A compilation film essay, by Thomas Lahusen.

From the very first days of their existence, the Bolshevik authorities were confronted with the question of how the new state was to represent itself and its objectives to a population, the majority of whom lived in a time and space separated from urban industrialization and modernization. Film, which, according to the legend, had been qualified by Lenin as “the most important of all the arts,” was to become one of the key mediums of self-identification and propaganda. By the mid-1920s the central government had defined a project of film distribution and exhibition, dubbed кинофикация - “cinefication,” under the auspices of a State Committee for Cinematography and its regional branch offices. Derived from the famous 1920 slogan “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” cinefication was invested with the same utopian message of progress and enlightenment.

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Its implementation followed the same path as many Soviet programs and institutions: it was caught between the demands of central control and regional manifestations of independence, of political propaganda and profitability, and the imperatives of the plan and the necessity of cost accounting. However, the Soviet effort of cinefication, despite abysmal failures, remains an unprecedented example of cultural dissemination, where every citizen was targeted, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder, including more than 150 distinct ethnic groups spread out across the 11 time zones of the Soviet empire.

 

Cinefication peaked during the era of “stagnation.” By the end of the 1960s, feature films, documentaries and newsreels were disseminated to the entire country, to every town and village, to the most remote corners of the Soviet Union, using  trains, trucks, boats, and other means of transportation. Soviet newsreels show projectionist on sledges heading toward villages drowning in deep snow, parachuted from airplanes to bring the movies to remote collective farms and reindeer herders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For many years, I attempted to get a general idea of the phenomenon of Soviet cinefication, its structure, its goals, its failures.  From the Moscow-based Main Film Distribution Administration and the Main Administration of Cinefication of the State Committee (Ministry) for Cinematography (Goskino) to republican committees and its regional and local subdivisions, all these different organisations produced a massive amount of documents, containing directives, orders, statistics, and letters, many of them filing complaints addressed to the local and central authorities: complaints about insufficient plan-fulfillment; letters from projectionists, complaining about not being paid for months, viewers complaining about the quality of projections and the monotony of programs. An additional source of information was the monthly journal Kinomekhanik (The Film Projectionist), giving interesting details about technical issues, problems related to projection, ticket selling, as well as description of films and performances.

 

Among the many letters figuring in the cinefication archives, I discovered some “pearls.”  One of them is a letter written by Stalin in 1947 to Bolshakov, the minister of cinematography of the USSR at that time. Stalin defends the use of “trophy films” (films brought back by the Red Army from the Berlin film archives) for general distribution among the Soviet public. We learn not only about Stalin’s own taste as a film connoisseur, but also about his concerns regarding the poor finances of the Soviet film industry, a taste – and concern – that the “masses” did not necessarily share with the leader. On the one hand,  “trophy films,” such as the Tarzan hits (starring Johnny Weissmuller), or the 1949 blockbuster The Girl of My Dreams (= the German film Die Frau meiner Träume, starring Marika Rökk, a favorite actress of Hitler), drove up box-office receipts. On the other hand, many letters to the minister and other organs complained about these screenings, judged immoral and out of place.

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When a Ryazan regional newspaper published in the late 1950s the collective letter of lumberjacks in a remote logging camp, complaining about the fact that their film projector was seized by the local distribution agency to be used elsewhere, we cannot only measure the popularity of film viewing, but also the endemic contradiction between film distribution and exhibition, and their material and technical limitations. A paper trail of considerable size, well-preserved in the central and regional archives, gives us a detailed picture of these two rival institutions, caught in-between the imperatives of the planned economy and the necessity of functioning as self-supporting organisms. If we consider the example above, even Stalin was caught in this eternal Soviet dilemma.

I hoped to get a better focus for my research when I chose to consult the archives of Ryazan oblast. Ryazan city is about 200 Km South-East of Moscow. Traditionally rural, the province also has an industrial sector. Its capital is home to the famous Ryazan Guards Higher Airborne Command School . Unfortunately, the general picture of what I found in the central archives was repeated here: the same directives, orders,  statistics, complaints, along the monthly, half-year and yearly dated files.

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Striking was also the uniformity of films programming: the same list of films – Soviet “classics” of the 1930s and 1940s, such as  Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October (1937), Lenin in 1918 (1939), Chapaev (dir. Vasilyev brothers, 1934), The Moscow Skies (dir. Yuli Raizman, 1944), or Petrov’s The Battle of Stalingrad (1949) continued to be shown endlessly in cinemas and mobile stations.  Exceptions were the Tarzan films and other “trophy films” taken from the German archives, such as  The Girl of My Dreams, and, during the 1960s, a number of Indian and Arab films. They were by the most popular.

Overall, however, I was desperate. What did the AUDIENCES really see, what did they think of film watching, what did they like, or dislike? I decided to organize a crew and travel through the Ryazan towns and villages, to interview still-working projectionists, local movie directors, directors of (decaying) distribution centers and especially viewers. They all told me much more that what I could find in any central or local file of the Department of Cinefication. The interviews put a “human face” onto the dry statistical numbers of plan fulfillment or its absence: the pleasure of watching a Tarzan film on a bed sheet hung between two birch trees; the interests raised by Indian films and, above all –- the importance for Ryazan peasant viewers that were films “about themselves,” films about the Soviet peasantry, and – expressed many times – the joy, while watching a film, of “laughing and weeping together. “ All this ended up by becoming our documentary film, entitled The Province of Lost Film (2007). It was screened at some international festivals and several times in Ryazan city itself, where it is was met with a lot of nostalgic feelings.

 

For information on this film, see:

https://www.chemodanfilms.com/the-province-of-lost-film

 

​The Ryazan experience gave me the idea to look at Soviet cinefication further away. The cameraman who shot most of  The Province of Lost Film,  A. Gershtein, was a former journalist who had worked in Frunze, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, now Bishkek.  He was himself the son of a well-known documentary filmmaker of this country. He had since then emigrated to Israel, and later to Canada, where we met.

 

The State Archive of the Kyrgyz Republic contains a number of fonds of the Administration of Cinefication of the Kyrgyz SSR, created during the 1930s. I wondered to what extend they would reflect “national” issues. Before Kyrgyzstan became acknoledged as a “nation,” the texts that relate to it were written in Chagatai, a Turkic language that was once widely spoken across Central Asia and emained the shared literary language in the region until the early 20th century. The earliest files in Kyrgyz language were typed or written by hand in Latin characters, which was the first Soviet Kyrgyz alphabet implemented during the Latinization campaign, meant to counter the former “great-power ( i.e., Russian) chauvinism,” a term used, for example, by Terry Martin in his 2001 The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 . After 1932, however, Latinization was accused of pan-Turkism, and the Kyrgyz alphabet turned Cyrillic. In addition, most files were then written in Russian and generally attest the same uniformity than elsewhere, with the same directives, orders,  statistics, complaints, etc.  

 

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Bringing Indian, other films of “brotherly” nations, the “miracle of Kyrgyz film" and films of their world-famous literary author Chingiz Aitmatov to the town and villages of this small Central-Asian nation, traveling cinema and “cinefication” were part and parcel of “real socialism.” Like the projectionists we interviewed a few years ago in the far-away province of Ryazan, many former viewers mourn the disappearance of both. I planned to make another documentary on cinefication in Kyrgyzstan. But it never came to be, except some shots amd interviews that I filmed aroud 2009, and a number of documents found in the Kyrgyz archives. The film essay “Profession-Projectionist” uses some of this footage.

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The screening of cinema for the “masses” was of course not limited to the Soviet Union. China closely followed the Soviet example during the 1950s and public screenings are still practiced today.  In 2017, documentary filmmaker Cui Yi and myself completed a film, entitled Screening from Within, showcasing outdoor film screening in today’s China and before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Migrant workers of Beijing and Chengdu, rural inhabitants of Anhui, Sichuan and the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, as well as projectionists from today and yesterday, share their thoughts, memory and experience about government and NGO-sponsored film screenings. Many of them remember the times when itinerant screening attracted huge crowds of viewers. Others—the younger ones, filmed in the Tibetan areas of Sichuan and Qinghai—take video cameras in their own hands to film “from within.” For more information, see: ​https://www.chemodanfilms.com/screening-from-within

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