Posted on May 26, 2011 - by Venik
The Russian revolutionaries return
In the 1920s and 30s it was a struggle against the censors to get the likes of Battleship Potemkin shown in the UK. Now the BFI is celebrating these pioneering Russian films
Some Russian films of the early 20th century that sent shockwaves through Europe, making an impact outside the realm of cinema, are celebrated in a two-month BFI Southbank season. John Lehmann, poet, Hogarth Press editor, and brother of novelist Rosamond, wrote in 1940 that their appearance in London “was an event that had a decisive formative influence on the minds of the most alert of the new generation”. Yet the films’ arrival was staggered to say the least.
Bedecked with endorsements from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the world’s most famous couple, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin had done sensational business in Germany in 1926, but distributors’ hopes of repeat success in Britain ran aground. “Officialdom,” complained an out-of-character Daily Express, “seems to think that Potemkin will undermine the British constitution and send the country crashing to red ruin.” Trotsky’s reported desire for the film to provoke mutiny in the Royal Navy was all the excuse the authorities needed to quash any hope of a release.
There remained the prospect of a “private” screening, outside the censor’s purview, and Britain’s first film society had been formed in 1925 for just that purpose, but its chairman Ivor Montagu, as well as meeting official opposition, had trouble persuading the Soviets that there was anything meaningful to be gained from showing their films to an audience of what were typically described as “young men in pale green shirts and hatless young ladies wearing sandals”. It was not until 10 November 1929, at the massive Tivoli theatre in the Strand, that Potemkin made its debut, in a one-off double bill with John Grierson’s Drifters.
The association between the Soviet directors and what became the Grierson documentary school endured, but the documentarists did not have a monopoly on montage, which had rapidly become the magic word in movie circles. “All of us in Europe went mad about the Russian revolutionary films,” Michael Powell remembered, “and our editing was changed forever, and for good.”
Many of the films were, like Potemkin, banned from cinemas, and Communist-led attempts to form workers’ film societies were harried on the grounds that their low fees were affordable to impressionable proletarians. Others, however, slipped through the net, and the likes of Victor Turin’s Turksib and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg were seen all over the country in 1930-1, mostly in cinemas that had yet to convert to sound and were running out of silents. Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera was given a spot at a small newsreel theatre off Cambridge Circus in London.
Elsewhere a handful of local authorities overturned the censor’s ruling on Pudovkin’s Mother and Storm Over Asia, and for a time Canning Town became a cinephile mecca. The documentarist Paul Rotha recalled seeing Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth “in a district that can hardly be described as attractive, and where at least two thirds of the audience was composed of people who had come from the West End”. The films’ possible influence on the remaining fraction was a cause for outcry and Potemkin itself remained verboten to all but a select few, like the Eton Film Society, which saw it in February 1933.
Despite the restrictions, among film-makers and critics the cumulative effect of the films and writings of the Soviet directors, particularly those who had visited England – Turin, Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov, and above all Eisenstein, who had lectured extensively during his stay in 1929, and Pudovkin, who published several books here – had been to make editing the chief criterion of film aesthetics for decades to come. New films from the USSR, in the era of sound and socialist realism, were greeted with less enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, Ivor Montagu, back from his travels with Eisenstein in the US, had come up with a new ploy. Censorship covered 35mm prints projected in cinemas, but not non-35mm prints projected in non-cinemas; so in 1934 Montagu began showing Potemkin in hired halls on 16mm, eventually making enough of a mockery of the system to persuade London County Council to reverse the ban. Finally, at the Forum, one of the capital’s first repertory cinemas, underneath Charing Cross, the masterworks of montage were allowed to appear in public, with Potemkin reaching London filmgoers in February 1936. Bearing out Lehmann’s thesis, it seems to have been this five-week run that inspired one of them, Francis Bacon, “to make the best painting of the human cry”.
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