Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

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CLOSE UP 175 and drvness and deliberate gravity, and reaching all the time towards a comedy of European spirit expressed in universal terms."* Very few other French films of any consequence have reached these shores, and those that have been exhibited have not been conspicuous successes. * * * RUSSIA. Just as Russia, by which we mean of course, the U.S. S.R. was the last of the great European countries to contribute to the art of the silent film, with Potemkin, Ten Days, etc., so was Russia the last of the great film producing nations to enter the field of the dialogue film.j Though Russia since the advent of the sound-film, has turned out a great many " talkies," fewer than a dozen of any prominence have been shown in America. Of these, Cossacks of the Don, Sniper, House of Death, Siberian Patrol, and Diary of a Revolutionist, may be dismissed as lesser achievements, and not warranting much more recognition than they received at the hands of the very critical American press and public (which is twice as critical when viewing a Soviet film). Golden Mountains and Alone, two of the more ambitious achievements to be shown here, were curious mixtures of the powerful dynamism of the silent Soviet film at its peak and the turgid lethargy of the Russian film at its lowest ebb of emotional excitement. Even superimposed English titles could not revive the sluggishness of these films for American audiences, while the die-hard Communists themselves found both lacking in many respects. Both were inauspiciouslv received. In dealing with the Russian temperament as far as American audiences are concerned, there is an additional barrier besides that of an alien tongue. There is the barrier of a society different from that of ours, which the Russian film makers make everv effort to stress through what is politely called by the gentlemen of the press — " propaganda for the Soviet Union." This prejudice has coloured much of the reaction towards Soviet sound-films in this country, though of course it is not responsible entirely for the popular disfavour of most of the Soviet " talkies," which' has been due to their technical inferiority, their monotony of routine, and general un-American point of view concerning the " sacred cows " of American life and manners. An exception — and the one justification of the Russian sound-film thus far as we know it in America — is, of course, the enormously popular and * CINEMA : by C. A. Lejeune (Alexander Maclehose and Co., London). t " It is one of the movie's little ironies that the most important development in film-making — the revolutionary work of the Soviet cinema — should have taken place at the precise moment when the coming of sound made it temporarily invalid ; that the one theory which might have saved the silent cinema from destruction arrived just as the silent cinema had drawn its last breath." CINEMA : by C. A. Lejeune (Alexander Maclehose and Co., London).