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THE FILM SINCE THEN
of a Nation, or Intolerance, both of which were filmed out of Griffith's head? Or Que Viva Mexico might have joined the original versions of Greed and Napoleon as projects inherently impossible of fulfilment. Eisenstein, in the fragments which we saw of the Mexican footage, came closer to the life of the common people than in any of his masterpieces. But whether that life could have been shaped into film form will forever remain an unanswered question.
When Eisenstein returned to Moscow after this sadly abortive experiment, he found a film world greatly changed. He and Pudovkin had solved the problem of sound-film technique on paper before he left,1 but it fell to those he left behind to discover how much of the theories expressed in 1928 could actually be realised. The basic principle put forward was that montage must apply to the sound track as well as to the mute, and from this it followed that the married film must be contrapuntal. Sound and visual images would complement, not duplicate, one another. The 1 compound cinema ' would be based on * non-coincidence \ The result, it was maintained, would be an even greater intensification of the shock-effect of silent montage.
The first Soviet sound film avoided testing the theory. The Road to Life (1931) by Nikolai Ekk included one instance of disjunct sound, the famous scene in which steam escaping from a locomotive expressed the grief of hundreds of onlookers. For the rest, it was largely a theatrical dialogue film, a form which it could hardly have avoided since its content was reformist and Victorian (the late Otis Ferguson described it as ' Louisa May Alcott on a collective farm '). Pudovkin's first effort in the medium, Life is Beautiful {A Simple Case), 1931, was a botch which nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.2 In view of its
1Cf. page 419. Vide, Close Up, Vol. 3, No. 4, October, 1928. The Sound Film, by S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov.
2 Life is Beautiful was shown in Britain as a silent film by the Film Society, May 21st, 1933. Vide, Soviet Cinema, Thorold Dickinson and Catherine de la Roche (Falcon Press, 1948), p. 37.
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