Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

256 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
and experienced russian directors had fed the country to Western europe
where flmmaking remained a viable career. 6
early Soviet attempts to reignite the flm industry were not successful. a
flm industry was far more complex than a factory and relied heavily on foreign
trade as much as artistic talent. It was only the implementation of the New
economic policy (Nep) that materially changed the situation.the Nep allowed
the formation of joint stock companies that could earn income, which was the
fscal solution that allowed movie houses to reopen and make profts from ticket
sales. after several iterations, Sovkino, the Soviet flm production company, was
established as a corporation with shares owned by the Supreme Council of
the National economy, Moscow and petrograd workers’ councils, and people’s
Commissariat of Foreign trade, which was the largest stockholder. 7 the resulting
cooperation between Sovkino and the one remaining independent flm studio,
Mezhrabpom-rus, solved the difculty of marshalling resources to make flms. 8
Mezhrabpom-rus used the profts from Sovkino to pay for flm production.
the Nep period not only marked a relaxed attitude towards the economy
and business, but it also marked a period during which attempts were made to
encourage the repatriation of russian intellectuals who had fed the country
during World War I or the Civil War. One such person was Iakov protazanov,
the russian flm director who had directed widely popular costume dramas
before the war and had lived in exile in paris and Berlin since 1917. 9 today in
the West, protazanov’s role in early Soviet cinema had been overshadowed by
directors such as Vertov and eisenshtein, but at the time, at age 41, this relatively
old man of the cinema promised to reinvigorate russian flm. 10 probably at the
behest of Lunacharsky, protazanov returned to russia with the promise that he
would be allowed to adapt aleksei tolstoy’s Aelita to flm with few expenses or
6. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, pp. 3-5, and Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 16-21. Both
authors recount the disassembly of the russian flm industry and the dispersal of its resources.
7. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, p. 40.
8. “In addition, the Nep allowed the formation of the private joint-stock companies. Of these, the
two most important were rus and Mezhrabpom, which were later to form Mezhrabpom-rus.
Mezhrabpom was an abbreviation of International Workers’ aid, an organization established in
Germany in 1921 by pro-Soviet and pro-Communist elements. Its original task was to help
Soviet russian fght famine.” Ibid., p. 38.
9. “[protazanov] made his directorial debut in 1912 with the production of the Departure of the
Great Old Man (‘ukhod velikogo startsa’), an account of the fnal days of Lev tolstoy. he made
a star of Ivan Mozzhukhin in literary adaptations, such as The Queen of Spades (‘pikovaia dama’)
in 1916, based on pushkin’s short story, and Father Sergius (‘Otets Sergei’) after the novella by
tolstoy, made in 1918.” david Gillespie, Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda,
Short Cuts: Introductions to Film Studies (London; New York:Wallfower, 2000), p. 10.
10. Jay Leyda, Kino:A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 1960,third (princeton, NJ: princeton
university press, 1983), p. 186.