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That is what I think of the nature and role of laughter in the conditions of the last encounters with the class enemy, who uses every imaginable (and unimaginable) opportunity to stop the triumphant march of socialism.
A comedy personage, a comedy type in Western Europe and America is a funny representative of its social environment; the ridicule often does not go beyond the positions of chauvinism or nationalism. At least this is true of the cinema from which all vestiges of militant class humour are being thrown out.
We can rise above the limits of purely biological laughter only if we rise to the level of understanding the social significance of the wry face which we make the target of our ridicule.
The comic quality of a social mask and the devastating force of social ridicule must and will form the basis of militant humour, the inevitable form of our laughter.
It seems to me that that is what laughter will be at the stage of the last and decisive battles for the triumph of socialism in one country.
1937
WOLVES AND SHEEP
(Directors and Actors)
As a matter of principle, I am all for the collective method of work and consider suppression of the initiative of any member of a collective body absolutely wrong. Moreover, I expressed this idea very emphatically at the U.S.S.R. Conference of Cinema Workers: "Only a talentless collective can exist when one creative personality tries to dominate another."
And yet in this problem, too, the struggle goes on two fronts and there are cases when a director's "iron heel" is not only justified but absolutely necessary.
No one will dispute the fact that unity of style, both in visualizing and producing a film, is an indispensable condition for creative director-actor cooperation. The importance of this condition is all the greater if a film is to be stylistically distingue (not stylized!).
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