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.
THE FILM SINCE THEN
human thought, could not easily come to rest in the problems of this year and next. Ivan, essentially, was a speculation on the nature of power — not Ivan's power, or Stalin's, but Power. As such, it was created outside the Soviet scheme of things, an involuntary heretic to its own cause.
Pudovkin's course has been much the same, so far as is known to us. His only film to reach America since Deserter was General Snvorov (1941), an historical pageant containing little to suggest Pudovkin's style or methods, much less his power and humanity. Nor did it exactly adhere to the line of history, the relationship between the General and the dynasty being prudently glossed over. Except for the great name attached to it, this might have been a routine historical film made almost anywhere in the world. It is a matter of much regret that his last film, Admiral Nakhimov, has not been made available to us.
There were elements in the early career of Alexander Dovjenko which might have suggested that he, alone of the old-line directors, would successfully adapt himself to the new dispensation. But apparently it was not to be. After Earth and Ivan,1 Dovjenko made but one film of first importance. Frontier ( 1936) known also as Aerograd, was perhaps the first of the Soviet nationalist films and certainly was one of the most legitimate. The imagery of his characteristic style, sometimes employed for its own sake, here took on significance in relation to the theme. In linking the semi-barbaric ritual of the old believers with the equally barbaric punctilio of the Samurai, Dovjenko used unmistakably cinematic terms to express the sources of the political alliance between the enemies of the Soviet inside and outside the territory of the Union. Set over against this image of the primitive and the retrograde was his striking portrait of the Communist youth of the new generation, a portrait rather more lyrical than functional, perhaps, but suffused with the poetry and drama of which
1 Discussed by Rotha in Celluloid, pp. 135-153, and Documentary Film, p. 175.
574