Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER MAY 1942 The Feature Film of the Month THE NEW TEACHER The New Teacher. Production: Lenfilm 1939. Directed by Sergei Gerasimov. Photography: V. Yakovlev. With Boris Chirkov as the teacher, Pavel Volkov as his father, L. Shabalina as his sister and Tamara Makarova as the girl friend. \l It's a funny thing about Russian films over the [,e last ten years or so, those that we've seen over here at any rate, how few of them deal with contemporary problems and present day Russian life. I suppose the main reason for this is that the old-guard directors, middle class intellectuals to the last, were heartily bored with the period of five-year plans and Soviet construction, and always wanted to be harking back to the good old days of upheaval, when noble revolutionaries were having exciting times shooting people. Old Professor Eisenstein, presented in The General [Line with the magnificent theme of the revolution of agriculture by the collective farm and new techniques, was much more interested in oldtime religious rituals and could find in the arrival of a new cream separator only a sexual significance. A village getting electric light for :he first time, so important to the people confined, to the intellectuals who had always had was just a bore. Uncle Pudovkin, baulked of x>mbs and street-fighting at home, ran off to Germany where there was still some going, to rake Deserter. Only Dovzhenko calmly carried >n in his same old line, which as Ivan, Aerograd ind Shots showed, magnificently survives a evolution, construction war or any other human ictivity. Of course we knew really that there must be )lenty of other stuff going on under the surface, young working lads coming on who were part ind parcel of the new society and not hangovers rom the old, directors who were from the >eople and part of them, who looked on them as iquals and not as queer creatures who must be alked and teased into doing what they were told, "red Ermler, from the silent days, carried on (in .punterplan and others) in his same quiet conitructive way. Kozintsev and Trauberg in the Maxim series got a bit nearer to present day ituff; there was Dzigan, there was Macheret of Men and Jobs. And there was a whole run of ilms which, although second-grade or even vorse technically, were far more interesting just >ecause they showed something of contemporary tussia than all the dreary overdressed historical reconstructions like Nevsky or Suvorov. All the ime while watching a poor film like Jazz Comedy or The Rich Bride you got a feeling of pxcitement at getting some idea of what up and taming Russians were feeling and doing. And now here at last is The New Teacher, the irst really complete expression of the new Russia, i fine subject and a fine film. Gerasimov the lirector is only a young lad— apparently his .irst film The Seven Brave was shown over here a few years ago — but in spite of, or rather, probably because of that, he seems more completely at home with talkie technique than any other Russian directors. The film is on the whole as well made, the people as nicely handled and placed for the camera, and the detail as full as anything by John Ford, say, whose films Gerasimov knows well, I bet. There are one or two roughnesses of course, but in the end they don't affect the real quality of the film at all. This quality is made up of a creative belief in the possibilities of human life, a firm sense of being at home in the world and liking it and a warm human feeling for the pleasantness of people. I don't remember ever having seen a film where you got a stronger impression of people with confidence and independence who were going to make of life exactly what they wanted. And when at the end the hero jumps out of the window, looks out over the moonlit countryside and exclaims "Ah! Life, life!" you know that here are people for whom as for the Americans the world is all fresh and new, a place of limitless possibilities; but people for whom this vital innocence and simplicity is based, not as in the new world on ignorance, but on full knowledge. You have only to compare this film with any German film to realise completely where the hope of the old world with its load of guilt lies. The New Teacher (a bad title) is a simple story about a village and a family in the new Russia. The son, beautifully played by Boris Chirkov (.Maxim) has been working as a teacher in Moscow and thought of by the village as a lad who has gone to the big city and made good. He comes back to the village, and their eager welcome of their distinguished visitor turns to disappointment and anger when they find that he's come not on a visit, but to stay. Clever, distinguished and pushful relations are all very well in the big city at a distance from which you can safely boast about them and their exploits, but it is altogether a different story when they're on your own doorstep upsetting your life with their fancy ideas. The rest of the film tells how he comes to terms with the village, with his father and family, with his girl friend and with himself, and the strength of the film is that all these conflicts are honestly resolved and not sentimentally by-passed. The film is warm and human and all the people very pleasant, but what is so good is that the point of the film is not how pleasant the people are, but where they're getting to. There is no morbid interest in private emotions: these people are part of a live community, and their feelings are all shared feelings. In a way you could call the whole thing propaganda, but that doesn't matter in the least, partly because it never tries to twist the truth and partly because you can always listen to somebody carrying on if he really cares about what he is talking about. There is an amazing richness of detail about the whole film which shows that Gerasimov really understands what's going on and hasn't mechanically simplified everything. There's the set-up in the family itself, father an old Partisan Bolshevik who dominates the others, mother under this thumb, auntie under both of them, and driven silly by continual housework, daughter very much alive and independent and obviously quite capable of dealing with dad when the time comes. There's the understanding of other people's points of view shown by dad's practical complaints about the holidays interfering with his moving— he's chairman of the collective farm. And there's the relationship of father and son, so often done before but never so well as this. Father half-proud, half-contemptuous of his son, resentful of his youth and cleverness, trying to patronise him and half hoping he's going to make a fool of himself; son nervous as a cat and falling into priggishness — a conflict honestly resolved, not as, for instance, in Renon's Man Who Came Back by a sentimental acceptance of the present, but by a creative view of the future. And there's a crowd of detail which is extremely pleasant not only for its warmth and humour but for its added feeling of going somewhere : the dance to welcome the son home, with the girls coming forward one by one to sing themselves into the company ; his sister and girl friend lying in bed afterwards listening to father carrying on and chatting intimately of adolescent this and that's ; the village question-meeting with the boy asking advice on an appalling Heath Robinson invention which won't work ; the holidaytime with the two lovers in embarrassed and frustrated silence while the shouts of people enjoying themselves together come faintly over the meadows; and the end, where the teacher, on terms at last with his girl friend, is warmed all through at the pleasantness of life in general, lifts his young sister on to the stairs and kisses her, goes into his own room, and ga/ing at his airman pal who is shamming sleep, remarks, "What a funny fellow", and then jumps out of the window to have a look at the night and think how nice life is. The only thing I could have wished was for him when he came hack into his room to ha\e fetched out a bottle of vodka, woken his pal and then had a bloody good booze-up together. It would have made a perfect end : but never mind, the film is beautifully made and beautifully acted, particularly father, son and sister, and what's more it is a real treat to meet a director who, well in with the people as he is, takes for granted the fact that they are pleasant and goes on from there to tell them what they should be up to. If up and coming Russia is like this (and I'm sure it is), there's nothing for Stalin to worry about, and Hitler is just wasting his own and e\er\ body's time.