Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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actors to assert that their suggestions and opinions were arrogantly swept aside by directors ; and Leningrad artists to maintain that the Moscow studios were badly organized, supercilious in tone and blandly indifferent to the welfare of the students graduating from the State Institute of Cinematography. For three days criticism raged fast and furious. The most destructive element of the conference was that under the guise of criticism there was a deal of backbiting, particularly on the part of the second generation of directors, who often showed themselves intolerant, arrogant and ungrateful towards the pioneer directors who, during an epoch of ruined economy, had raised a number of basically important theoretical signposts. That the newcomers should criticise and revise the early theories of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, shows the virility with which they come to the cinema; but when several young directors of talent unlit by genius began to belittle Eisenstein and Pudovkin with personally rude quotations from Gogol and Georges Sand, and set themselves up as inquisitors, then they showed themselves to be suffering from a disease known in revolutionary circles as Marxian measles. By contrast the Communist Party representative, Dinamov, belittled no one and showed a much more profound understanding of the creative artist's psychology than some of the budding geniuses showed towards each other. His speech can be summarized in the words of Marx, "that all emancipation leads back to the human world, to relationships, to men themselves." Therefore, the main tasks of the Soviet cinema artists in 1935 are: — (1) To reinstate Beauty. The beauty which emerges from ideas and not from single sequences, beautiful in themselves but related only as illustrations to the theme or as symbols of ideas. (2) For artists to feel the epoch in their blood — as Eisenstein and Pudovkin felt it when they made Potemkin and Mother, for "the voice of the epoch must ring in the voice of the hero." (3) The hero to be unafraid of burning passions. In order that the Soviet cinema may have this passion the directors (as has not always been the case) must only take those subjects with which they are in love. They must take root in the subject as trees take root in the soil. (4) To create individual characters. People with real and often contradictory natures, not puppets in black-and-white pulled by the string of ideas stated but not analysed. Contradictions in life and in people must be seen and understood ; and above all the enemy, like the hero, must be shown in the round. (5) To create actors with great passions, to portray such 150