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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
ously plaguing the documentary-makers in Britain, as expressed in the following passage from Rotha : 'If significant propagandist motives are to be served, it is clearly not the slightest use making films which will appeal only to a limited section of the public .... If documentary is going to be significant, we must make films which will move the people and not just amuse our fellow-directors. If cinema is a branch of art at all, then it is the most vulgar branch because the most popular. And if the masses are interested in seeing individuals on the screen, then documentary must embrace individuals/1 This statement provides the real motivation for the Soviet revolt against typage and montage which, though expressed in theoretical terms, seems actually to have been motivated by the natural propagandist desire to reach larger audiences more intimately and more cogently.
To a certain extent Dinamov's criticisms of the left-wing were justified. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and others were not only lost in intellectualism but in aesthetic intellectualism. The faults of The General Line, A Simple Case, Ivan and Three Songs of Lenin derived from an absorption in the medium for its own sake underlined by an implicit disinterest in the material treated and, possibly, an implicit distaste for the propagandist ends to be served. But it is to be questioned if the alternative method of the rightwing answered the dilemma any better. From Chapaev onward, the Titans of the twenties took something like a backseat; they appear to have functioned chiefly as ' artistic supervisors ', overseeing the product of entire studios but rarely directing individual films. That opportunity fell to the Vassilievs, Kozintzev and Trauberg, and a host of newcomers whose names were then unknown to Western cineastes. Devotees of acting and narrative, they set to work to duplicate Chapaev — and did exactly that.
It had been expected that Dinamov's dictum would result in films which would centre around ' class characters ' drawn from the mass of Soviet humanity industriously
1 Op. cit, pp. 180, 181.
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