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NEW TRENDS IN SOVIET CINEMA
MARIE SETON
The recent Moscow Cinema Conference and the subsequent discussion made it quite obvious that the Soviet cinema has entered upon a new phase of its development. For four years there has been a crisis among the cinema artists, brought about by the transitional conditions of the Soviet Union itself. They failed time and again to find and reveal the spirit of the time before that spirit had evolved into something different. They were frightened of contradictions. More often than not the problems raised in the films were out of date before the pictures were released, or the theme of the pictures muddled because the scenarios had been given a fresh twist half-way through. For example, the last sequence of Pudovkin's Deserter — the unemployed's encounter with the police — was originally in the second reel. During 1934, however, coinciding with the increased stability of Soviet life, the film industry got "out of the wood" and produced several pictures with interesting new trends, and one, Chapeyev, which can rank beside Potemkin and Mother as characteristic of its period.
The three days conference served to clear the air by giving public expression, not to say official status, to a number of thoughts which were in the process of turning into facts. It also gave the second generation of directors and the less known cinema artists an opportunity to formulate their theories, which were more often than not in opposition to those of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. They in turn modified or threw out a number of their theories, essential in their day, which had been hitherto generally accepted as characteristic of Soviet film. For example, the subordinate position of the professional actor which characterized the work of Pudovkin, and the subordination of the individual character to the mass which was a corner stone of Eisenstein's scenarios.
The most constructive element of the conference was the frankness with which all expressed themselves. Directors from the national minority republics like Georgia did not hesitate to say that they were too often considered as provincials by the Moscow artists;
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