Into the dustbin of history

Scan page 9

A new face has been found lying on the cuttingroom floor. In the faded company of blighted starlets the features of Josef Stalin have been consigned to cinematic perdition.

Paul Neuberg, producer of the current ITV series 'Red Tsar' discovered that Stalin had been systematically eliminated from Soviet historical documentaries.

In some cases, new figures had been superimposed to block Stalin out of vital scenes, but mostly film had been simply and effectively cut.

Neuberg argues that this blanket censorship was carried out in the mid-sixties by the Kremlin bureaucracy, which just offered international holders of the originals what were supposedly 'cleaner prints' while they substituted their new versions.

"Leading role'

The irony of this absurd tale is complex. The films in question were generally made with the express purpose of enlarging Stalin to revolutionary heroic proportions, and in particular to show the leading role he was supposed to have played in the October Revolution.

Without the central figure they lose most of their pointnot to mention playing time. For example, 'Lenin in 1919' now runs for 108 minutes, as opposed to the original version, which is recorded at 133 minutes.

But Stalin himself was of course one of the earliest and most vicious of film censors.

This typical example of Stalin's bureaucratic methods started its course in 1927.

Embarrassment

The great Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein, had been commissioned to produce a film celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.

But the finished product Aims for Freedom and Enterprise have published a booklet entitled 'Your Freedom proved an embarrassment to the bureaucracy-Trotsky featured as a leading figure beside Lenin, and this was scarcely convenient to Stalin at a time when he was preparing to expel Trotsky from the party and throw him into exile.

Censored

When 'October' was finally screened shortly before these events of late 1927, the film had been judiciously censored.

Trotsky had been eliminated except for one scene at the Petrograd Soviet, where ingenious cutting made him appear in a counter-revolutionary role!

The history of 'October' marked the turning point of the Soviet film industry.

In the early years after the revolution, it was in film above all that the revolutionary ardour A picture that dodged the censor-the real pockmarked Stalin of Soviet Russia in the arts.

Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and others revolutionised the techniques of cinema as they sought to create revolutionary art.

Never surpassed

In 'Strike' 'Battleship Potemkin' and 'October" Eisenstein presented the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat in a form that has never been surpassed.

In his early documentaries Vertov used film as a tool of the revolution, screening the realities of the Civil War and the new society throughout the cities and villages of the Soviet Union.

Vertov's greatest achievement, 'Man with a movie camera' • was completed after 'October' and escaped the scissors of the bureaucracy only by avoiding any overt political statements.

It remains a unique expres sion of the day-to-day reality of a society undergoing revolutionary transformation.

But as the bureaucracy consolidated its power, the revolutionary cinema was appropriated as a propaganda machine for counter-revolution.

Not even Vertov and Eisenstein could escape or transcend the new conditions.

Personality cult

In Three Songs of Lenin' Vertov contributed to the building of the Lenin personality cult which the bureaucracy used to launch the Stalin personality cult.

In 'Alexander Nevsky. Eisenstein mingled this unwilling task with a display of Great Russian patriotism and anti-German hysteria which served as a substitute for a revolOfficial view of Stalin utionary struggle against All the genius of Eisenstein Writings on and one of Prokofiev's most brilliant scores are not enough to save this film from the status the Fourth of crude Stalinist propaganda dished up as art.