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THE FILM SINCE THEN
to look for none, but content yourself with the vast description it gives of the world to-day : of high-powered industry, of unemployment, of poverty, of the accumulating fire of public effort, of the stresses and storms between men and men which economic disaster has brought in its train. The net effect is of great tragedy, in which the beauties of blue sky and morning, ships and machinery, young faces and hopeful faces, are strangely stifled in the common disaster .... For my part, I shall only record that no film or novel or poem or drama has sketched so largely the essential story or the essential unhappiness of our time, or brought them so deeply to the mind/1
Meanwhile, less celebrated directors were attempting to cope with the struggles, problems, and achievements of the five-year plans. The efforts of Dovjenko (Ivan 1933), Vertov (Enthusiasm 1931, Three Songs of Lenin 1934), Macharet (Men and Jobs 1932), Ermler and Yutkevich (Counterplan 1932, Peasants 1934), have been described in Documentary Film, which also surveys the controversy that abruptly shifted the course of the Soviet cinema with the appearance of Chapaev in 1935. 2 It is suggested that the reader refers to Rotha's account of this period, for the controversy and its aftermath have been determinants in the subsequent course of the Soviet cinema. Briefly, Eisenstein and Pudovkin on the one hand, and Vertov and Dovjenko on the other, were denounced by the official leaders of the Central Committee for the pursuit of a barren intellectualism. The ' Soviet man ' had disappeared from, or had never appeared in, these mass-films and Songfilms. The way to bring him to life involved a return to acting and to stories centring around individuals. (Chapaev, with its developing ' class character ', represented the synthesis which was to be the way of the future.)
This triumph of the right over the left-wing of Soviet cinematography signalled a dilemma which was simultane
1Grterson on Documentary, edited by H. Forsyth Hardy (Collins, 1946), p. 55. 2 Documentary Film (Faber & Faber, 1936 & 1939), pp. 174-179.
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