It should also not be forgotten that, as at other stages of the construction of the Soviet state, the leadership and influence of the Party school on cinematography of the 20s was not limited to decisions of the Central Committee and other party bodies and to meetings on cinema issues. Leadership and influence were exercised through communists who were sent to film organizations; through creative and other public film associations; through printing and criticism; through recruitment and training of personnel. And the 20s provide a huge amount of material revealing the creative role of the party in all these areas. Unfortunately, the authors of the volume did not show interest in them.
Paying attention to minor figures, and sometimes not deserving of a kind word, the authors did not find a place for a number of major party workers — ideologists and "producers" of Soviet cinematography — who played a significant role in its formation and development.
One of the first organizers and leaders of the socialist film department, a close collaborator of B. I. Lenin on pre-revolutionary work, D. I. Leshchenko is presented in the book as an almost comic figure.
Another associate of V. I. Lenin, the largest Soviet business executive K. M. Shvedchikov, as chairman of Sovkino, who played a major role in streamlining the film business and creating the material and technical base of film production, is not even mentioned. The third major political figure, one of the leading ideological workers of cinematography of the 20s, the initiator of attracting C. M. Eisenstein to the production of the Battleship Potemkin, who had a huge ideological influence on the great director, K. I. Shutko is mentioned in a context that does not give the slightest idea of his actual role in the history of Soviet cinema.
The role of Bolshevik V. A. Yerofeyev, one of the creators and leaders of Soviet film printing (Kinogazeta, Kinopechat publishing house) and film society (Association of Revolutionary Cinematography), and later one of the leading directors of the documentary film, is not covered at all.
The activities of such prominent ideological and managerial workers as P. A. Blyakhin, I. P. Trainin, M. P. Efremov and a number of others are insufficiently and sometimes inaccurately characterized.
An undoubted omission is also the absence in the book of an analysis of the role of such important components of the cinematic process as public film organizations (ARC, Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema), film printing (newspapers "Cinema", "Newsreel ARK", "Soviet Screen"), as theory and criticism, as the SCC and other film educational institutions.
I stopped at these examples not only because the most important topic of the book — the politics of the party in the cinema — is crumpled, but also because they, these examples, characterize other fundamental miscalculations in the selection and presentation of material — the disproportion between the real historical value of a fact or phenomenon and the place that is given to it on the pages of the first volume. Here are some more examples.
The largest figure of the Soviet screenwriting of the 20s, the author of scripts for a number of outstanding films, the founder of the Soviet theory of screenwriting, a wonderful teacher and creator of the world's first department of screenwriting, who brought up several generations of screen writers, Valentin Konstantinovich Turkin looks much paler in the book than many minor figures from among the same screenwriters of the 20s.
In some chapters, theoretical statements of writers random for Soviet cinematography are given (for example, A. Toporkova). At the same time, the book does not characterize the contribution of immeasurably more significant film theorists: the same B. K. Turkin, V. I. Pudovkin and others. So the proportions shift, and it is difficult for the uninformed reader to determine where the mountain is and where the hummock is.
It seems that we are not looking at a collective monograph with a single concept, strict selection of material, carefully verified estimates, but a collection of loosely coupled articles by different authors using different scales when evaluating homogeneous phenomena. skylines.ru