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THE FILM SINCE THEN
struggling with the problems of the second and third FiveYear plans. Instead, the return to the theatrical method brought with it a retreat to themes and scenes of the past. Not only the past of the 1917 revolution (Baltic Deputy 1935, Lenin in October 1938, We from Kronstadt 1936), and the 1905 revolution (the Gorki films), but all the way back to Suvorov and Peter the Great, even to Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. Each of these films, and film series, had a specific propagandist aim. Most were well done within the limits of their deliberately adopted style. There is, of course, always room for experiment in the handling of historical material, even though some master-theorists and historians of the film have suggested, with a good deal of force, that it is not in the nature of the medium to deal with material so remote from contemporary life. But to find, as indeed we do in summing up, that costume drama as a genre for an entire decade largely dominated a State-supported and Statedirected art, dedicated to assist in the transformation of an agricultural society into an industrial society, is to ponder deeply on the ways of leaders. The nature of the Soviet situation in the thirties demanded above all else that masspropaganda serve two main purposes : to cushion the shock to the individual of necessitous collective regimentation, and to enlist the sentiments and loyalties of the complete population in the collective effort. It is difficult to see how any of the big films of the late thirties performed either function, except in the most indirect and remote way.
The return to the Actor, then, would seem as much an evasion of Soviet film problems as the earlier absorption with abstract film theory. The origins of this impulse to evade are given in part in Grierson's criticism : 4 It is a commonplace of modern teaching that even with revolution, revolution has only begun. The Russian film directors do not seem to have appreciated this, for it would lead them to subject matter which, for the moment, they appear to avoid : to the common problems of everyday life and to
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