Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

characters so that they live; for, said Dinamov, "you cannot base your cinema entirely on the use of natural types, any more than it can be wholly a documentary cinema." (6) To have a subject in every picture, for the mass has its subjects and its leaders. Mother, Storm Over Asia and Chapeyev are the main line of the Soviet film ; in them there are heroes through whom the action as thought and the thought as action is manifested. (7) To create heroes who must think so that their thoughts reach the public. (8) To create heroes who must feel, otherwise the subject will remain incomplete. Moreover, characters must have main emotions, for "an eagle could not fly with a host of little wings." None of these problems can be solved without (9) a clear style and a perfect technique. It is not quantity, but quality that counts. "In the Golden Age of Greece the statues were of normal size; only in an age of decay did quantity replace quality. Style is the artist's handwri ting " — and the Soviet cinema has many styles and theories: Eisenstein's the intellectual, Dovzhenko's the poetic, Pudovkin's the passionate and emotional. (10) The final problem of the film workers is to remake cinema consciousness. The struggle is not so much a fight against different theories as to create a definite and positive new style. In fact, an ever-evolving and developing style. The only film which has shown a mature development of many of these new trends is Chapeyev, the first sound picture of two brothers Vassilev. They adapted the scenario from the book by Furmanov with the use of historical records. Chapeyev is the only recent Soviet film with any large comprehension of men as they are in life. Its beauty will last because it is not "fashionable" in its thought or its treatment. It is full of the spirit by which an epoch can be seriously judged. It is not like Nights of St. Petersburg or Storm, pictures which show a revival of interest in the classical and the beautiful; or The Jolly Boys (Jazz Comedy) , which is full of formal beauty that degenerates often into the pretty-pretty. Though the theme of Chapeyev, the struggle of a small detachment of revolutionary soldiers under the command of Chapeyev, is a page from early Soviet history recorded in a novel by Chapeyev's actual commissar, Furmanov, the characters and events are essentially seen through the eyes of 1934-35. Had Eisenstein or Pudovkin taken this theme in 1925, instead of Potemkin and Mother, they would in their separate methods have treated it as an heroic mass drama of civil war, ending in the death of all concerned. Made to-day it is an analysis of character, the political 151