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1925

Introduction

Eight years after the October Revolution the Party began to take definite steps to organise, or at least to guide, cinema in a
more revolutionary direction. Following the resolutions of the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924 (Document no. 40) the first
of a series of Conferences on various aspects of cultural activity was held in June under the auspices of the Party’s Agitprop
Department. It adopted guidelines for creative literature that were to mark a turning-point for the other arts as well:
henceforth art was enjoined to be ‘intelligible to the millions’, 85 a phrase that was rapidly to become a watchword.
Goldobin, the director of production for Goskino, while acknowledging the progress made in consolidating Soviet cinema,
felt that further steps were urgently required in two fields (Document no. 45): first, working-class audiences needed more
Soviet films on topical themes rather than exotic imports and, second, rural audiences quite simply needed more films and
more film facilities. This was part of a general move to mobilise support behind an alliance to be forged between worker and
peasant. In November the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema (ODSK) was founded to ‘raise the mass’s interest in Soviet
film’, to ‘sanitise cinema programmes’ and ensure the ‘gradual removal … of foreign films’. It went further than Proletkino
and ARK in that it tried for the first time to involve the masses in Soviet cinema.

These moves occurred against the general background of the development of the cult of Lenin. It was in 1925 that
Boltyansky published a collection of documents Lenin and Cinema, to which Lunacharsky contributed his memoir.86 Lenin
was becoming the touchstone by which arguments were justified: hence Vertov justified his argument for an enormous
increase in the percentage of documentary films by reference to the so-called ‘Lenin proportion’ (Document no. 48).

Viktor Shklovsky, returned from exile in Berlin, criticised the Cine-Eyes but his criticisms were ones of emphasis rather than
of essence (Document no. 49). He countered their strident claims for documentary film by comparing them to ‘a man with
frostbitten fingers’. Plot, according to Shklovsky, was almost an inherent characteristic of cinema, a natural way of organising
cinematic raw material: he concluded that ‘Unconscious cinema specificity, the passion for imaginary impartiality, the fear of
art all impoverish cinema and at the same time fail to resolve the problem of a way out from art.’

In his contribution to the cinema v. theatre debate Abram Room argued that cinema was closer to real life: ‘Theatre is
“seeming” whereas cinema is “being”‘ (Document no. 47). Therein lay cinema’s greater power. But, while earlier writers had
seen cinema as a means of renewing theatre, Room saw cinema’s current theatricalisation as a ‘transitory truth’ on the path to
a full realisation of cinema’s real essence.

38 The Strike (1925) directed by Eisenstein for Proletkult and Goskino

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39 His Call (1925) directed by Protazanov for Mezhrabpom-Rus.

45 Anatoli Goldobin: Our Cinema and Its Audience

Source: A. Goldobin, ‘Nashe kino i ego zritel”, Novyi zritel’, 10 February 1925, pp. 5–6.

There is no doubt that during the past year there has been a significant improvement in the attitude of our cinema audience
towards the film production that it is offered. A year ago it was seen as an indisputable truth that only a foreign ‘hit’ could
bring in the takings, that Soviet films would not make a profit and would for the most part not even pay their own way.

Life itself is now in the process of refuting this truth daily. The news that Goskino’s Soviet scientific film Abortion had
broken all the records set by foreign ‘hits’ caused a real sensation. And in which cinemas?! In the best cinemas in Moscow
that are by no means patronised by theproletarian public.

What does this mean? That the Nepmen who patronise the expensive cinemas and have previously preferred foreign films
have changed their tastes and rushed to see Soviet films, even scientific ones, that have neither Mary Pickford, nor lavish
sets, nor thrilling stunts? Not at all. It means that the workers’ demand for really useful films is so great that they are not put
off even by the high prices of the first-class cinemas and that they have filled them in the knowledge that Abortion had its
‘first run’ in these cinemas alone.

The figures and facts at our command indicate without doubt a regeneration in the social composition of our cinema
audience. The network of so-called ‘commercial’ cinemas in the large cities, that has been significantly reduced as a result of
the government’s tax policy is no longer able to compete with the elemental growth of the network of cinema installations in
local and Red Army clubs.87 According to the latest data, this network has already passed one thousand outlets for the whole
of the USSR. The number of mobile cinema units serving the countryside is growing day by day and has now reached 600.

Interest in cinema amongst the broad masses of workers and peasants is undoubtedly growing and the worker audience’s
conscious attitude towards cinema is becoming stronger and more precise with every film that it is shown. Witness to this is
the current wave throughout the Soviet Union of mass organisation of workers’ film circles, the growing number of film
critics from the machine-tool industry, of worker film correspondents, as our press wrongly calls them.

What are the demands made on films of this new audience for our cinema? They are demands dramatically opposed to those
made by the world bourgeoisie.

The principal demand of the worker cinema audience is a demand for the contemporary film content that we need, that meets
the most vital spiritual needs of the revolutionarily inclined mass. It is not entertainment that this mass expects from cinema
but a healthy resolution of those doubts that it finds difficult to resolve on its own. If a film has something to say, if it calms

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the anxiety of a troubled mind about the future and creates a firm conviction that ‘we have not lived, we are not living and we
shall not live in vain’ the worker audience will be quite satisfied.

The techniques of cinema, the lavish sets and the art of the ‘kings of the screen’ are of no interest to the worker audience. It
still has little understanding of the finer points of film and photographic techniques or the delights of fanciful montage.

It is no accident that the most enthusiastic reviews in the provincial Party and Soviet press (which is a better reflection of
workers’ opinions than the press in the capital) are devoted to films produced by Proletkino.

As everyone knows Proletkino’s films are distinguished by one common failing, the undoubtedly clichéd nature of their
production. Despite this, all Proletkino films without exception treat the contemporary and profoundly revolutionary themes
that we need (The Red Home Front, From the Spark – a Flame). This apparent virtue is for the worker audience the principal
and fundamental virtue of the film.

The worker audience obviously does not notice the technical poverty of the film and this failing is perhaps not so important if
it is concealed by the ideological value of a subject that is properly communicated and that the audience needs in the way that
it needs ‘black bread’.

The most successful Goskino films in the provinces were: Old Knysh’s Gang, The Red Web, The Valley of Tears and in
particular Abortion.

The much-talked-about Aelita was received by worker audiences in the provinces with considerable doubt as to its
usefulness.

Foreign films are unconditionally rejected by the worker audience almost without exception.

In terms of the number of titles there are few Soviet films. For every thousand programmes composed of foreign films, no
more than a hundred Soviet films are released. But foreign films are distributed in the USSR in five, and as a maximum eight,
copies where fifteen to twenty copies of Soviet films have to be printed. (Old Knysh’s Gang was sold out in twenty-six
copies, How Petunka Went to Ilyich and The Lenin Cine-’Pravda’ in twenty-five.)

When the countryside is properly supplied with mobile film projectors Soviet films will be released in hundreds of copies.

46 Zhizn iskusstva Editorial: Theatre or Cinema?

Source: Teatr ili kino?’, Zhizn’ iskusstva, 3 March 1925, pp. 3–4.

The slogan ‘Face the Countryside’ has been brought to the attention of the whole of the Soviet press which is actively
debating the methods for realising one of Ilyich’s principal legacies. A series of local congresses and conferences in all
corners of the USSR has accepted various concrete decisions on the question of a closer union [smychka] between town and
country. The same theme was elaborated at the all-Union conference on political educational work. Finally it found an echo
here in Leningrad at the congress of rural librarians [izbachi].

Cultural work in the countryside must attract the most active discussion on the part of those who work in the arts and stand
resolutely on the platform of Leninism and in fact in the periodical press we do find a number of responses to the problem of
the forms of artistic work in the village. Some of them give first priority to theatre, others stand with equal energy for
strengthening cinema activity.

Krasnaya gazeta, for instance, asserts the predominance in the countryside, among artistic circles of all sorts, of precisely
these drama circles, which significantly outnumber the choral circles. Consequently the paper proposes a series of measures
that would assist the use of theatre as a powerful factor in the cause of cultural progress in the countryside.

Tribuna iskusstva, the organ of the Central Executive of the Union of Art Workers of Belo-russia, assigns a similar role to
theatre in the countryside. In this connection the journal places great hopes in the peasant correspondents [sel’kory]. The
peasant correspondent must help to bring theatre closer to the peasant. The peasant correspondent must wage war against the
choking of rural theatre with all sorts of rubbish.

The defenders of rural theatre are not troubled by the fact that the artistic value of rural spectacles in present conditions
cannot be great. The desire for theatre exists perfectly well. When we have overcome the financial difficulties we shall be
able to start organising in the districts and communities lending stores of theatrical equipment and libraries to supply rural
theatres with plays etc. At the moment, some people assert, it is not a question of this. Now the principal task is to guide the
work of the theatrical circles along correct ideological lines.
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We are sorry, but this is the same Manilovism that Comrade N. calls the effort to divert the work of village drama circles on
to the rails of amateur work on the principle of a United Artistic Circle! It is the same Manilovism that Tribuna iskusstva falls
for when it suggests that the present rural theatre might serve as a medium for the political development of the mass of the
peasantry, acquainting them with our country’s past, inducing them to cultivate their own fodder, to mechanise their farming,
to re-establish their cooperatives, etc.

This kind of armchair fantasising is decisively refuted by the sober practicalities of life that are directly linked to village
ways. Thus, in the Barnaul newspaper, Krasnyi Altai, we find some very interesting travel notes by Comrade Pozdnyshev
(‘The Countryside As It Really Is’), which are devoted to the unhealthy tendencies in rural work and, in particular, in rural
dramatics. Comrade Pozdnyshev, relying on his observations in a number of districts, firmly asserts that the priority given to
rural drama is hindering the necessary establishment and development of village reading rooms [izba-chital’nya], which are
generally recognised to be the centre of cultural work in the village, around which all the cultural resources of the countryside
should be grouped. At a time when Komsomol members, and sometimes teachers, local government officials, area political
education workers etc. are actively participating in village drama circles, the village reading rooms are usually provided with
a single librarian who has to do everything. The librarian leans over backwards but he cannot of course give the reading room
more than he does give it without active outside assistance. Naturally, this represents a direct loss to the reading room which
has been put in the vanguard of our work in the countryside! This of course results from inadequate instruction and
supervision from above.

It would be absurd to deny the educational significance of theatre but at the same time we must admit that this enthusiasm for
rural drama circles at the expense of the work of reading rooms is positively harmful – all the more so because the rural
theatre is at present quite unable to satisfy even the most modest requirements. Anything that turns up by accident is put on
the village stage. Comrade Pozdnyshev has cited a number of examples of theatrical practice in the countryside. Here is one
of them, borrowed from the ‘work’ of the theatre in the village of Platavo in the Alei region:

Today anyone who wants to act has the right to act how they want, only on a regular basis, so entrance is free for everyone.

(Signed) Chairman of the Cultural Education Committee

(Signed) Secretary.

These kinds of ‘spectacles’ are as a rule put on once a week (on Sundays) and in other places even more frequently – two or
three times a week. How can we spare the energies of rural workers that are wasted on drama circles which produce such
negative results?

It is quite obvious that the pull of theatre cannot in present circumstances be satisfied by the countryside’s own resources. We
cannot now produce the necessary number of politically and culturally educated leaders of amateur drama circles. For this
reason the rural theatre will inevitably take on the character of a dreadful amateurism and its spread cannot be part of the plan
for the cultural construction of the country-side. It might be possible to alleviate this disaster with mobile troupes of
professional actors performing an ideologically approved repertoire. But where shall we find them? From the ranks of the
unemployed? You won’t get them into the countryside for love or money!

But in the countryside there is an unsatisfied demand for spectacles and good films could of course do much better service in
this respect and produce much more positive results. Cinema can really produce what Tribuna iskusstva expects from village
theatre. Cinema has every chance of becoming essential to the countryside and close to the peasant’s understanding. It can
provide him with both healthy artistic nourishment and the useful knowledge that he needs for rural life. In addition cinema
can become a powerful weapon of Communist enlightenment among the peasant masses. In this respect we must, of course,
exploit it to the full. The resolution of the 13th Party Congress is quite definite on this: ‘we must pose in practical terms the
task of supplying the countryside with mobile film projectors.’

Discussing the same theme, the Vladimir paper Prizyv expresses an opinion that deserves most careful consideration.
Pointing to the fact that the Soviet public cannot remain indifferent to the political educational work of cinema, Prizyv
proposes the creation, under the Political Education Committees of Standing Conferences of representatives of organisations
working in the countryside. Their task must be to establish funds and work out a plan for the cinefication of the countryside.
The cinefication of the countryside must be a slogan just as the electrification of the countryside is. We must organise a
Society for Rural Cinematography [Obshchestvo derevenskoi kinematografii – ODK] similar to the Society of Friends of the
Air Force or the ‘Down with Illiteracy!’ Society.

We believe that the idea put forward by the paper Prizyv must receive the very broadest support. The mass construction of
mobile projectors with an adequate supply of films that the countryside needs will help to illuminate with a shaft of light the

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darkness of the peasant’s life and will sow the seeds of his Communist education. Mobile projectors are powerful tanks on
the educational front.

40 A peasant film audience in the mid-1920s from Iz istorii kino, no. 11 (Moscow 1985).

41 ‘GOZ’ mobile projectors were described as ‘powerful tanks on the educational front’. Illustration from Iz istorii kino, no.
11 (Moscow 1985).

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42 Against ‘theatricalisation’. Abram Room’s The Bay of Death (1926) with intertitles by Shklovsky, helped introduce a new
narrative vigour into Soviet cinema.

We must therefore get down first of all to the cinefication of the countryside. Rural theatre, which is both good and necessary
to us, cannot for the time being be placed practically in the ranks of immediate and urgent tasks.

47 Abram Room: Cinema and Theatre

Source: A. Room, ‘Kino i teatr’, Sovetskii ekran, 19 May 1925 (no page numbers).

‘Cinema is a prostitution of theatre.’ That was said once by Evreinov, that very Nikolai Nikolay-evich who is the ‘best
philosopher among the directors and the leading director among the philosophers’.

Now, today, 15 years later, when cinema has left theatre far behind in its triumphal progress, now, when cinema, in all only a
couple of dozen years old, has proved to be a greater ruler of our minds and thoughts than the honoured and venerable
thousand-year-old theatre – nowadays, it would appear, such ‘anti-Evreinovism’ is a downright bluff and should also fade
and die, like the flower-like Bengal light, but, just imagine, you can find people like this not just here but ‘abroad’ who not
only share that point of view but also try to justify and prove it, in theory and in practice. That theatre, with its specific
characteristics, influences and must influence cinema and that cinema in the past, present and future was, is and will be
theatrical and theatricalised – this position has found many peculiar defenders and followers.

THEATRE.

Theatre is above all transformation, illusion, representation, acting, unreality, convention, stylisation….

CINEMA.

Cinema is pre-eminently realism, life, the everyday, objectivity, properly motivated behaviour, rational gesture….

Theatre is the art of ‘ennobling deception’, putting life on the buskin, corroborating the arithmetical paradox that 2 × 2 may
equal 3 and 5, depending on a lesser or greater degree of theatricality.

Cinema is the visual art, the art of sincere truth and common sense, the art that allows of no deception or dissimulation and
which might take as its proud motto the ancient Greek epigraph: ‘No-one who is not a geometrist may enter here.’

If we had to characterise theatre and cinema in simple terms we should have to say: theatre is ‘seeming’ whereas cinema is
‘being’.

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Thus, we must use ‘theatrical’ and ‘theatricalised’ to describe any treatment or elaboration of any real phenomenon involving
features and characteristics that transform, decorate or stylise true reality.

In the years of cinema’s infancy and even nowadays, when cinema’s elders still go on relapsing into their cinema childhood,
many of them, knowing more about counting than about film-making, approached, and do approach, the problem confronting
cinema in an extremely simplistic and highly eclectic fashion (‘a bit here, a bit there’): from theatre they took actors, from
literature they took a great deal, starting with the novel and ending with the proverb, from painting they borrowed something
like composition and even from music they contrived to transfer unnoticed to the screen the most melodious romances….
They mixed all this together, called this mixture a feature film and showed it on the screen and the gullible public, whose
taste they were trying to satisfy (‘whatever you want, sir’), came to believe that cinema was also theatre, with the sole
difference that you could go into a cinema in your overcoat and galoshes.

The results of this more than flippant injection proved to be extremely pernicious. For a long time – for too long even –
cinema was held in unlimited and forced captivity by theatre and it is only recently that it has begun gradually to free itself
and only in the last years, if not months, that the true nature and essence of cinema as a fully independent art in its own right
has begun to be clarified.

The Americans, who were the first to bring health, life and reality into cinema, were the original Adams to produce the
correct and, in many respects, true line of development for cinema. Old Cine-Russia, cultivating not only theatre but also the
theatrical, has as a result built a cemetery where a cross marks every grave, every pseudo-cinematographic theatrical feature
film.

The new Soviet cinema, a cinema that is willing and striving to be and to stay healthy and full of life, has been able to come
close to a successful resolution of this question and to produce, albeit so far in a homeopathic dose, a little real cinema.

Nevertheless there are now many people (not everyone perhaps, but a significant proportion), not just here but also in Europe
and even in America, who seriously propose to find for cinema a series of points of contact with theatre by transferring to the
screen the expressive acting qualities and functions of theatre, giving cinema a theatrical and theatricalised appearance.

Let us take America. The best examples are The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood and The Thief of Bagdad and, in particular, the
central hero of these pictures, the ‘incomparable and unique’ Douglas Fairbanks himself. Who is this ‘Doug’? He is, first and
foremost, an actor. He is an actor who combines in fantastic form full-blooded rounded cheeks and a supple athletic body
with a decorative appearance, a dancer-like balletic quality and even the exaggeratedly gallant affectation of the
contemporary Molièresque theatrical trend.

Now for Germany. It is a country that reaffirms the slogan of theatricality better and more powerfully than anyone. Caligari,
Raskol-nikov, The Nibelungs are sufficiently clear examples of this inclination. The director Robert Wiene and the actor
Conrad Veidt are the best theatricalisers of cinema although they do not openly admit to this in theory. Thus, for example,
Wiene, the director of Caligari, tries to justify the theatricality of his works through Expressionism, i.e. the attempt to lay
bare the inner nature of the characters and their personalities.

Here in Soviet Russia there are also failures of a purely theatrical nature, not to mention the endless number of examples of
the theatricalis-ation of cinema (theatricalism), which are somewhat fewer than in America or Germany, even in those
insignificant attempts to create a genuine cine-object.

That is the general situation and state of affairs here in Soviet cinema and elsewhere in European and American cinema.

We are convinced that the truth of the banner of cinema theatricalisation is a transitory truth and that it will continue to exist
until such time as the basic raw material of cinema and the methods of organising it are defined, until the sphere of activity of
feature films is determined and, lastly, until such time as the question of the feature film’s very existence as such, both in
general and in particular, is called into question.

48 Dziga Vertov: Cine-Pravda and Radio-Pravda

Source: D. Vertov, ‘“Kinopravda” i “Radiopravda”‘, Pravda, 16 July 1925.

The textile worker should see the worker in the engineering works when the latter is manufacturing the machinery that the
textile worker needs. The engineering worker should see the coal miner who provides his factory with the fuel that it needs,
coal. The miner should see the peasant who produces the bread that he needs.

All workers should see one another in order to establish close and indissoluble links between them. The workers of the USSR
should see that in other countries – in England, France, Spain, etc. – there are everywhere workers like themselves and that
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the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is being waged everywhere. But different workers are far away
from one another and for that reason they cannot see one another.

The workers and peasants have to trust the words used by one person or another (a teacher, an agitator) to describe the
situation of other workers and peasants who are living in another place. But each teacher, agitator, priest, writer etc. describes
what is happening elsewhere in his own particular way dependent on many factors: his convictions, his education, his ability
to write or speak, his integrity and incorruptibility, his ‘mood’ and the state of his health at a particular moment. How then
can the workers see one another?

The ‘Cine-Eye’ pursues precisely this aim of establishing a visual link between the workers of the world. The Cine-Eyes
themselves work in the newsreel field (Cine-Pravda, Cine-Calendar, Cine-Eye) and the field of scientific film (Silkworm
Breeding, Rejuvenation), and the scientific part of a film (Abortion, Radio-Pravda, etc.).

The ‘Cine-Eye’ movement is gradually attracting attention and sympathy. The sympathetic letters from the provinces, the
encouraging resolutions of the peasant audience, the circles of Cine-Eye observers that are springing up, the reinforcement of
the Cine-Eyes by the rising generation of Komsomol film production workers now in training and the fact that a section of
our state customers has at last turned to the ‘Cine-Eye’ all mark a significant degree of approval for us in our struggle.

In this respect the cinemas that show full-length films are the most conservative. We must promote ‘mixed programming’ as
a slogan:

(i) a three-reel newsreel of the ‘Cine-Eye’ type: The Lenin Cine-Pravda, let us say;
(ii) a one-reel cartoon;
(iii) a one- or two-reel scientific film or travelogue;
(iv) a two-reel drama or comedy.

Mixed programmes of this kind, towards which we shall have gradually to school both cinemas and the public, will provide
an opening into commercial cinemas and will serve as a basis for self-sufficiency, for profitability for newsreels and scientific
films even in cases where significant sums have been spent on them.

Of course, the designated proportion may be altered in either direction. It was in 1922 that Lenin demanded the establishment
for cinema programmes of a definite proportion between ‘entertainment’ pictures (for purposes of advertising and receipts)
and a propagandist newsreel From the Life of the Peoples of the World.

Shortly afterwards in a private conversation with Comrade Lunacharsky, Comrade Lenin once again referred to the need to
establish in the cinema repertoire ‘a definite proportion between entertainment films and scientific ones’ and he gave
instructions that ‘the production of new films imbued with Communist ideas and reflecting Soviet reality should begin with
the newsreel.’ To this Comrade Lenin added, ‘If you have a good newsreel, serious educational pictures, then it doesn’t
matter if, to attract the public, you have some kind of useless picture of the more or less usual type.’

It is no secret that these insistent instructions on the part of Comrade Lenin have so far not been realised in the slightest
measure.

The cramming of the cinema repertoire with fiction dramas places the Cine-Eyes’ work in newsreel and scientific film-
making in an extremely unprofitable and dependent position in relation to fiction film. Vast capital resources and all the best
instruments of production are at the latter’s disposal.

Against this balance-sheet:

Fiction film 95%

Scientific, educational and travel 5%
films 100%
we must promote this balance sheet:88
‘Cine-Eye’ (everyday life) 45%
Scientific educational films 30%
Fiction drama 25%
100%

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That is how the problem of the ‘Cine-Eye’, i.e. of the organisation of the perception of the workers, will be resolved. The
Cine-Eyes’ second position deals with the organisation of the workers’ hearing.

We are promoting agitation through facts not merely in the field of perception but also in the field of hearing.

How can we establish an auditory link along the whole world-wide proletarian front-line?

While in the visual sphere our cinema observers have fixed the visible phenomena of life with their film cameras we must
now talk of recording audible facts.

We are acquainted with that recording apparatus the gramophone. But there are other more perfect recording apparatuses:
they record every rustle, every whisper, the sound of a waterfall, the speech of an orator, and so on.

A demonstration of this sound recording can, after it has been organised and edited, easily be transmitted by wireless in the
form of a ‘Radio-Pravda’.

Here too, in the broadcasting schedules of every radio station, we can establish a definite proportion between radio dramas,
radio concerts and a radio newsreel ‘from the life of the peoples of different countries’.

A ‘radio newspaper’ without paper and oblivious of distances is the basic purpose of radio rather than the broadcasting of
Carmen, Rigo-letto, romances etc. with which our radio began its development.

While there is still time we must save our radio from a passion for ‘fiction broadcasting’ (cf. the dominance of fiction film).

We contrast ‘Cine-Pravda’ and the ‘Cine-Eye’ to ‘fiction film’. We contrast ‘Radio-Pravda’ and the ‘Radio-Ear’ to ‘fiction
broadcasting’.

Technology is taking rapid strides forward. A method of transmitting images by radio has already been invented. In addition
a method has been found of recording sound phenomena on film.

In the very near future man will be able to transmit by radio visual and auditory phenomena recorded with a radio-cine-
camera simultaneously to the whole world.

We must make preparations so that we can turn these inventions of the capitalist world to its own ruin.

And we shall not be preparing to broadcast operas and dramas. We shall redouble our preparations to give the workers of the
world the chance to see and hear the whole world, to see, hear and understand one another.

49 Viktor Shklovsky: The Semantics of Cinema

Source: V. B. Shklovskii, ‘Semantika kino’, Kinozhurnal A.R.K., 1925, no. 8 (August), p. 5.

The science of the meaning of words is called semantics. The word ‘poem’ is of course not perceived merely for its sound.
Sometimes even its sound is almost not perceived and then it fulfils the role of a conventional sign that brings to our attention
a whole series of interconnected meanings. A distinctive semantics also exists in painting. Individual moments in a picture
are significant not just because of their beauty: the semantic element encroaches upon the purely pictorial aspect and
transforms it. For example, if a picture contains a detail that is semantically important but in the pictorial sense individually
insignificant, that detail may draw the spectator’s gaze and alter the focus of the picture. Our very perception of space is
explained by the fact that we recognise the objects in a picture and, on the basis of our knowledge of their usual essence, we
endow them with volume.

If we scrutinise an indistinct silhouette or we perceive an object in the distance, we shall locate that object’s individual parts
differently in space according to our perception of it. So-called non-objective painting is more like painting in images of
indeterminate meaning. Semantic constants play an even more significant role in cinema.

The latest view is that the case of a merger of two separate alternating objects into a single moving object is attributable to
our psychology rather than the physiology of sight. We are inclined to think of the object as moving rather than changing:
hence, if letters of a different shape but with the same value are projected on the screen, we see how the letters modulate and
gradually change their outline. But, if we project on to the screen letters that are very similar in shape but have a sharply
distinguished sound value, we shall find the moments of transformation are much more noticeable.

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If we increase the distance between frames, making the shots less frequent, we do not destroy the sense of continuity of
movement but merely make its perception difficult. Ultimately it is possible to make the viewer swoon if he has to expend
too much mental energy trying to connect the fragments rushing past him. Cinema movement is exceptionally interesting
from the point of view of the perception of movement in general. It has as much to do with reality as a broken line has to do
with a curve. Our knowledge of what the hero is doing on the screen facilitates our perception. It is as if semantic movement,
definite action, occupies the intervals between the frames and facilitates our perception. For this reason purely balletic
movement in cinema suffers most of all. The hero blows his nose well on the screen but dances badly.

43 The three-reel Lenin Cine-Pravda, released in January 1925 to mark the anniversary of Lenin’s death, included some of
Vertov’s most elaborate montage and superimposition effects to date.

44 Members of the Lef group, Moscow 1925. From left: Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky, Pyotr Neznamov, Sergei
Tretyakov, Osip Brik and Mayakovsky.

The Cine-Eyes do not want to understand the fundamental essence of cinema. Their eyes are situated at an unnatural distance
from their brains. They do not appreciate that cinema is the most abstract of the arts, close in its fundamentals to certain
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mathematical devices. Cinema needs action and semantic movement just as literature needs words. Cinema needs plot just as
a painting needs semantic meanings. Without these it would be difficult to orientate the viewer, to give his gaze a single
definite direction.

In painting shadows are a convention but they can only be replaced by another convention. Cinema needs an accumulation of
conventions that will replace its trusty terminations of language.

The primary raw material of cinema is not the filmed object but a certain method of filming it. Only a certain approach by the
cameraman will make the frame tangible.

But this kind of work is quite possible for a writer if he operates not with words but with more complex fragments of literary
material. By using an epigraph, a writer contrasts the whole of his work with another work. By using documents and extracts
from letters and newspapers, the writer does not cease to be an artist but merely alters the sphere of application of the
principle of art. Lev Tolstoy’s What For? consists of several quotations from Maximov but they have been chosen and
contrasted by Lev Tolstoy. Dziga Vertov differs from Tolstoy, apart from the number of devices that they make use of, in that
he is even less deliberate in his work. The Cine-Eyes reject the actor and think that in so doing they are breaking with art, but
the actual selection of moments to be filmed is itself a deliberate act. The contrast between one moment and another –
montage – is realised in accordance with the unifying principle of art.

In the works of the Cine-Eyes film art does not break new ground but merely narrows down the old. They work like a man
with frostbitten fingers: they do not know how to use small objects and are forced to make do with work on second-hand
form. The fragments used by the Cine-Eyes are traditional ones. They jettison the usual already played-out motivation for a
reel change but do not offer anything new. They have their own motivation and it is always the same: the bare movement of
the camera. The Cine-Eyes’ raw material is shot without any regard for the semantics of cinema and the objects filmed
therefore appear to be unconnected one with another, not something that has been altered or staged. In their frames objects
are impoverished because there is no tendentious (in the artistic sense of this word) attitude towards the object.

Cinema is the art of semantic movement. The basic raw material of cinema is the distinctive cine-word: a section of
photographic material that has a definite meaning. Hence the raw material of cinema gravitates by its very essence towards
plot as a method of organising cine-words and cine-phrases.

Different places do not have equal value within the film frame. An individual semantic change involving the replacement of
one two-hundredth part of the frame sharply alters its whole significance – all the more sharply because everything around it
remains the same. The classics of American cinema make widespread use of this, repeating whole scenes and changing only
their basic direction.

Unconscious cinema specificity, the passion for imaginary impartiality, the fear of art all impoverish cinema and at the same
time fail to resolve the problem of a way out from art.

50 Grigori Boltyansky: Cinema and the Soviet Public

Source: G. M. Boltyanskii, ‘Kino i sovetskaya obshchestvennost”, Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 45, 7/10 November 1925, p. 15.

In the struggle for October in cinema the emergence on the front of the worker public on the eighth anniversary of October of
aneworganisation, the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinematography (ODSK), will have enormous significance.

The Society’s coming year will be spent in organisational construction. This Society, alongside the ‘Down with Illiteracy’
Association, must play one of the leading roles on the educational and cultural front. ODSK, in assisting the development of
Soviet cinema, must be an instrument of education and knowledge, because cinema is raising the cultural level of the toiling
masses of the USSR and its numerous nationalities who are not yet even literate. In many cases mobile film projectors and
their pictures have destroyed superstitition and prejudice, which no agro-propaganda etc. could have overcome, and the
countryside has gone over to crop rotation, to electrification and so on. The establishment of ODSK should assist the final
completion of the construction of Soviet cinema as an instrument for the class education of the proletariat. The vast and
fruitful tasks of Soviet cinema construction that ODSK faces are: taking possession of cinema, the skilful direction of its
work in the interests of the toiling masses, the development of amateur filming, the actual attraction of the masses into the
work of constructing the Soviet cinema, keeping film production in line, the creation of a critical perception of the bourgeois
film with a view to fighting its harmful influence on the psyche of the workers, the struggle to raise the mass’s interest in
Soviet film and the gradual removal from our everyday life of the foreign film until it comprises a small percentage, the
struggle to sanitise cinema programmes and include in them scientific films and newsreels, work on the cinefication of the
countryside, and so on.

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From among these tasks it seems to us that one of the first and most important practical tasks is the establishment of training
courses for the leaders of workers’ film circles.

Workers’ film circles in clubs and factories are growing up spontaneously. They have no proper guidance. Because of this we
can already see in these circles, on the one hand, unhealthy tendencies towards professionalism and, on the other hand, a
fascination for the superficial dynamism and composition of the American film that leads to a fetishism of form and the
unconscious perception of elements of bourgeois morality. The workers’ circles lack the proper guidance of adequately
trained people from their own milieu.

In collaboration with the All-Union Central Council for Trades Unions, ODSK must immediately organise courses to train
the leaders of film circles, thus meeting the spontaneous film activity of the working masses.

We must, however, pay particularly careful attention to the programme and the work of such courses. They should in no way
recall the shortened courses of the Cinema Technicum or even the production courses of the Fabzavuch type that were
envisaged at the 1st Goskino factory in Moscow.

The courses must be a Marxist class school for the education of the leaders of workers’ film circles. The role of the film
industry and its history and development in the light of the general development of capitalism, the position and the
characteristic features of the world film industry, the battle for markets, technology and invention in cinema in the light of the
general development of technology in the industrial period; art – ideology, the directions and themes of the world’s bourgeois
culture, as superstructures on capitalist economics in its contemporary phase, the position, role and tasks of Soviet
production, the role and perspectives of Soviet film production abroad and, in particular, in the East – this is the direction the
work of these courses should take.

The leaders of workers’ film circles should derive the concrete knowledge of cinema that they need not from theoretical
lectures but from well prepared 2–3 day excursions to our film factories and the detailed explanation of pictures, through
visits to laboratories, cinema equipment factories, the State Cinema Technicum and other schools, and other cinema
institutions. Through a detailed acquaintance with its functions and work, by watching films, dismantling and getting to know
the parts of photographic and projection equipment, listening to a model script in the Artistic Soviet and, at the same time, by
getting to know its technology, those who attend the courses will acquire the minimum knowledge of the process of film
production and of the role of the film industry that the leaders of the worker film public require.

45 The Devil’s Wheel (1926) directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg for Leningradkino.

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46 The Bear’s Wedding (1926) directed by Konstantin Eggert and Vladimir Gardin for Mezhrabpom-Rus.

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