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1926

Introduction

On 18 January 1926 The Battleship Potemkin was released. If any film can be said to have changed the course of cinema
history, then Potemkin must have a strong claim. It created a sensation among film critics, film workers and the intelligentsia
generally. It was hailed as the ‘pride of the Soviet cinema’ and it gave Soviet film makers a new self confidence. But
Potemkin’s greatest success came abroad and especially in Germany.89 At home audiences were less enthusiastic, finding the
film too difficult or obscure. There was a considerable debate about Eisenstein’s methods in the film. Gvozdev claimed that
the methods of Potemkin were the methods of the Theatrical October’ but the principal evidence he cited was that neither had
anything in common with the old ‘academic’ theatre (Document no. 52). Kirshon and Dubrovsky suggested that the
celebration of Potemkin served to conceal serious problems (Documents nos 53 and 56). Soviet cinema was still not
producing films of sufficient quality in sufficient quantity: the word ‘crisis’ was in the air.

Attempts to define cinema specificity continued: Balázs argued that the essence of cinema lay in photography (Document no.
54) but, in a highly sarcastic polemic, Eisenstein countered this by pointing up the importance of editing. He emphasised the
centrality of the shot while also arguing for the significance of the sequence, a number of shots juxtaposed through montage:
thus, in Eisenstein’s view, was a new language of cinema being developed (Document no. 55).

But a new bone of contention was emerging alongside the perennial argument over cinema and theatre: the Cine-Eyes were
now important enough to be attacked and to be attacked for avoiding the vital issues (Documents nos 58 and 60). Vertov
argued for the centralisation of all documentary and newsreel filming and the creation of an archive of such film which he
described as a ‘film factory of facts’. Esfir Shub, then still working on the re-editing of foreign films such as Dr Mabuse for
Soviet audiences, objected that the Cine-Eyes were trying to create a monopoly for themselves and tartly observed, ‘We do
not need a factory of facts if it is to manufacture fact’ (Document no. 59). Viktor Shklovsky argued that Vertov’s theory of
documentary film denied the central importance of the director, and thereby of montage, in cinema. It was not so much the
facts themselves that were important but the way in which they were arranged and interpreted: ‘A newsreel needs titles and
dates’, the newsreel equivalent of plot (Document no. 60).

Although hindsight suggests that 1926 is above all the year of Potemkin, it did not necessarily seem like that to audiences at
the time. Far more filmgoers went to see The Bear’s Wedding, produced by the semi-private company in which the director
Konstantin Eggert had his own stake and scripted partly by Lunacharsky, whose wife played a leading role. The People’s
Commissar for Enlightenment was all too aware of popular taste and of the need to defeat bourgeois cinema at its own game
using its own methods (Document no. 61).

51 Adrian Piotrovsky: The Battleship Potemkin

Source: A. Piotrovskii, ‘Bronenosets Potemkirí, Krasnaya gazeta (Leningrad), 20 January 1926.

A worker, a student, a woman in a shawl, a clerk, a schoolboy – the hearts of the whole motley Soviet public move with a
single emotion, a single indignation, anger, hope or pride. A work of art has rarely been so omnipotent, but it was just like
that at the showing of The Battleship Potemkin, the first part of Eisenstein’s epic on 1905. The impressive force of this film,
which is not at all agitational but simply made by a brilliant artist and revolutionary, is so staggering that it seems at first as if
this strict alternation of simple pictures has not been devised by anyone, as if a broad wave of heroic life is rolling over us
and can roll in no other way.

In fact this is a work of the most refined mastery and, more than that, it is a new kind of cinema art, a masterpiece of Soviet
film style. As in his first picture, The Strike, Eisenstein seems to give new life to objects and people, showing them from
quite unexpected and cleverly selected points of view. Potemkin is an amazing review of the men and the objects of the sea.
The contre-jour photographs of the port of Odessa are the height of marine lyricism but this is far from being the most
important thing. The shots in this film are locked into sequences, into ‘parts’ elevated by a pathos that is both great and pure.
The indignation, the mutiny, the heroic grief for the dead man, the monstrous tsarist revenge, the extreme tension of waiting
(the approach of the government squadron), the boundless rejoicing: these are the six emotional blocks that make up this
poem and each block divides into hundreds of crystal-like shots, criss-crossing details, human faces, machine fragments, that
are pierced through and through with a single burst of will characteristic of a particular part as a whole, and driven by an ever
increasing tempo. The montage of pure pathos is Eisenstein’s basic method.

That is why his Potemkin is monumental. The everyday precision, the authenticity of the stripes and badges that is favoured
by others, left him virtually unmoved. Potemkin, Odessa: these are, in generalised terms, a mutinous battleship stirring a city.
That is why the effect of his ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence is so irresistible: the wide white steps down which the crowd, pursued

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by gendarmes, runs, slides and cowers – a genuine staircase into hell, real steps of horror. That is why your heart sinks when
you see the solitary guns of the mutinous ship. For all its terrible concreteness and its absolute vitality, Eisenstein’s art is
symbolic and it is great enough to act like gigantic generalisations.

Does Potemkin have a plot? Yes, more so than The Strike – or, rather, the development of the pathos is here more firmly
grounded and linked. But this crystal-clear and tremendously gripping plot unfolds without any intervention from the
individual intrigue and personal romance that others consider necessary to a film. The hero is the sailors’ battleship, the
Odessa crowd, but characteristic figures are snatched here and there from the crowd. For a moment, like a conjuring trick,
they attract all the sympathies of the audience: like the sailor Vakulinchuk, like the young woman and child on the Odessa
Steps, but they emerge only to dissolve once more into the mass. This signifies: no film stars but a film of real-life types. It is
as if the director is letting our eyes roam through the crowd: ‘Look how rich simple life is!’

But the more public value of Potemkin cannot yet be measured. With it the first stone of a heroic epic of the Revolution is
laid, an epic that is like the daily bread of popular education in our country. It would be rash to leave this monumental
fragment on its own. Stone by stone, by precisely these simple and sublime methods, we must make a film epic, a glorious
monument to Soviet film style. Glory to Soviet cinema!

52 Alexei Gvozdev: A New Triumph for Soviet Cinema (The Battleship Potemkin and the Theatrical October’)

Source: A. Gvozdev, ‘Novaya pobeda sovetskogo kino. (Bronenosets Potemkin i ‘Teatral’nyi Oktyabr’”), Zhizn’ iskusstva, 26
January 1926, pp. 7–8.

The advertisements filling our newspapers proclaim The Battleship Potemkin as the ‘pride of Soviet cinema’. On this
occasion the newspaper advertisements and the film critics are unanimous in their judgement of the new film. In fact,
Eisenstein can and should be proud of Potemkin because even the Western and American cinemas have not produced a film
that is so captivating in its execution and at the same time so significant in its content. Potemkin is an event of enormous
public significance because in it form and content have been fused into a powerful unity and a film with a revolutionary
theme has found its proper revolutionary artistic form.

The film captivates the viewer and forces him to experience in a profound way the heroic epic struggle for the emancipation
of the masses. It exerts an emotional influence on the viewer’s psyche, appeals to his feelings and controls them until the very
end. The viewer is subjected to the powerful rhythm of events, surrenders to the power of the artist and, appreciating his
intention, feels himself enriched by the significant content. He continues to live and think the images he has seen, guided by
the pictures stored in his mind. He is shaken and moved. He is agitated and at the same time stung by the beauty of these
pictures.

This film has convinced and will convince very many ‘non-believers’ in a very wide range of views: non-believers in the art
of the ‘great silent’, in the indissoluble link between true art and the political and class struggle, in the eventual triumph and
superiority of the young ‘left’ art over the academic realism and psychologism of the old school. We repeat: this film has
enormous public significance not just as a model of a work of art with a revolutionary content but also as a measure of our
artistic public and of our artistic policy as a whole.

In a brief characterisation it is impossible to detail exhaustively the wealth and power of the artistic methods used by
Eisenstein. They must be studied section by section in all their minutest details. All cinema specialists – or, rather, all those
who are ready to learn and move forward – are agreed on this. We must study from our various viewpoints because the film is
complex and diverse. We must uncover the laws governing its structure because in them lies buried the secret of the powerful
effect of cinema on the viewer. But we must broaden the question and ask in a general sense how a film like this could be
made. Where did it come from? Which artistic currents and tendencies gave rise to this picture which is now welcomed by
both ‘right’ and ‘left’ followers of art? Because the recognition of this film, a unanimous and enthusiastic recognition,
signifies not just a recognition of Eisenstein as an individual creative talent but also a recognition of the whole current that
carried him to this triumphant shore.

People have said of Potemkin that its uniqueness lies in the fact that it represents a rejection of the methods of theatre and an
affirmation of the specific methods of cinema. It is true, in fact, that there are no actors in the usual sense of the word. There
is no theatrical ‘hero’ with his experiences in high society, no love melodrama, none of the sentimentalism or psychologism
that permeate theatre and its offspring, cinema of the usual kind. At the beginning of the film we see the beating of the waves,
and the rhythm of the sea then develops in the following frames, concealing with growing strength the energy that is
contained in the beating and movement of the waves. In theatre this would be impossible…. In Eisenstein’s film it is objects
and not actor ‘heroes’ that act: the battleship with its machinery, its staircases, the muzzles of its guns, or the city with its
jetty, its bridges, streets and terraces. This would also be impossible in theatre…. But does it follow from this that

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Eisenstein’s Potemkin has absolutely no connection with theatre, as Viktor Rappoport90 asserted at the improvised debate
after the public showing of the film in Leningrad?

Of course it is not like that. Potemkin is far removed from the old theatre whose essence it rejects with its whole being, far
removed from the theatre of society plays (which the academic theatre lives on), from the theatre that concentrates on the
‘sexual question’. It is also far removed from the opera and ballet stage with its fairy-tales set in royal courts and its stilted
mythological heroism, from the theatre of Stanislavsky, i.e. from the intellectualising deviation in stage art with its emphasis
on the psychoanalysis of the individual. Yes, Eisenstein is far removed from all this and his triumph is a triumph over the old
theatre, which he restores to the courtiers, noblemen, merchants and intellectuals of the nineteenth century.

But Eisenstein and his Potemkin are close blood relatives of the young art of the revolutionary years and, in particular, of the
revolutionary theatre of Soviet Russia. They are the offspring of the ‘Theatrical October’. Potemkin represents the application
to cinema of the methods of this school. It too is a form of theatre: not of the academic theatre but of the ‘theatre of October’.

Anyone who wants to appreciate the significance of Potemkin and to understand the sources it derived from should not forget
that Eisenstein was a pupil of Meyerhold at the time of The Magnanimous Cuckold, Earth Rampant and The Death of
Tarelkin.91 These were the models that he learned from. He developed further the principles found in these stagings in theatre
in his own productions. His work in Proletkult in Moscow is the next link in the development of the ‘Theatrical October’. A
remarkable show that Eisenstein staged in the Proletkult Theatre, Can You Hear Me, Moscow?, 92 did not get to Leningrad
and could not exert its influence here. But this does not mean that it had no influence at all. On the contrary, it was, and in the
history of revolutionary theatre will always remain, a magnificent model of the maximum possible saturation of theatre with
agitation. In this production Eisenstein sharply and decisively dissociated himself from the old theatre and its methods, be
they the hallowed ‘traditions’ of the Alexan-drinsky, of Stanislavsky or of the fairy-tales of opera and ballet. He borrowed the
methods of the circus and the music-hall and structured them in accordance with Meyerhold’s ideas, driving them to a
convincing artistic and agitational limit, beyond which beckoned the destruction of the old theatre and the formation of the
new. This frightened people and in the atmosphere of theatrical reaction of recent years, in conditions of the ‘persecution of
leftism’, Eisenstein was forced to leave and abandon work in theatre. He went into film and made The Strike and Potemkin,
two great triumphs that are now acknowledged by the very same people who ‘rejected’ left theatre. But we must not forget
that his method of work has remained the same.

People who proclaim the emancipation of cinema from theatre point to the ‘beating of the waves’ that opens the action in
Potemkin and say that it would be impossible to do that in theatre and that this therefore constitutes a rejection of theatre. But
would it really be possible on the stage of any of the academic theatres to insert at the beginning of a play a procession like
the ‘religious procession’ that crosses the stage at the beginning of Meyerhold’s production of The Foresti?93 A religious
procession in which a priest walks arm in arm with a Cossack wielding a whip? The academicians tell us that this is not
theatre but a stunt that is unworthy of the ‘temple of art’! Well, if it had not been for the rejection of the old stage art on the
stage of the militant Soviet theatre, there would have been no Potemkin and the future of Soviet cinema would not now have
been revealed with such clarity. Enough of these ‘stunts’ and this ‘unintelligible’ leftism, people said when tightrope walkers
and acrobats were performing the agit-play Can You Hear Me, Moscow?. But it is in precisely these ‘stunts’ that the
agitational rhythm that now swamps us in Potemkin first appeared.

In Eisenstein’s film it is objects rather than actors that act. That is why it is not theatre, say the academicians of the theatre.
But is it not true that objects act in the theatre of Meyerhold? Was he not the first person to teach us to understand the ‘play of
objects’ and to show us their effective force? Does anyone not remember the exit of the objects in The Warrant:94 the trunk
and the lady, the table and the icons, the sewing machine, the bed, the piano and the other ‘objects’ that Meyer-hold forced to
act. You can already see all this as a method in Meyerhold’s productions of 1922–3. To the enemies of left art this was a
‘stunt’ but for us it was an assertion of the new method of theatrical work that is now, having been translated into cinema,
celebrating its triumph.

In Potemkin there is no individual hero as there was in the old theatre. It is the mass that acts: the battleship and its sailors and
the city and its population in revolutionary mood. Both are organised with great mastery and merged into a complex
composition. But the elements of this composition have already been seen in the revolutionary productions of the amateur
theatre and in its professional artistic version, in Meyerhold’s Give Us Europe!95 The finale to Act I of Give Us Europe! (The
Red Sailor’) and the mass scenes of the explosion in the tunnel in Act III already pointed the way to a new composition for
mass scenes. In the methods of revolutionary theatre we have already witnessed a struggle not between individuals but
between classes, a struggle embodied in the struggle between the two trusts in the play. This is the beginning of the path to
further theatrical achievements and this is where cinema too derives its strength, as Potemkin clearly confirms.

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47 ‘A new kind of cinema art, a masterpiece of Soviet film style.’ Piotrovsky was among the first to hail Potemkin as the
decisive breakthrough of the emergent film avant-garde.

48 ‘In Potemkin there is no individual hero as there was in the old theatre. It is the mass that acts.’ Gvozdev noted
Eisenstein’s debt to Meyerhold while claiming Potemkin as a vindication of Theatrical October’, the ‘left front of Soviet art’.

The views I have expressed here need to be developed further because the same thing could be demonstrated by analysing the
rhythm of individual scenes and their grouping, by alternating ‘natural’ and human scenes, by exchanging ‘peaceful’ and
‘violent’ scenes, by the processes of accumulation and intensification and by the methods of supporting and reinforcing them.
But for the moment we must take note only of the most important thing, the link between the achievements of Soviet cinema
and the ‘Theatrical October’, the left front of Soviet art. Because the triumph of ‘Potemkin’ is a triumph for the revolutionary
left art of Soviet Russia.

It goes without saying that in establishing this link with the ‘Theatrical October’ we are not exhausting the characteristics of
this remarkable film which must be viewed independently of theatre as a brilliant and very stylish cinema epic. But this is not
the place for that. In the meantime we must resolutely declare that the triumph of Potemkin necessitates a reexamination of
all the positions that are hostile to the ‘Theatrical October’, and that it raises doubts about the course towards right-wing art
that has been taken recently and reminds us forcefully of the need to move from a rejection to an affirmation and a deepening
of October in our whole artistic policy.

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53 Vladimir Kirshon: Literature, Theatre and Cinema (Extract)

Source: V. Kirshon, ‘Literatura. Teatr. Kino’, Molodaya gvardiya, March, 1926, no. 3.

Recently films depicting the events of our epoch or of the distant past in Georgia, among the Crimean Tartars, in Armenia
etc., have been showing on our screens. These are the result of last year’s summer expeditions. The reflection in cinema of
the revolutionary struggle of our nationalities must be acknowledged as a proper task. Cinema can and must play an
enormous role in educating the nationalities of the USSR. It is very easy to translate intertitles into the languages of these
nationalities, much easier, of course, than it is to print books in these languages. But events taking place on the screen are
intelligible without words and do not require translation. However, it is with regret that we must admit that very many of
these attempts have met with failure. We should note, for example, Abrek Zaur and The Song on the Rock. Our film workers –
scriptwriters and directors – have not devoted enough attention to studying the way of life, the history and customs of the
nationalities about whom they have begun to make films and the result has been an extremely sad affair. On the spot these
films provoke mocking smiles because the nationalities do not recognise themselves on the screen and, seeing the caricature
of their way of life, become indignant. But for us these pictures are less interesting because their plots, following the habit of
our pseudo-Revolutionary scripts, are concocted hastily and tritely: policemen oppress, princes feast, brave mountain people
rebel and deceive the police. The result: wasted resources, wasted funds, failed, or half-failed, films. We must take a
particularly resolute hard line on ideological consistency and historical literacy for this kind of film.

A revival is now discernible among our filmmakers. Spring is approaching, and summer, the shooting season. The production
plans for the majority of cinema organisations promise to provide us in the coming year with a whole series of films based on
the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and even Fonvizin. In cinema the tendency to turn away from revolutionary films
is extremely strong.

The Last Shemet96 and The Station Master, which were successful with the philistine public, have given inspiration to our
reactionary filmmakers. They do not even want to hear about a film that reflects the Revolution: they think that the classical
repertoire should furnish the basis of our cinema’s work.

A group of revolutionary workers in cinema is now joining together for an organised rejection of this trend. The battle has
begun. Its outcome will to a significant extent depend on the Party’s final say on this matter. We are convinced that the Party
will speak its mind and that the campaign against Soviet films will be halted.

54 Béla Balézs: The Future of Film

Source: B. Balash, ‘O budushchem fil’my’, Kinoaazeta, 6 July 1926.

Film can become a work of art only when photography itself ceases to be mere reproduction and becomes the work itself.
When the work, the decisive creative expression of the emotions and the spirit, is realised not in staging and acting but
through the mediation of the photograph in actual shots.

When the cameraman who does in fact make the picture also becomes its author, the poet of the work, the real film artist for
whom acting and staging are the mere ‘occasion’ to which he relates, like a painter to a landscape (preferably the most
beautiful one!), to a life only through his brush in a work of art, in the expression of his spirit. As long as the cameraman is
last in line, cinema will remain the last of the arts. But the reverse is also true!

In insisting on the artistic integrity of the photograph itself I by no means have in mind the decorative beauty of the shot
which, incidentally, you encounter very often and which is not infrequently accorded much greater significance than it
deserves. The decorative charm of individual shots gives them something that is statically pictorial, immobile and wrapped
up in itself: their ‘beauty’, as if petrified, is killed by a headlong rush of events in the form of a series of ‘living pictures’
through which the film as a whole staggers staccato fashion from one pictorial shot to another. Whereas the whole essence of
cinema lies in the scope of the general rhythm of the passing events of real life.

No! I have in mind the hidden symbolic expressiveness, the poetic significance of the shot that has nothing to do with
‘decorativeness’ or ‘beauty’, that is not produced either by play or by the object (subject) of the photograph but is created
exclusively by the methods and possibilities of photography.

I want to explain this through two recent examples, two wonderful shots from Battleship Potemkin.

The enthusiasm of the population of Odessa is shown by the increasing rhythm of the groupings of the enthusiastic masses
and you begin to wonder: where do we go now? How can they possibly show more enthusiasm, joy or ecstasy?

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Suddenly you see a sumptuous picture. Like a hymn of ecstasy that resoundingly interrupts what has gone before you see the
skiffs sailing to meet the battleship. According to the plot they are carrying foodstuffs to the mutinous sailors. In the film it
seems as if they are hurrying towards them with millions of hearts.

This delicate winged flight of hundreds of billowing sails evokes an image of the collective display of enthusiasm, joy, love
and hope that no single face, even that of the greatest artiste, could express. It is not the plot motif but the photograph, the
photograph itself taken beyond the bounds of the greatest lyricism and of such powerful figurative and poetic force that you
can scarcely compare poetry itself with it!

It is in this hidden figurative quality of the shot, that has nothing in common with ‘decorative’ beauty, that the creative poetic
opportunities for the cameraman lie concealed.

Then we see the sailing-vessels filmed from the deck. As if by some command they all lower their sails at once. The logical
‘content’ is that the boats have stopped near the battleship. The action of the picture suggests that a hundred sails, a hundred
banners have been lowered before the hero. It is this figurative quality of the pictures that contains their original poetry,
something that can occur only in a film, only through photography.

For two photographs on the same subject would be deprived of any symbolic or poetic expressiveness if they were merely
part of a vast landscape. Then they would not define the expression or physiognomy of the shot.

It is only through an undoubtedly conscious design that crams the whole shot full to its very edges with sails that these
photographs acquire the unity of mimic expression and the significance of gesture that become the depth of experience and
the sense of the film. There is not even any room for argument here: the poetic expressiveness of the scene is created not by
the motif but by the photography.

But this is the only way that can help cinema to stop being a servant of art and become an independent art.

People say to me: both the camera positions in Potemkin that you have described were determined by the director and were
not the original and independent ideas of the cameraman.

So be it. It does not matter in this context who is in charge of the photography. It makes no difference whether the director or
the cameraman is the creator of such a work of art. The decisive factor is that cinema art of this kind emerges only through
the lens; it can only be produced through photography.

55 Sergei Eisenstein: Béla Forgets the Scissors

Source: S. Eizenshtein, ‘O pozitsii Bela Balasha’, Kino, 20 July 1926 and ‘Bela zabyvaet nozhnitsy’, Kino, 10 August 1926.

Balázs’s article will surprise some people. Without its concluding stipulation: The cameraman is the alpha and omega of
film.’

We have such respect for foreigners that we might consider this a ‘blessing’. The idiots on the Moscow evening paper who
accorded recognition to the exercises by young Frenchmen that Ehren-burg brought from Paris have declared it to be a
‘revelation’. These are sheer enfantillages – ‘children’s playthings’ – based on the photographic possibilities of the
photographic apparatus. I am not exaggerating when I say that: if we have these ‘children’s playthings’ today, tomorrow they
will be used to refurbish the formal methods of a whole branch of art (for instance, the ‘absolute’: the plotless film of Picabia,
Léger or Chomette).

We are taking our conviction that light can come only from the West to the point of absurdity.

Professor Meller journeyed to London, to the egg market. To seek out standard eggs.

He found unusual ones.

A search began.

Which farms, which ranches, which plantations? Where did this unusual breed of hens come from? Through a chain of Dutch
egg wholesalers, agents, contractors and intermediaries they were traced to … the Novokhopyorsk district. This ‘Sirin’,
‘Alkonost’, ‘Firebird’ turned out to be a peasant’s hen.

A peasant’s hen from the Novokhopyorsk district. And a London market….

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But the hen is not a bird and Balázs is a great authority. Such a great authority that at a stroke his book is translated,
published and paid for by two publishers. Why not, if it’s all right to make two films from the same material? One set at sea,
one in the mountains, and so on.

To understand Béla Balázs’s position you have to bear two things in mind: the first and the second. The first is the basis (not
the economic one), where and for whom his report was written. Filmtechnik is the organ of the German cameramen’s club.
Give the cameraman his due or, more exactly, give him the position of respect that he deserves – that is its fighting slogan.

But that is already an integral feature of the economic basis.

The cameraman achieves. He is obliged to achieve ‘self-determination’. To us this kind of programme sounds somewhat
savage.

What? In the cultured West?

Yes. In the cultured West. The steel jaws of competition in the Western metropolis are not accustomed to thinking of the
‘service staff’ as individuals. The director is just acceptable. But in fact the hero is of course the commercial director. And the
cameraman? Round about where the camera handle ends, that’s where this … mechanic apparently begins.

In the advertisements for Potemkin even the heroic Prometheus wanted at first to leave Eduard Tisse out altogether. So strong
is the tradition. That is not surprising because in the UFA-Haus – the multi-storey headquarters of Universum-Film-
Aktiengesellschaft – they don’t even know men like Karl Freund or Rittau by sight. That’s how it is. They told us themselves.
Whereas even we know them by sight. They are like the Novokhopyorsk eggs … only from the Cöthenerstrasse, where UFA
shares its enormous building with the ‘Vaterland’, the largest café in Berlin. And not for nothing. It is not coincidental that
this corner is swarming with swastika-wearers (German Fascists) distributing news-sheets and leaflets. UFA will follow suit.

The Tägliche Rundschau of 12 May 1926 writes: The declaration by the board of the leading German film organisation UFA
of its truly national and common-sense interests is undoubtedly a slap in the face for the Committee of Censors: “In view of
the character of the political inclinations of the film we decline to include The Battleship Potemkin in the distribution plan for
UFA theatres.’” On the same subject Film-Kurier writes that, ‘The wrath of a businessman who has missed the brilliant
commercial success of the season is understandable.’ But in other ways UFA remains true to itself. And not only UFA but
Phoebus and the others, whatever they are called.

The cameramen are setting up a union to defend the character of their activity.

That is the first thing. It explains the emphatic nature of Balázs’s positions.

The second thing concerns that same economic basis. Balázs is unaware of collectivism not just in film but also in its
production, in work. There is nowhere that he can have seen it. He is due in the USSR in July. Then he’ll realise. In Germany
man is to man as wolf to wolf and the link between the director and the cameraman is the bank-note. Unity through non-
material interest is unknown there.

Balázs’s ‘starism’ is the individualism of bourgeois countries in general. They do not think beyond this in the West. Someone
has to be the ‘star’. One person. Yesterday it was the actor. This time let’s say it’s the cameraman. Tomorrow it will be the
lighting technician.

The idea that a film is the result of collective efforts goes to the devil.

What about the man who is nearly dying from the heat of the burning sun, who has to be sponged down, the man Kivilevich
whom nobody has ever heard of, who is bent down under the weight of a lighting mirror and dares not move in case a shaft of
light should run across little Abraham while he’s being trampled on the Odessa steps?

Or what about the heroism of the five striped assistants?! The ‘iron five’, taking all the abuse, shouting in all the dialects
spoken by the crowd of 3, 000 extras who were unwilling to rush around ‘yet again’ in the boiling sun. Leading this human
current behind them. Regardless of its mood. By their own example. And what about the Odessa crowd itself?!

What of Kulganek, Stepanchikova, Katyusha, Zhenya, who stayed up three nights in succession to edit the negative for the
demonstration copy that was shown on 28 December in the Bolshoi. Do you realise what it means to edit a negative of 15,
000 metres down to 1, 600?!

Who remembers them? … Even in our own country. Cheap overtime workers who were viewed with suspicion by the work
inspectorate. Their collective enthusiasm a mere debit in the ‘administrative plan’.
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Balázs cannot yet conceive of the idea of the cameraman as a free member of a union of equally creative individuals, not of
the cameraman as a ‘star’ but of the camera operator as a co-operator. There the camera crew is a transient pact between self-
seeking individuals, here it is a ‘creative collective’.

In his approach Balázs makes the same mistake in his theoretical principles as he makes in his section on creative
organisation. Because he dissociates himself from a rigid view of the externality of the shot, from ‘living pictures’ but bases
his view on the figurative quality of the shot as the decisive factor, he falls into rigidity himself in his definition of methods
of influence.

It cannot be the decisive factor. Even though it responds to such an undeniable sign as the specific result of specific (i.e.
peculiar to it alone) characteristics of the instruments of production, i.e. it corresponds to the possibilities that are the
exclusive prerogative of cinema. But Balázs’s individualism encourages him to dwell on this.

The shot itself as ‘star’.

His stipulation about the staccato effect between ‘beautiful shots’ is extremely woolly even in the case of ‘symbolic shots’
because for Balázs the compositional harmony would be preserved in the film as a whole. He does not mention the conditions
for a ‘genetic’ (constructive) amalgamation of the shots.

A long time ago, before The Strike was released, we wrote in Belenson’s ill-fated book Cinema Today97 opposing the
individualism of the West: ‘a), down with individual figures (heroes isolated from the mass), b). down with the individual
chain of events (the plot intrigue) – let us have neither personal stories nor those of people ‘personally’ isolated from the
mass….’ It remains to add one more ‘down with’ – the personification of cinema in the individualised shot. We must look for
the essence of cinema not in the shots but in the relationships between the shots just as in history we look not at individuals
but at the relationships between individuals, classes etc.

In addition to the lens Balázs has forgotten another defining ‘instrument of production’: the scissors.

The expressive effect of cinema is the result of juxtapositions.

It is this that is specific to cinema. The shot merely interprets the object in a setting to use it in juxtaposition to other
sequences. That is characteristic. Balázs always says ‘picture’, ‘shot’ but not once does he say ‘sequence’! The shot is merely
an extension of selection. That is, the selection of one object rather than another, of an object from one particular angle, in
one particular cut (or Ausschnitt, as the Germans say) and not another. The conditions of cinema create an ‘image’ [obraz]
from the juxtaposition of these ‘cuts’ [obrez].

Because the symbolism (in the decent sense of the word!) of cinema must not be based on either the filmed symbolism of the
gesticulation of the filmed person, even if there is more than one (as in theatre) or the autonomous pictorial symbolism of the
emerging shot or picture (as in painting).

However strange it may seem, we must not look for the symbolism of cinema – for its own peculiar symbolism – in the
pictorial or spatial arts (painting and theatre).

Our understanding of cinema is now entering its ‘second literary period’. The phase of approximation to the symbolism of
language. Speech. Speech that conveys a symbolic sense (i.e. not literal), a ‘figurative quality’, to a completely concrete
material meaning through something that is uncharacteristic of the literal, through contextual confrontation, i.e. also through
montage. In some cases – where the juxtaposition is unexpected or unusual – it acts as a ‘poetic image’. ‘Bullets began to
whine and wail, their lament growing unbearably. Bullets struck the earth and fumbled in it, quivering with impatience.’
(Babel.)

In cases other than those of traditional juxtaposition the meaning acquires its own autonomous sense, distinct from the literal,
but no longer featuring as an element of its figurative quality (no literary Darwinism!). The notion of ‘swine’ has its own
independent legitimacy and nobody thinks of the figurative fascination of the results of ‘swinish’ behaviour. Why? Clearly
there is little demand. But figurative expression, generally speaking, forever represents a ‘mutation’ that emerges only in
context. When someone says, T feel crushed’, you still do not know whether ‘grief’ or a ‘tram’ is responsible. It becomes
obvious from the context.

But Balázs gets bogged down in skiffs and his own definitions which are far removed from ours: the effect of hauling down
the sails (simultaneously) appears to have been created by the symbolism of the collective gesture (Gebärde) and not by the
lens. The way the image is cut [obrez], of course, is here exactly as decisive – no more, no less – in the final analysis as the
Sebastopol fishermen’s union in toto once they are resolved and able to ‘symbolise’ this scene!

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Nevertheless we must welcome Balázs for his good intention of constructing a cinema aesthetic on the basis of the
possibilities that are unique to cinema, i.e. on pure raw material.

In this respect he has, of course, rather fallen behind the USSR. But we must not expect a man to discuss the ‘montage shot’
when this concept is generally unknown in Germany.

There are ‘literary’ shots and ‘pictorial’ shots, i.e. those that tell us what is happening (an acted sequence), and those that
constitute a performed intertitle (the scriptwriter’s responsibility) or a series of easel paintings (the cameraman’s
responsibility).

Germany is unaware of the director’s shot that does not exist independently but is a compositional shot, a shot that, through
composition creates the only effect specific to cinema thought.

49 Tisse filming Potemkin. Eisenstein rejected Balázs’s elevation of cinematography and the individual shot, insisting instead
on the collectivity of his group’s work and on the primacy of montage.

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50 Esfir Shub.

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51 Pudovkin’s The Mother (1926) confirmed the promise of ‘a remarkable blossoming of Russian cinematography’. But
Lunacharsky warned against excessive avant-gardism: ‘We must know how to attract our great public to our own films.’

People still speak of ‘American montage’. I am afraid that the time has come to add this ‘Americanism’ to the others so
ruthlessly debunked by Comrade Osinsky.

America has not understood montage as a new element, a new opportunity. America is honestly narrative; it does not
‘parade’ the figurative character of its montage but shows honestly what is happening.

The rapid montage that stuns us is not a construction but a forced portrayal, as frequent as possible, of the pursuer and the
pursued. The spacing out of the dialogue in close-ups is necessary to show one after another the facial expressions of the
‘public’s favourites’. Without regard for the perspectives of montage possibilities.

In Berlin I saw the last two reels of Griffith’s 1914 film The Birth of a Nation: there is a chase (as always) and nothing
formally different from more recent similar scenes. But in twelve years we might have ‘noticed’ that, apart from its narrative
possibilities, such, ‘if you’ll pardon the expression, montage’ could offer the prospect of something more, something
effective. In The Ten Commandments, where there was no special need to portray the Jews separately, the ‘Flight from Egypt’
and the ‘Golden Calf’ are shown without recourse to montage but, speaking technically, by long shots alone. Hence the little
nuances of the composition of the masses, that is the action of the mass, go to the devil.

In conclusion, a word about Béla Balázs’s style. His terminology is unpleasant. Different from ours. ‘Art’, ‘creativity’,
‘eternity’, ‘greatness’ and so on.

Although some prominent Marxists write in the same dialect and this counts as dialectics.

It looks as if this style has become acceptable.

56 Alexander Dubrovsky: The Soviet Cinema in Danger

Source: A. Dubrovskii, ‘Sovetskoe kino v opasnosti’, Pravda, 20 July 1926.

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The Soviet cinema is now undergoing a major crisis. Suffice it to say that a number of film-producing organisations in
Moscow and Leningrad have either ceased production altogether or reduced it to insignificant levels. In Leningrad the state
film factory has been closed (laid off). Leningradkino (formerly Sevzapkino), one of the earliest Soviet cinema organisations,
is now in a state of depression, awaiting its merger with the Moscow organisations in the limited company that is now being
formed. In Moscow the position is no better. Of the Moscow film-producing organisations both Proletkino and Kultkino –
organisations whose very names indicate the great tasks confronting them – have ceased to exist since the spring. The
remnants of these organisations have been transferred to Goskino. In the meantime Goskino is also suffering from a serious
illness.

Goskino is curtailing production in one (the third) of its two Moscow factories. The first state film factory is still alive. But
all its productions (The Traitor, The Wind and The Chestnut-Tree) have been completed and the new productions have not yet
quite begun, despite the fact that half the summer shooting season has passed by. Thus, instead of Proletkino, Kultkino, the
first, third and Leningrad film factories, which during the current season produced approximately fifty feature-length films,
there remains in fact only the first Goskino factory, because the Goskino production plan envisages no more than ten films.
This situation can only be described as catastrophic. Only Mezhrabpom-Rus and Gosvoyen-kino are in a healthier state.

The consequences of the crisis in film production will be felt in distribution in the immediate future. By the end of this year
the entire existing supply of unreleased Soviet films (around twenty titles) will have been exhausted. Even now Sovkino,
whose purchases abroad are limited, has been forced to re-release on to the market old rubbish like The Headless Rider, The
White Moth, and so on.

It is first and foremost the network of cinema installations in workers’ clubs and of mobile rural projectors for the peasants
that has grown in such an extraordinary way during the last year that will suffer from the absence of Soviet films. Then the
crisis will affect commercial screens as well. This will be a blow to the entire economic basis of cinema. To save the situation
Sovkino will once again be forced to arrange the purchase of foreign films. The funds that could now save Soviet film
production will go abroad. I do not have to point out that this will be an enormous cultural defeat.

The cutback in Soviet film production cannot, as the trades unions have already pointed out, be allowed to happen. On the
contrary: film production must be given the immediate financial support it needs during the next few weeks or the production
season will be lost once and for all. Similarly we must complete as soon as possible the reorganisation of the film industry
and the merger of production and distribution that we have already embarked upon. Lastly, in production itself we must take
every possible measure to avoid a cutback in production and the dispersal of the qualified workforce. To achieve this we must
make every effort to reduce the cost of Soviet films. For precisely 500,000 roubles we can make either five ‘hits’ for 100,000
roubles each or twenty-five good ‘middling’ films for 20,000 roubles each. It is that second path that Soviet cinema must take
now. In the last season in the activity of that very same Proletkino we find examples of failed hits such as Mabul, which cost
225,000 roubles or Lena Gold (70,000 roubles) while the only really successful Proletkino films for that season, The Great
Flight and Who Whom?, cost 12,500 and 6,000 roubles respectively. Another example: Abortion, which made a profit of over
100,000 roubles, cost 7,000 roubles overall. At the present time the most important step is to produce the cheap films we
need. If we do that, it will not be difficult to find the funds and the actual quality of the films will not suffer; we shall stop
only the dear ‘spectacular’ films such as the adaptations of the classics, etc. The greatest attention will be given to themes
that reflect our everyday life, the reality that surrounds us and that give us the opportunity to make broad use of exteriors.

The Soviet cinema is in danger. As a matter of urgency we must use every possible means to cure it.

57 Dziga Vertov: The Factory of Facts

Source: D. Vertov, ‘Fabrika faktov. (V poryadke predlozheniya)’, Pravda, 24 July 1926, p. 6.

After five years of persistent prospecting the ‘Cine-Eye’ method has won a complete victory in the field of non-played film
(see The First Cine-Eye Reconnoitre, the Lenin Cine-Pravdas, Forward, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World, now on
release).

Now – as the experience of the past year shows – a simple borrowing of the purely external style of the ‘Cine-Eye’ by so-
called ‘fiction’ film (played films, films with actors) is quite enough to make a noise (The Strike and Potemkin) in that area of
cinema.

We see the number of different ways in which the ‘Cine-Eye’ method is even now ousting ‘played’ and ‘acted’ film for the
cinema. The increasing borrowing of the external style of the Cine-Eye by ‘played’ film (The Strike and Potemkin) is only
one instance, a mere chance reflection of the ever growing ‘Cine-Eye’ movement. But that is another question and I shall not
deal with it here. The speed, the methods, the price of the disappointments through which the proletarian audience will

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gradually come to realise the impossibility of salvaging the decrepit and degenerate ‘acted’ film, even when it is receiving
regular injections of elements of the ‘Cine-Eye’ – these are questions for the future.

But the question raised by Comrade Fevralsky in his timely Pravda article of 15 June98 of a single centre, a firm base, for
‘Cine-Eye’ work and ‘Cine-Eye’ workers is a matter for the present, a matter of current interest.

Comrade Fevralsky is quite right when he talks about the need to centralise immediately all aspects of non-theatrical and
non-played film.

The newsreel archives, the production of scientific films, of Soviet film newsreels, of Cine-Pravda, animation workshops, the
production of the great ‘Cine-Eye’ films, the re-editing and correction of foreign educational films and, lastly, the production
of such actorless hits as A Sixth Part of the World – all this must be concentrated in one place and not (as at present) split
between each department, between each of the Goskino and Sovkino buildings scattered across Moscow.

Every non-played film in one place with a film laboratory. With an archive of non-played films.

Our viewpoint is:

Alongside the unified film factory of grimaces (a union of all kinds of theatrical film work from Sabinsky to Eisenstein) we
must form

A FILM FACTORY OF FACTS

(a union of all kinds of ‘Cine-Eye’ work from the current newsreel flash to scientific films, from thematic Cine-Pravdas to
film series imbued with revolutionary pathos).

Once again:

Not a FEKS (the Leningrad Factory of the Eccentric Actor), nor Eisenstein’s ‘factory of attractions’, not a factory of kisses
and doves (film directors of that ilk have not yet become extinct), nor a factory of ‘death’ either (The Minaret of Death, The
Bay of Death, Tragedy in Tripolye, etc.)

Simply:

A FACTORY OF FACTS.

Shooting facts. Sorting facts. Spreading facts. Agitation with facts. Propaganda with facts. Fistsful of facts.

Flashes of facts!

Masses of facts.

Hurricanes of facts.

And individual little facts.

Against cinema sorcery.

Against cinema mystification.

For the genuine cinefication of the workers’ and peasants’ USSR.

58 Viktor Shklovsky: Where is Dziga Vertov Striding?

Source: V. B. Shklovskii, ‘Kuda shagaet Dziga Vertov?’, Sovetskii ekran, 14 August 1926, p. 4.

The inclusion of real raw material in a work of art is a natural phenomenon that has happened on more than one occasion. In
Melmoth the Wanderer mentioned in Eugene Onegin the horrors of the novel are annotated: this, they say, happened here or
there.

This resulted in an original montage of attractions, the attention of the audience was directed to the shot, to the information.
The plot motivated the stunt.

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A stunt does not merely consist of Harry Piel, wearing white spats, jumping from roof to roof. A stunt is a fragment of raw
material experienced aesthetically.

The montage of attractions (of Eisenstein) marks a transition to raw material.

In his excellent article ‘The Pathos of the Separator’ Sosnovsky99 expressed his surprise at the new shot that addresses the
hero and his family.

This will come to cinema. It does not, of course, just apply to separators. It will come to literature. It too will probably be
called a ‘novel’.

In his letters to Nekrasov, Salty kov-Shchedrin protested that ‘he calls my articles short stories and novels’.

For the time being the history of literature studies not works but their titles.

The novel died long ago.

Great Russian literature is an enormous misfortune for the present day.

Because people expect a ‘broad canvas’ from it with Kitty Levin as a Komsomol girl.

Dziga Vertov is a straightforward and strong man. It appears that he is numbered among those who perceive the betrayal of
art as its end.

He stands for non-fictional, non-aesthetic cinema. It seems that his group is opposed to actors. But, since the non-actor does
not know how to behave naturally in front of the camera, a new problem arises: how to train everyone to be filmed. This is
like taking a sledge-hammer to crack a nut.

Dziga Vertov has done a great deal in Soviet cinema. It is due to him that new paths have opened up.

I had to see Forward, Soviet!

The majority of the shots in this picture were filmed neither by Vertov himself nor on his instructions.

He takes newsreel as his raw material. But it must be said that Vertov’s own shots are much more interesting than those he
has found in the newsreel. There is a director’s presence in them. There is aesthetic consideration and invention.

The best shots are of the streets being swilled down, the shots of a train from beneath the wheels, the new life and the old
filmed with a touch of Impressionism.

Vertov’s talent is a general cinematic talent and it is not in doubt.

There now arises the question of the film’s fictional tendency.

A montage of everyday life? Life caught unawares. Not material of world importance. But I think that newsreel material is in
Vertov’s treatment deprived of its soul – its documentary quality.

A newsreel needs titles and date.

There is a difference between an idle factory and the Tryokhgorny workshops idle on 5 August 1919.

Mussolini talking interests me. But a straightforward plump and bald-headed man talking can go and talk off screen. The
whole sense of news-reels lies in the date, time and place. A newsreel without this is like a card catalogue in the gutter.

Dziga Vertov cuts up newsreel. In this sense his work is not artistically progressive. In essence he is behaving like those of
our directors whose graves will be decorated with monuments, who cut up newsreels in order to use bits in their own films.
These directors are turning our film libraries into piles of broken film.

I want to know the number of the steamer that lies on its side in Vertov’s film.

I want from Vertov what we have already had from Matyuren. Vertov has, of course, set himself an exceptionally difficult
problem: two thousand metres without a plot. This problem should certainly be shortened to five hundred metres. The whole

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thing must be done in a studio. It needs a scriptwriter. It needs a plot, but not one based on the fate of a hero. A plot is after
all only a semantic construction of things.

It is nothing to be ashamed of.

It seems to me that Vertov’s work needs not a compromise but a more consistent application of principle.

Above all in the auditorium.

In this country we sometimes leave a director off the screen for two years or so.

Then we are surprised because he has lost touch with the masses.

A director must be sensitive to his consumer. The audience. Vertov needs to be distributed. Without distribution there is no
ideology, no real achievement.

59 Esfir Shub: The Manufacture of Facts

Source: E. I. Shub, ‘Fabrikatsiya faktov’, Kino, 1926, no. 41, reprinted in: L. N. Poznanskaya (ed.), Esfir’ Shub. Zhizn’ moya
– kinematograf (Moscow, 1972), pp. 244–5.

One of the significant facts on our cinema front is the fact of the recognition of non-played film. This is not just a declaration,
an article, a resolution or even a decree: it is a fact of the real organisation of actual production.

This production base will be called the ‘factory of facts’ and the ‘Cine-Eyes’ will work there.

I do not think that is quite right.

The ‘Cine-Eyes’, to whom this production undertaking has been assigned and entrusted have of course deserved or, as they
say, earned this right. There was no objection on that account. But we must object to the ‘Cine-Eyes” monopoly.

It is not only those who look at the USSR through the ‘Cine-Eye’ or who can narrate socialist construction exclusively in
‘pathetic hits’ who want to work in non-played cinema.

Different facts must reach the studio.

The studio must take this into account, remove its Futuristic sign and become simply a factory for non-played cinema where
people could work on editing newsreels, films of the history of the Revolution made from newsreel footage, where scientific
production films and general cultural films could be made as a counterweight to played entertainment films.

We do not need a factory of facts if it is to manufacture facts.

60 Viktor Shklovsky: The Cine-Eyes and Intertitles

Source: V. B. Shklovskii, ‘Kinoki i nadpisi’, Kino, 30 October 1926, p. 3.

The Cine-Eyes originally protested against literariness in cinema and against the frame with parallel intertitles. At the same
time they stood for the frame as such, thinking that the frame has an existence outside its semantic significance, that its
resolution comes within the confines of the actual frame of the screen. Hence plot, as a complex organisation of frames, as a
kind of everyday motivation for the links between them, seemed to them to be external to the frame and non-cinematic.
Whereas plot is only a particular instance of construction. It is a construction of everyday semantic propositions. An
individual human being usually constitutes the basis of a plot: an individual plot is usually based on the story of an individual
human life or a single moment of that human life. But this is just the [Western] European concept of plot and just the current
one.

Dziga Vertov’s group was orientated towards fact. They stood for fact and against anecdote. They rightly thought that the first
characteristic of the shot in cinema was its specificity and its connection with fact and they said, ‘We shall produce our works
from the montage of facts.’ In this they corresponded to many parallel movements in contemporary art.

A most interesting thing has occurred in Dziga Vertov’s latest work A Sixth Part of the World. First and foremost the factual
frame has disappeared and the staged frame appeared. They seemed to be geographically insecure and enfeebled beside their
juxtaposition. In this film we noted with interest that in one place the sheep were dipped in the surf and in another place they

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were dipped in a river. This is very interesting and the surf is well photographed, but where it was shot is not precisely
determined. Similarly there is no precise determination of the [shots of women] laundering with their feet: it is filmed as a
curiosity, an anecdote, and not as a fact. The man who departs on broad skis into the snow-covered distance is no longer a
man but a symbol of the departing past. The object has lost its substance and become transparent, like a work by the
Symbolists.

Just as in Dziga Vertov’s last work Forward Soviet!, the composition of objects has led to a straightforward parallelism: then
and now, or there and here. What is more, having rejected the kind of composition associated with the novel and the drama,
Dziga Vertov has passed on to lyric composition and even called it an epic hit. The intertitles have turned out to be literary
and they have been stood on tiptoe through the use of large letters.

If I am shown a title that describes a child feeding at the breast and I am then shown a child feeding at the breast I realise that
I have been taken back to lantern-slides. Dziga Vertov is of course not so naive that he does not appreciate the parallelism
here between title and frame. But, because for him this parallelism is lyrical and heroic he is won over by it and he adopts and
does not change its form but merely tries to change its emotional significance.

Dziga Vertov needs actors. For the photography of the bourgeoisie rotting and dancing the foxtrot has the character of pure
acting. It rots badly: the petty bourgeoisie, probably our NEP bourgeoisie, is badly mangled. It dances the foxtrot on a carpet
and that is uncomfortable. It dances badly. The setting is bad. Look at the ‘Chocolate Kiddies’:100 these negroes in Dziga
Vertov’s film dance well because they have not been asked to stage something but are real workers. In cinema the choice of
movements is extremely useful.

Dziga Vertov’s work is art and not construction. His rejection of plot construction has only unified his work. His orientation
towards fact is artistically correct but has not been carried through to its conclusion. The result is simply verse, red verse with
the rhythms of cinema. Because the artistic nature of his work has been transferred to lyrical parallelism, his frame is little
used.

Dziga Vertov has turned through an angle of 730°, i.e. he has done two complete turns around himself and ended up turning
by only 10°. His paths have corresponded to the paths of fiction cinema. But Dziga Vertov’s intentions are extremely fertile
and those people who [in future] will film real newsreels, those who will indicate the length and breadth of a place and the
day of shooting, those who will film real fields will be indebted to his ideas, the ideas of Dziga Vertov the passer-by.

61 Anatoli Lunacharsky: Cinema – the Greatest of the Arts

Source: A. V. Lunacharskii, ‘Kino – velichaishee iz iskusstv’, Komsomol’skaya pravda, 15 December 1926.

Lenin’s remark that cinema is the most important of the arts for the current epoch is constantly being repeated.

It is not difficult to decipher the inner sense of this judgement by Comrade Lenin. The fact that Lenin was ready to grant
pride of place to cinema among the other arts shows that in art he valued above all its colossal agitational and propagandistic
force. Art, images, a gripping plot, thrilling combinations of sounds, lines and colours – all this penetrates even into a
consciousness that is not yet prepared for more or less abstract scientific figurative understanding.

Cinema does not possess speech. By thus relinquishing the principal instrument of intellectual influence it does, of course,
renounce some of the purely artistic force of the word, but it scarcely suffers from this. After all, music, the art without
words, by the very juxtaposition of its rhythms and sound masses often produces an impression that is no less moving than
the most exquisite poetry, although it is much less definite.

But cinema, which, like music, is wordless and which is, in exactly the same way, rich in rhythm and direct tracts of emotion,
is incomparably more definite than music and this is because it is figurative. We have taken the concept of ‘figure’ from the
figurative arts. That is why they are called figurative. The poet frequently employs all his energies in order, through the
combination of words, to evoke in the reader an almost visual, almost tangible image, whereas the painter or sculptor does
this very simply because in this consists the very essence of his art.

Nevertheless painting and sculpture have one great weakness: they are passive. Poetry and music are much richer than them
precisely because they unfold their forms just as life itself unfolds. In this respect cinema has great strength. Cinema is
concrete like painting or, rather, even more concrete, because, shorn of the rich brilliance of painting, it is unusually exact in
its reproduction of natural phenomena and it boundlessly captures in nature everything that it needs while at the same time
enjoying enormous liberty with time. It may, consequently, develop a story, it may jump from place to place, it may skip
whole years and even centuries. It may force things to go backwards, it may slow down something extremely fast, it may
speed up something that is really slow. In this respect it is richer than life itself. It offers possibilities bordering on sorcery.
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People say that there is one aspect that cinema does less well than poetry and that this forces it to turn for help sometimes to
words through intertitles and sometimes to music through accompaniment. They say that cinema is powerless when it comes
to the depiction of the internal world. Poetry can relate what a man thought or felt as if the writer had transported us inside
that person. But cinema can only show us the exterior: how his face changed or how he gesticulates. This objection is,
however, of little importance. The greater part of our thoughts and experiences occur in the form of barely noticed or
revealed images. As a matter of fact, when we think, dream, rejoice, reminisce, hope or doubt a unique pale film passes
before us inside with a whole mass of barely noticed images, some reproducing something that we once saw and some
combining things we have seen in the most fantastic forms. Not only can the cinema attain the riches of this internal life that
passes before our mind’s eye, it can also, if it wishes, achieve almost the same degree of fluency. Dream, memory, fantasy,
unexpected discovery or suddenly aroused suspicion – all these can be conveyed by the cinema with an unusual animation of
which, by contrast, no other art, including even poetry, is capable.

This is the instrument that technology has given to man. Can we really pass it by? Let us remember again that it has an effect
even on illiterate people. This is the instrument that can not only produce an artistic reflection of life but can also serve
science, bringing distant things nearer and giving us the opportunity, while sitting in a chair, to undertake vast educational
journeys, without touching a microscope to see something improbably small and without touching a telescope to examine the
heavenly bodies under enormous magnification.

For this reason it struck me as strange when recently, during one of my discussions with worker correspondents, I was asked
whether it was a good thing that our younger generation is keen on cinema.

Why should it not be a good thing? Of course it is good. Magnificent. It is even better than their being keen on the theatre,
music, or even books.

There is disgusting and debauched theatre, there is worthless hack music, there are books that are harmful and confusing,
there is, unfortunately, the abominable commercial cinema: indeed it even predominates.

The bourgeoisie is pretty cunning. It rarely makes propaganda films. It knows that it has an ugly face and that no beliefs will
compel anyone to love it. It does not try to convince. The bourgeoisie does not compete in this sense. On the contrary, it tries
to divert the attention of the audience, the attention of the great public from important matters. It is dangerous for the
bourgeoisie to talk about important matters, it is dangerous to discuss and argue. It knows that it can easily be out-argued.
Hence it does not produce propaganda films but instead unleashes the demon of commerce. The cinema entrepreneur has the
same scope as the opium salesman in China in trading in so-called film entertainments.

With its apolitical cinema, with its mass market cinema the bourgeoisie is better at blinding the masses than any propaganda,
however skilful. I shall go further: a consciously propagandising cinema that wants to teach is like someone with their legs in
irons.

Of course it is one thing if it is an obviously scientific film. The people who come to see it will be those who are motivated
by scientific curiosity. But, if you want to produce a great film melodrama, a great film novel, in a word, a fictional film, then
your preaching tendencies will very often be damaging. For the great mass wants to relax, wants to be entertained, wants to
forget, and you are starting to re-open its daily wounds, to talk of its misfortunes, of the evils of the day, of its duty, you are
opening its eyes to one or another of its social circumstances, etc. It begins to get bored, it begins to feel that it is attending a
lecture. We must say directly that, to ensure that a really agitational and propagandist cinema can compete with such rubbish
as The Thief of Bagdad and Beasts of Paradise. We must have a considerable knowledge of how to make this kind of film
fictional above all else, i.e. gripping. Without all this the propagandist cinema will, like a dry spoon, irritate the monk.

The conclusions?

It is splendid that our younger generation is keen on cinema and we must make certain that it becomes as keen as possible on
it, but on a cinema that will increase its consciousness, rally it, make it stronger, more honest, brave and actively
revolutionary.

But what do we have to do to ensure this? Is it enough merely to strengthen the censorship and to permit even fewer dubious
films from abroad? Is it enough merely to produce well-intentioned Soviet films?

Neither the one thing nor the other is enough. With a great deal of honesty but a very small amount of talent these measures
might put the younger generation right off cinema. We must at all costs develop and promote our cinema further and higher:
it must be ideological and interesting at the same time. In this connection we must learn from the men who poison popular
consciousness, the great film concerns of the West. We must know how to attract our great public to our own films. This is

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unlikely if it can only be captivated by the depraved and the rotten. One thing is true, namely that it loves brilliance, a variety
of experiences, romance, beauty, rapid actions, an interesting plot, and there is nothing for us to fear in that.

When the greater and the lesser pedants of Soviet cinema start to teach us grandiloquently that all this is essentially trash and
that we should pass as quickly as possible to films without a plot, without a hero, without eroticism, etc., they will be serving
us very badly. While not in the least denying the significant role that works of this type can play we must state clearly that
this is a product that finds not only a commercial (this is half the trouble) but also a mass psychological market.

Fortunately we have recently witnessed a remarkable blossoming of Russian cinematography. Things like The Battleship
Potemkin, the films Cross and Mauser, The Wind, The Mother, The Wings of a Serf, The Skotinin Gentlemen, and even such
slight and superficial films as The Three Millions Trial, etc., etc., bear witness to the fertility of our Soviet soil in this field. It
is producing rapidly and abundantly new directorial, acting and technical resources. We have now found a financial base too
for, on the whole, our cinemas, film rental and film production are profitable. There is therefore no reason to be dejected: we
can boldly look ahead.

Soon we shall overtake the European and American cinema. It is not they who will threaten us by conveying contraband of
varying degrees of decay and depravity, but we who shall threaten them by breaking through on all their fronts and, to the
masses’ loud applause, which has been stifled by American-European ‘order’, sailing out into the great ocean of cinema art
in full sail beneath the proud Soviet flag.

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