Storm Over Asia: KINOfiles Film Companion 11 9780755624775, 9781845113742

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Illustrations

1 Map of the Soviet Far East 2 Vsevolod Pudovkin photographed for Proletarskoe kino, Moscow 1925 3 Bair’s prey in the wilderness 4 Valeri Inkizhinov stripping off for Sovetskii ekran 5 Inside the yurt 6 The splendid fox reappears around the neck of the merchant’s girlfriend 7 The merchant 8 Young and old at the market admire the splendid fur 9 The troops ranked preparing to shoulder rifles 10 The woman partisan 11 Scarified trees and rocks – a typical landscape 12 The preening of the Buddha 13 The uniform of the occupying forces – on a valet stand 14 Bair, the ‘puppet prince’, groomed by the missionary 15 The dance photographed from the eaves of the temple 16 Masked dancers 17 A baby – the reincarnated Khutuktu 18 Bair leading the horde at full pelt 19 Full-page advertisements in Licht-Bild-Bühne and Berlin FilmKurier

x 2 8 10 12 16 19 21 22 28 29 36 37 38 39 41 42 45 59

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks, as ever, to the Twin Peaks of Russian Film Studies in Britain: Professor Richard Taylor and Professor Julian Graffy. Thanks also to Professor Ted Braun and Sarah Braun, Dr Ansje van Beusekom, Derek Walmsley, Nick Lambert and Susie Painter. In Moscow, Rashit Yangirov, Naum Kleiman (and his staff at the Muzei Kino), Svetlana Artamanova of the Russian State Library, Valeri Bosenko and the staff of Gosfilmofond, the staff at RGALI, and Tatiana Storchak, Natasha Ushkakova and Sasha Ikonnikov at VGIK, Ekaterina Khokhlova and Tamerlan Dzhabrailov, all offered various forms of help. The efficiency and long opening hours of various branches of the Petersburg Public Library (Saltykov-Shchedrin) were a great boon. In Berlin, work was undertaken at the Film Museum and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (and thanks to Sigrid, Erich, Charlotte and Reimar); in Paris at the Bibliothèque des Arts et Spectacles (and I’ll miss the fusty atmosphere of the Arsénal!). The beleaguered library staff at the BFI were unflaggingly helpful and Sean Delaney showed great forbearance and good humour in the face of my requests for material strangely ‘disappeared’ in the 1970s. This slim volume is dedicated to the memory of Dr Catherine Cooke – an inspirational friend, mentor and scholar – and much missed. I am grateful to The British Academy for funding research towards this book.

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Note on Transliteration

The transliteration system used for proper names in the text of this study is that of the Library of Congress, without diacritics, with the following emendations: (a) when a Russian name has a clear English version, such as Eisenstein and Meyerhold, that is preferred; (b) when a Russian surname ends in –ii or –yi, that is replaced by a single –y, e.g. Shklovsky, Gorky, Trotsky; (c) when a Russian given name ends in –ii, this is replaced by a single i, e.g. Grigori, Anatoli, Vasili, Valeri. However uncommon in English usage in either version, I have chosen to use the spelling yurt rather than iurt. The standard Library of Congress system is used in the Notes and the Further Reading.

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Production Credits

English title: Original Russian title: Production Production company: Release date: From the story by: Scenario: Director: Co-director: Camera: Assistant director: Design: Length: Cast Bair, the Mongol The lama Representative of the English trading company Commander of the occupying forces His wife Missionary Leader of the partisans English foot soldiers Young woman

Storm over Asia Potomok Chingis-khana [The Heir to Ghengis-Khan] Mezhrabpom-fil’m, Moscow, 1928 Moscow, 9 November 1928; Leningrad, 20 November 1928 I.M. Novokshonov Osip Brik Vsevolod Pudovkin Valerii Inkizhinov Anatolii Golovnia A. Legashchev Sergei Kozlovskii, M. Aronson 1928 / 3092 metres; 1949 / 2425 metres Valerii Inkizhinov F. Ivanov Vladimir Tsoppi A.M. Dedintsev P.S. Belinskaia V.Iu. Pro Aleksandr Chistiakov Boris Barnet, Karl Gurniak Anel’ Sudakevich

Sound version released by Mosfil’m December 1949, under the direction of V. Gonchukov, with a scenario by V. Gonchukov and L. Slavin and music by Nikolai Kriukov.

Acknow

1. Map of the Soviet Far East

Many thanks, Britain: Profess also to Professo Derek Walmsle Yangirov, Nau Artamanova of of Gosfilmofon Ushkakova and Tamerlan Dzha and long open Library (Saltyk undertaken at thanks to Sigri thèque des Art Arsénal!). The helpful and Sea the face of my This slim volum an inspirationa I am grateful book.

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1. The Director and his Crew From whatever viewpoint we may approach the movie, from whatever angle survey it, the names that have the hardest service will be those of Chaplin and Sennett, Pudovkin and Eisenstein, Lubitsch and Clair – the names of men who, living fully in their own time and within their own medium, have known how to give their work a value beyond topicality.1 Caroline Lejeune Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin was born in Penza in 1893 of Tartar extraction. In his youth, his interests included painting, music and especially theatre. In 1910 he entered Moscow University to study physical chemistry, then in 1914 volunteered for service in the artillery. While a prisoner of war, he learnt German. His enthusiasm for cinema, he recalled to Herbert Marshall, was prompted by his first viewing of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (USA, 1916) in 1920: amongst critics (including Adrian Piotrovsky) and fellow filmmakers (including Sergei Eisenstein) he soon acquired the appellation ‘the Russian Griffith’, although Jay Leyda claims that ‘no Soviet film of importance made within the following ten years was to be completely outside Intolerance’s sphere of influence’.2 Pudovkin was then introduced to the director Vladimir Gardin (a survivor from the preRevolutionary cinema) with whom he studied before joining Lev Kuleshov’s workshop in 1922. Here he worked variously (as was standard collective and ‘laboratory’ practice) as designer, actor and assistant – notably on The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks [Neobychainye prikliucheniia Mistera Vesta v strane bol’shevikov, 1924].3 Pudovkin left in 1925, to make the short comedy Chess Fever [Shakhmatnaia goriachka], codirected by Nikolai Shpikovsky, and the educational film, The Mechanics of the Brain [Mekhanika golovnogo mozga]. Here, he formed a lasting relationship with the cameraman, Anatoli Golovnia. Camera operators, it should be noted, were routinely accorded credit in the film journals of this period

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2. Vsevolod Pudovkin photographed for Proletarskoe kino, Moscow 1925 alongside directors. With Golovnia, the scriptwriter Natan Zarkhi, assistant director Mikhail Doller and designer Sergei Kozlovsky, Pudovkin made the great silent films that established his reputation at home and abroad, The Mother [Mat’, 1926] and The End of St Petersburg [Konets SanktPeterburga, 1927], in both of which he appeared in cameo roles; he starred as Fedia in Fedor Otsep’s 1929 The Living Corpse [Zhivoi trup], shot by Golovnia; with Golovnia and Kozlovsky, as cameraman and designer, he directed The Heir to Genghis Khan, here producing a script in collaboration with the writer and eminent Formalist critic, Osip Brik. Pudovkin says that he and Brik had heard of a Mongolian to whom similar events had occurred, recounted by the journalist Ivan Novokshonov, whose novelisation, acknowledging the film, ‘honoured in the treasury of Soviet cinematography’, did not appear until his rehabilitation in 1965.4 After some ten weeks filming on location, Pudovkin returned to Moscow in June 1928 to start work on editing The Heir to Genghis Khan. At this date it was Pudovkin’s standard practice to work with a scenario as an ‘iron skeleton’. Later he fell foul of the authorities and the critics, notably Viktor Shklovsky, a perennial thorn in his side, by adopting the

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looser format of Alexander Rzheshevsky’s screenplay for A Simple Case (Life is Very Good) [Prostoi sluchai (Ochen’ khorosho zhivetsia), 1932]. The prototype for Bair, say Brik and Pudovkin, was an actual Mongolian partisan who had become an officer in the Red Army – in which Brik, too, had previously served. According to Pudovkin’s 1951 biographer, Alexander Mariamov, Brik knew Mongolia well, the country, its people and their way of life.5 The former athlete, Alexander Chistiakov, here appearing as the leader of the partisans, was also a regular collaborator since the days of his shared apprenticeship with Kuleshov, having played the role of the Bolshevik leader in The End of St Petersburg and re-appearing as Fritz, leader of the Hamburg strikers in Pudovkin’s The Deserter [Dezertir, 1933] and as a Civil War hero in A Simple Case, while A.M. Dedintsev, The Heir to Genghis Khan’s ‘commander of the occupying forces’, was cast in a comparable military role in A Simple Case. Another former Kuleshov graduate and boxer, Boris Barnet (who appears as the cowboy, Jeddy, in Mr West) is cast here as a British soldier: he also directed films, notably Miss Mend with Otsep (in which he acted, as in The Living Corpse), in 1926, The Girl with the Hatbox [Devushka s korobkoi, 1927] and The House on Trubnaia [Dom na Trubnoi, 1928], designed by Kozlovsky, all for Mezhrabpom. Moscow in October [Moskva v oktiabre, 1927] was commissioned from Barnet to mark the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, along with Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg. Gurniak (another foot soldier in The Heir to Genghis Khan) and Tsoppi (the fur trader) both reappear in The Deserter. Anel Sudakevich (the fur trader’s love interest in Storm over Asia) was likewise a Mezhrabpom regular, appearing in The House on Trubnaia and Sergei Komarov’s 1927 The Kiss of Mary Pickford [Potselui Meri Pikford]. The company Mezhrabpom-Rus was officially formed under the provisions of the New Economic Policy (1921-28) in 1924 with the signing of a contract between the organisation for Workers’ International Relief (Mezhunarodnaia rabochaia pomoshch’), presided over by Willi Münzenberg and Rus, one of the few film studios to have survived the Revolution. Mezhrabpom was represented by the Italian Communist Francesco Misiano and the studio by the director Yuri Zheliabuzhsky.6 By 1927 it was employing more than 300 people: it also owned three cinemas in Moscow and two in Leningrad. In 1928 the studio was nationalised (then becoming Mezhrabpom-film) under the direction of the central committee of WIR. Notwithstanding the artistic and propaganda coup at home and abroad of The Mother and The End of St Petersburg (no less a luminary than the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoli

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Lunacharsky, said that The Mother was an astonishing success for a young director, remarkably accomplished, ‘a genuine masterpiece of Russian cinematography’) left-wing critics, notably at ARK (the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography) had criticised Mezhrabpom for pursuing an ideologically incorrect ‘art for art’ policy.7 Kristin Thompson has observed that during the 1927-28 season Soviet films for the first time generated more revenue on the domestic market than imported films.8 In March 1928 there was an embezzlement scandal in Berlin and WIR activities were re-organised accordingly.9 Reflecting a new-found confidence in Russian production, protective import restrictions were reported in Germany in August, with Mezhrabpom continuing to seek profits abroad.10 In a leading article in Sovetskii ekran in September 1928, Kirill Shutko, the journal’s former editor and head of the Soviet trade delegation in Paris, welcomed the new constitution of the company as ‘a timely initiative’. He trusted that it would commit Mezhrabpom to a new target in output. For too long, he said, post-Revolutionary Russia was represented abroad by such films as Alexander Sanin’s Polikushka, a 1922 adaptation from a Russian ‘classic’ (a story by Lev Tolstoy) starring the venerable Moscow Art Theatre actor, Ivan Moskvin. Only with these films, said Shutko, was Mezhrabpom able to secure a tentative foothold in the foreign, bourgeois market – ‘but Polikushka had no connection whatsoever with the contemporary reality of post-revolutionary, Bolshevik society’. Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin [Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925], he said, opened the eyes of the capitalist world to the achievements of Soviet production and it is this example, in both its thematic and artistic merit, which he urged Mezhrabpom-film to follow.11 1928 marked a political and economic shift in Russia (the launch of the First Five Year Plan) and a move for Mezhrabpom towards international themes and concrete collaborations (such as The Living Corpse and The Deserter). Pudovkin’s reputation in Russia (where theorising about cinema in the 1920s was considered as important politically and artistically as its practice) was further enhanced by his articles in journals and the publication in Russian of The Film Director and Film Material [Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial] and The Film Scenario [Kinostsenarii] in 1926, subsequently translated into German. When Kurt London spoke in 1937 of Russia as ‘that country possessed of the highest film culture’, he meant teaching and writing about film as much as the films themselves.12 Ivor Montagu, the aristocratic founder of the London Film Society, Communist sympathiser, zoologist (and table-tennis ace) translated these pamphlets into English under the title Film Technique (1929). In 1934, Pudovkin’s The Actor in Film [Akter v

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fil’me] was published in Leningrad with an introduction by Pudovkin’s champion and first biographer, Nikolai Iezuitov. This, too was translated and produced abroad, amalgamated in America as Film Technique and Film Acting (1949). Articles continued to appear in translation in Experimental Cinema. In spite of Pudovkin’s growing reservations about his early writings, prompted by the vicissitudes of official policy dictating the means and ends considered appropriate for cinema, Montagu continued to fly the flag abroad. In 1958 he said that ‘Film Technique and Film Acting in the Englishspeaking world have been reprinted again and again…because they have been the only simple materials on deep fundamentals available. There is just as much interest in them, as basic classics, as ever’.13 Even in the 1980s, he continued to argue for the ‘value to the present generation’ of his translations of Pudovkin.14 Pudovkin became a member of the Communist Party in 1929 and in 1935 was elected doyen of cinematography. On the strength of his reputation abroad, he served as something of a cultural ambassador for the USSR, attending Peace Congresses and lecturing to societies and associations – for instance, in India.

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2. Analysis Plot Synopsis The silent version of Storm over Asia opens with scenic views of empty plains, with bare hills on the horizon. A closer shot reveals an ancient inscription, in an exotic script, carved into a slab, denoting a shrine: perhaps this is a shrine to Genghis Khan. A young Mongolian stalks his prey, a marmot – and shoots (fig. 3). Back at the family’s yurt, the lad’s father lies on his sick bed. Prayers are offered by a lama. The boy is told to sell a splendid fox fur to raise funds to support the family, but, catching sight of the pelt, the lama demands a higher price for his services. A tussle ensues and the lama drops an amulet before speeding away on horseback. A sister saddles the lad’s horse and his mother gives him the amulet before he leaves for the market, as a blessing for his journey. A foreign merchant offers him far less than the true value of the fur but insists that he accept his terms. The boy is angered and a fight breaks out in which the merchant’s cashier is slightly injured. In retaliation, troops of the occupying force are despatched to pillage the native encampments and punish the whole population. The Mongolian flees to the taiga. An intertitle re-locates the action to 1920, in the mountains and forests of Siberia. The lad encounters a soldier (dressed in the uniform of the occupying force), fighting with a partisan on a cliff edge. The soldier falls, but the lad holds the partisan fast. Military reinforcements are approaching and they needs must escape. Another partisan arrives at the gallop: the Mongolian leaps behind the saddle. At their camp he is greeted as a comrade. The partisans’ leader (whom Bair has saved) is brought in on his death bier. He utters his final words: ‘Listen to Moscow’. The section ends with a primed gun mounted silhouetted against the sky and a distant long shot of the Kremlin against a setting sun. At the headquarters of the occupying forces, the commanding officer and his wife prepare for their visit to the lamasery; meanwhile, the lamas

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3. Bair’s prey in the wilderness prepare for the elaborate ritual at which the commander is to be their honoured guest. The ceremony is performed. Hostilities continue and the lad is captured. The commander peremptorily orders his execution (a task which the deputed foot soldier is loth to perform) but the amulet he was carrying is then discovered by the resident missionary to proclaim its bearer to be the descendant of Genghis Khan. The Mongolian, seriously wounded but not yet dead, is retrieved and patched up, then paraded as a novelty (a ‘puppet prince’ for the occupying army, which recognises the potency of the myth for the people it presumes to subjugate). The Mongolian meets again with the merchant from the market, who boasts of his having shot the fox himself and offers it as a gift to the commander’s daughter. The Mongolian snatches back the fur and launches an assault against his captors. Another Mongolian prisoner at the headquarters is killed and our hero’s wrath is devastating. Finally, he is seen leading a Mongolian horde at full charge across the steppe, the black war banner of Genghis Khan fluttering aloft: ‘Down … with the dogs … of imperialism!’ [Doloi … sobak … imperalizma!]. A storm from the east overpowers the occupying army.

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Bair, the Mongolian and the Baikal Plains: ‘the desolate landscape of Central Asia’ In Brik’s original scenario, the Mongolian youth is called Sulim, in Pudovkin’s published shooting script the character is indicated by the actor’s name. In the version of the silent film shown in France he is called Timor, after the son of Chinkim, grandson of Kublai Khan; in the 1949 sound version he becomes Amogolan. Ivan Novokshonov’s 1966 novelisation calls him Anu Dorchzhi. But during shooting, and for the 1928 Russian and German releases of the film (and later British screening) he was always known as Bair. Pudovkin’s casting of Valeri Inkizhinov in the role was highly fortuitous and effective. He was, says Pudovkin, ‘a true’ Buriat Mongol, born in a region adjacent to the film’s setting, ‘the land of his father and his father’s father’.1 Inkizhinov’s own father played Bair’s father and, says the son, was enormously helpful to the crew on location.2 Bair’s younger brothers in the yurt already have the weathered brown faces with white bodies which foreign travellers noticed as common. The plastic values of their distinguishing features (broad forehead, wide-set almond eyes, high cheekbones) are enhanced and emphasised by framing and lighting. However, subsequent reports in British journals that ‘the trapper king’ had ‘never acted before’ are erroneous and fanciful.3 Inkizhinov worked briefly at the Azerbaidzhani studio in Baku, then, on the strength of the success of Storm over Asia in France and Germany, emigrated and, in later life, was cast indiscriminately in a range of Asiatic roles in French, German and Italian films, from Fedor Otsep’s 1934 version of Amok, to G.W. Pabst’s 1938 Shanghai Drama [Le Drame de Shanghai] (on which fellow émigrés, Andrei Andreiev and Georgi Annenkov worked as designers), to Fritz Lang’s 1958 remake of The Indian Tomb [Das Indische Grabmal] and Riccardo Freda’s 1961 The Giant at the Court of Kublai Khan [Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan]. Inkizhinov, like most of Pudovkin’s performers, was a professional, previously for eight years a tutor in Biomechanics with Vsevolod Meyerhold, working alongside the Kuleshov workshop during Pudovkin’s apprenticeship and appearing in The Death Ray [Luch smerti, 1924] and with Pudovkin in Kuleshov’s 1929 The Gay Canary [Veselaia kanareika]. In Sovetskii ekran, Inkizhinov spoke in August 1928 of the rigorous training undertaken for the film, of the need to cast off the ‘pedestrian Russian intellectual’ and to rediscover his Mongolian self: stripped to the waist, he proudly displayed his sportsman’s physique, the result of much running, jumping and climbing and (under the instruction of a cavalry officer) riding confidently without stirrups, as if born ‘in the saddle

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4. Valeri Inkizhinov stripping off for Sovetskii ekran

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of the steppes’4 (fig. 4). Nikolai Kaufman, reporting progress on the film for Kino, also detailed Inkizhinov’s preparatory exercise regime.5 Prince Dimitri Obolensky, who served with a division of the White Guard equipped by the British, recalled in the memoirs written in exile that any Tartar who found himself in the army ‘made an excellent soldier, especially in the cavalry’, while Prejevalsky commented of the typical Mongolian that ‘his legs are bowed by constant equestrianism, and he grasps the saddle like a centaur’.6 But this sort of appropriate casting should not be confused with the notion of ‘typage’ employed by Eisenstein (for instance, for The General Line/The Old and the New [Staroe i novoe] 1929), as Eisenstein himself acknowledged: Pudovkin works with actors: that is one point on which our views differ. He is doing something very interesting: he is looking for something between a professional actor and the people that I use in my films. He takes an actor like Inkizhinov and uses him once as if he were not an actor. He lets him play a role that corresponds to his temperament and natural calling. He is thus at the same time an actor and a real person: but such coincidences are rare….7 Photographic catalogues inventorised ethnic types of the Russian Empire and their respective habitats, some overtly decorative in intent (ranging from, for instance, Bukhar’s 1872 Album of Views and Types of the Orenburg Region to Sergei Produkin-Gorsky’s coloured lantern slide series of Russia and Central Asia, now held by the Library of Congress), others more strictly scientific (for instance, Kostenkov’s 1860 The Kalmuck Steppe and its Inhabitants).8 These include posed portraits of people with yurts, while in The Heir to Genghis Khan Golovnia uses the open lattice work of a yurt’s roof to light the confined space, casting a characteristic pattern on the faces of the people inside (fig. 5). From 1870-73, Nikolai Mikhailovich Prejevalsky, soldier, sportsman and natural historian, travelled in Mongolia and Tibet, recording the landscape, the vegetation, the animals and the people, their language, dress and customs. His observations extended from the marvels of medicinal rhubarb, through the inconvenience of using teabricks as currency, to the gestation and parturition of camels. For part of his journey he was accompanied by a Buriat Mongolian guide, Dondok Irinchinov, and he devoted much space to a description of the typical nomadic habitat (the skin and felt-covered yurt) and the nomads’ dependence on their horses and dogs. He described the natives’ religious beliefs and the continuing sway of the mythology surrounding Genghis Khan. But throughout his travels, Prejevalsky retained a sense of superior European morality, ‘in resolution, energy and unwavering courage’:

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5. Inside the yurt

Next to laziness and apathy, cowardice and religiosity are the most characteristic qualities of the Mongols. Apart from the fact that cowardice plays the dominant part in the character of all Asiatics, it is particularly strongly developed among the Mongols because they are not active politically, because the influence of the Chinese has a stultifying effect, and finally because the desert itself has its own influence, never affording man an opportunity for active work.9 Travellers even before the Revolution had speculated on the typical effect of environment on temperament. In the fine and applied arts, at the turn of the century, there was a fashion for itemising regional differences in physiognomy and costume. The sculptor Konenkov made a series of ceramic portraits of the Russian people (now in the Tretiakov Gallery); Pavel Kamensky in 1907-8 modelled ceramic figures, amongst them a Buriat woman (now in the Moscow Museum of Decorative and Applied Art). The Russian Ethnographical Museum in St. Petersburg has a similar series, ‘Nations of Russia’, including Mongolians, manufactured between 1909 and 1913. At the

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same time, the French-based film company, Pathé, produced a film series known collectively as Picturesque Russia, including an item devoted to ‘Russian Types’ and ‘A Fish Factory in Astrakhan’. Amongst the first Russian-produced Pathé films was An Episode in the Life of Dmitri Donskoi, devoted to a fourteenth-century hero, the conqueror of the Khan Mamai and his Golden Horde, and Peter the Great. The opening of Moscow’s Museum for the Study of Peoples, covering ‘everyday life and art of the peoples of the USSR’, was celebrated in 1925, with its director, Professor F. Sokolov, calling in Sovetskoe kino in April 1927 for cinema to discover ‘real’ ethnographic material and not to filter its ethnographic content by recourse to objects available in his collections. ‘Between 1925 and 1926 alone’, Emma Widdis has noted, ‘633 “scientific” expeditions were organised with the aim of gathering “historical and ethnographic” material about various component regions of the new state’.10 Vertov’s seventh Kinopravda newsreel featured geologists studying rock layers along the banks of Lake Baikal.11 In the year prior to Pudovkin’s trip (covered by Sovetskii ekran over several weeks) Sovetskoe kino published the articles ‘With a cine-camera in the Buriat’ (Sovkino making a return visit in 1929) and ‘Some friendly advice about travelling round the world’, describing the trials and tribulations encountered by crews and the reactions of local populations, suitably illustrated with pictures of cameramen intrepidly trekking for historical and ethnographic footage; the first sound cinema expedition, conducted in the same territory, produced In the Heart of Asia [V serdtse Azii, 1931].12 Vecherniaia Moskva, the Moscow evening paper, advertised a Mezhrabpom ethnographic film made in the remote outposts of the Caucasus, Svanetia, alongside screenings of Nanook in 1928. In 1929, K. Feldman wrote for Sovetskii ekran on ‘A day in the life of a Soviet kulturfilm’ in Samarkand, the city of Tamerlan, and Vladimir Erofeev described ‘How we filmed Afghanistan’.13 Viktor Turin’s 1929 Turksib also recorded the camels, horses and yurts of Eastern nomads, documented the isolated tombs of ancient heroes and presented a panorama of the Kazakh city of Alma Ata. But, as Emma Widdis has further observed, Turksib and Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1930 Salt for Svanetia [Sol’ Svanetii], based on a newspaper article by Sergei Tretiakov, differ from Storm over Asia in that they show the relief of the travails of remote parts of the Union by the sharing of resources with other regions.14 Water is brought to the cotton fields of Turkestan by the iron horse, the railway; salt and, implicitly, Soviet civilisation is brought to the Ushkul in the Caucasus, where ‘mountains as white as salt’ stop salt reaching people who crave it for their very existence. In spite of its extraordinarily appealing cinematography, far from celebrating old ways

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of life, Salt for Svanetia shows religion as pernicious and akin to superstition. Lenin is dutifully quoted in the opening credits: ‘The Soviet Union is a country so big and diverse that every kind of social and economic way of life is found in it’. A designated studio for documentary films, Kultkino, was established in 1924 but its disbanding in 1926 left Mezhrabpom-Rus the major producer in the field. The People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment levied taxes on cinema tickets in order that funds could be re-directed towards the making of educational films, which, together with Mezhrabpom’s independent revenues, allowed it to make geographical, topical and scientific documentaries. Under Lenin’s cinefication programme such films were carried into the regions, by boat, train and camel, with projectors powered by mobile generators, or were shown in workers’ clubs, in schools, hospitals and in factories, as cheaply as possible to make them accessible to all (Dziga Vertov’s 1930 Enthusiasm/Symphony of the Donbass [Entuziasm/Simfoniia Donbassa] shows the screening to workers of a film extolling the efforts of shock workers). Sometimes these were shown to the accompaniment of an explanatory lecture. In the major commercial cinemas in the larger towns, a programme often billed a documentary film as the first item, followed by a comedy short then the main feature. These documentary films were generally released at a loss and no more than ten copies were made. Pudovkin’s The Mechanics of the Brain was unusual for raising a profit.15 Storm over Asia begins somewhat in the manner of the The End of St. Petersburg, for which Pudovkin and Golovnia sought to convey Russia in general and not just the particular landscape of the Volga region: The first shots … show hilly countryside with sheaves of rye, ploughed fields which reach as far as the horizon to merge with the sky…In these pictures a sense of space was achieved by the well considered succession of graded tones, of the yellow rye and blue sky with white clouds. The troughs and furrows conveyed the feeling of an infinite distance and the cutting from landscape to landscape determined the extension of vision.16 They employ a similar device at the beginning of A Simple Case. A man stands with his back to camera in a field, the furrows running diagonally top left to bottom right of frame, with his shadow cast strongly right to left; there is a close-up of the man’s hand turning slowly then of the man in profile: ‘A common story of the Civil War…five years of hard living and of struggle…’. The opening sequences of Storm over Asia celebrate the shapes and atmosphere of the Baikal plains, the bare landscape, long,

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low horizons and solemn, rounded hills. The departure of Bair for the market, says Golovnia, ‘closes with shots of the yurt isolated on the steppe, with its banner fluttering in the breeze’: with these we sought to convey the sensation of the wind of the steppe, of the flat plain distantly framed by hills, of the arid sky with a few small clouds. Taken together the scene is monotonous, only the yurt with its white skin covering is slightly marked out against the surrounding countryside.17 This depth of field is further emphasised when the troops arrive to seize the natives’ cattle, at first a mere cluster in the far distance, centre frame, then rapidly splaying outwards, evenly and symmetrically, to spread across the full breadth of the frame. In Storm over Asia, Bair is the product of his tribal lineage and the natural environment that supports the tribe. He is shown laboriously trailing and stalking his prey, patiently waiting for the kill. Bair leaves behind him a long and lonely path of footprints in the snow which perpetually covers the mountain peaks surrounding Lake Baikal. The opening sequence has something of the quality of Robert Flaherty’s nomadic Eskimo documentary, Nanook, released in Moscow in 1924 and still showing in 1928 at the Artes cinema (dedicated to the educational documentary kulturfilm) which also screened Pudovkin’s Storm. Flaherty also narrated the difficulties entailed in making the film, sponsored by the fur trading company Réveillon Frères. The film’s opening intertitles set the scene: The mysterious Barren Lands – desolate, boulder-strewn, wind-swept – illimitable spaces which top the word…The sterility of the soil and rigour of the climate no other race could survive. Here is a man who has less resources than any other man in the world. He lives in a desolation that no other…race could possibly survive. His life is a constant fight against starvation. Nothing grows; he must depend utterly on what he can kill; and all this against the most terrifying of tyrants…the bitter climate of the North, the bitterest climate in the world. In Nanook, too, a trader entertains his audience (who have come to sell their huskies) and attempts to explain the principle of the gramophone. Nanook tests the disc by biting it, just as, in Storm over Asia, the ‘natives’ assay the coin proffered by traders on their teeth. Nanook starved to death on an unsuccessful expedition shortly after the film was made. Bair’s peaceful resilience is a natural adaptive trait, borne of the material relationship of his people with their habitat.

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6. The splendid fox reappears around the neck of the merchant’s girlfriend

Pudovkin issued instructions to Inkizhinov to neutralise the westernised behaviour he had acquired in Moscow: Reserve: a deliberately narrowed range of movement to indicate emotion; explosions of accumulated energy in sudden fury; many shy smiles (or reasons for smiling): and no needless naturalistic details, no matter how justified by actual Mongolian habits (Bair does not scratch himself, or blow his nose in his fist, or punctuate his talk with the long hissing classic sigh).18 At the market, other trappers gulp in nervous anticipation of Bair’s reaction to the merchant’s meagre payment; Bair blinks, then eventually lashes out. At the headquarters of the occupying forces, the young woman who has received the splendid pelt as a present from the merchant quivers with fear as Bair is shown sternly and steadily looking on, before finally exploding and snatching it from her (fig. 6). At the end of the film, there is an agonising pause, and exchanged shots delineating this trepidation, while Bair’s anger reaches fever pitch before he suddenly lunges at

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his fellow Mongolian’s assassin. Elsewhere, Bair’s psychology is metaphorically externalised, for instance with the fretful fish gasping for air, around his bandaged head, as he falls to the floor during his incarceration at the headquarters of the occupying forces: he painfully manoeuvres himself to an aquarium to drink from the tank of clear water, then collapses and tips it over. In The Living Corpse, Pudovkin, as the unhappily married Fedor Protasov, contrived a passively psychologised, repressed performance, where it makes a stark contrast with the animated expressiveness of his ‘gypsy’ co-star, the Georgian actress Nata Vachnadze. Inkizhinov drew a comparison between Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Calculating and logical, he says, Eisenstein knew in advance what an interlocutor would be saying to him in the next moment: Two different temperaments, two methods. This is why Eisenstein was weak at composing attractions that portrayed a soul, a whole individual personality, and for him the attraction was always a matter of putting together quantities, multiples. Pudovkin had a deep, penetrating sense of humanity and could make one feel mass events through a single character. Thus Eisenstein was never free from the technique of his principles. It worked like a calculating machine and a machine incapable of provoking tears and laughter in others. Pudovkin was the reverse. By force of temperament, for example, Eisenstein would resort to any tortured confession to say that he was sad or unwell. Pudovkin was entirely at ease, even in front of strangers. Inkizhinov says that Pudovkin worked by demonstrating what he wanted although, in spite of his own roles in films, neither Kuleshov nor Inkizhinov rated him much as an actor.19 Richard Taylor has suggested that a comparison of the press reviews of The Battleship Potemkin and The Mother already indicates the qualities in his work that equipped Pudovkin all the better to survive under Stalin, Pudovkin depicting individuals while Eisenstein presented a mass protagonist.20 His first biographer, Iezuitov, praised Pudovkin for his warmth and sincerity towards people and to the cause of the working class. Remembering in 1937 his first encounter with Pudovkin in The Mother, Iezuitov hotly contested accusations expressed in scholarly journals that Pudovkin’s films served a bourgeois ideology, were merely schematic and lacking in dialectic.21 In Sovetskii ekran, soon after the release of The Heir to Genghis Khan, Mikhail Devidov contributed to the then current debate about film heroes. He complained of heroes who were oppressed, suffering, humble about themselves and self-sacrificing: these may appeal, he

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said, to the high literary tastes of the intelligentsia. Devidov heralded the new heroism of Soviet cinema, conceived of revolutionary and creative optimism.22 There was propaganda value in Bair’s passive equilibrium and resignation. The character of Bair was constructed such that his type of temperament lends weight to the force effecting his awakening of conscience. In Storm over Asia, Bair happens upon the partisans by accident – and his enemy’s enemy becomes his friend. In The Deserter, Pudovkin went yet further, effecting a political conversion in the central typical figure. On the one hand, by not resisting execution, Bair may be seen to be offering himself as a significant sacrifice. I tend to think that Bair’s discounting of his individual self, his own self-effacement, renders him less of an original hero in the populist, Stenka Razin mould, and serves to make the later Bair all the more potent a figure. ‘Men make history’, said Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, arguing the case for the individual, ‘and therefore the activities of individuals cannot help being important in history’.23 Such a device was by no means unique to the ideological purposes of Soviet film in the 1920s, endeavouring to affirm and maintain the state through a founding mythology in the recent and distant past, but it did here carry particular political and historical force. A distinction is made between the Mongolian priests and the tribesmen who call upon their services. While the tribesmen may be held to be the innocent victims of superstition, their fears are deviously preyed upon by the priest at the old man’s bedside. As he sways with the incantation of the prayers, his eyes flash open at the mention of the valuable fur, suggesting that his mind is really occupied with more worldly concerns and that his religion is sham. Religious and mercenary interests are shown to be in cahoots, both here and at the headquarters of the occupying forces. The Traders and the Market; Escape to the Taiga In 1920, Beatrix Bulstrode recounted her travels by train and camel through Mongolia, in search of ‘the picturesque and the primitive…medievalism untouched’, passing through the market town (the capital city of the Buriat-Mongolian Republic), used by Pudovkin for Storm over Asia: Verkne Udinsk is not a place of many attractions. Once a penal settlement, now a military stronghold ... in relation to its size and position … the shops are fairly good. There are also a couple of factories while a brisk trade is carried on at certain hours of the day in the big market square. Considerable business is transacted in Verkne Udinsk in connection with skins, fur, wool and timber.24

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7. The merchant

But Pudovkin does not show the prison or the Russian Orthodox church (the town’s most dominant features, Mrs Bulstrode said) nor its factories. In Marxist terms, the conditions of production (Bair’s life as a trapper) and contending productive forces (the sale of the fur, as the product of his labour) establish a basis for dramatic change. Russian expansion had been driven east by fur, the ‘soft gold’ that accounted for one third of the Imperial coffers at the height of the trade in the seventeenth century.25 Sumptuous regalia combined fur with gold in the crowns of the Tsar and Tsarina (as shown in Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty [Padenie dinastii Romanovykh, 1927] and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible [Ivan Groznyi, 1944-46]). Colonialism was driven by a massive hunt for bears and mink, sables, ermine, foxes and otters. In Brik’s scenario, the merchant (fig. 7), William Smith, is English as are the troops who defend him ‘In the interests of Capital’. In the silent version there is extensive coverage of the market stalls (one sells felt boots) and entertainments (the gramophone and sword

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dancers) on offer at Verkne Udinsk (now Ulan Ude). Here bullock carts jostle with horses and a mounted native merchant offers Bair three horses and his own mount in exchange for Bair’s pelt – Bair insists on the 500 pieces of silver his father has demanded. Golovnia engrossingly catalogues a variety of physiognomies (the weather-beaten, creased faces of old trappers; heavily bearded Slavs and sparsely whiskered Asiatics; the beaming face of a young woman) and their expressions as the splendid silver fox, photographed several times in close-up (at the yurt and the market) to emphasise its luxurious depth and colour, is revealed (fig. 8). Distrustful of the merchant, Bair initially withholds his finest wares. The merchant blows on the fur to test its worth. But working with amateurs (that is to say, people playing themselves) was not entirely straightforward. Pudovkin recalled resorting to tricks in order to obtain a desired spontaneous reaction: In the film Storm over Asia I needed to have a crowd of Mongolians looking rapturously at a precious fox fur. I engaged a Chinese conjuror and filmed the faces of the Mongolians watching him. When I joined this take to a shot of the fur in the hands of a trader I achieved the result that I required. Once I had a long battle with an actor trying to obtain a good-natured smile from him: I failed. The actor kept on ‘acting’ the part. When I did seize the moment and filmed his face smiling at a joke I had made, he had been quite convinced that the shooting was over.26 In addition to this manipulation of events in front of the camera, Pudovkin resorted to other devices, disrupting the leisurely, documentary pace and comfortable distance with which the background action was recorded. Bair’s sclerotic passivity is disturbed and he lunges at the English merchant. He is seized by the throat by the merchant’s cashier – whose wounded hand is shown in large close-up: ‘A white man’s blood is shed!’. Meanwhile, the merchant rolls on the floor, pretending to fight until he knows that it is safe to break cover. This minor injury requires inordinate reparations. The troops of the occupying forces are instantly summoned into action, by close-up shots taken at different angles of a fanfare beaten out on a side-drum and alternate staccato flash frames of black and white. The trappers at the market flee in panic and the stall holders bring down their shutters. The titles ‘If in twenty-four hours…the criminal has not been delivered to the authorities…the whole population…will be made an example of…and fined’ are punctuated with shots of the commanding officer, issuing orders from the saddle, and a rank of foot soldiers turning in unison in slow motion, as if gathering strength,

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8. Young and old at the market admire the splendid fur

before briskly shouldering their rifles then simultaneously taking aim (fig. 9). Such conscious rhythmic distortion had been used for emphasis by Pudovkin previously and was further exploited in A Simple Case. In his 1931 essay ‘Time in Close-Up’, which explicitly referred to his work on this later film, Pudovkin described this as a means of guiding the attention of the spectator to a particular purpose, akin to shifts in the size of object in the frame, or to the masking of areas of the frame: When a director shoots a scene he varies the position of the camera, bringing it closer to or pulling it back from the actor depending on whether he wants to draw the audience’s attention to the overall pattern of the movement or to the individual face. In this way he controls the spatial construction of the scene. Why should he not do the same with time as well? Why not give momentary prominence to some detail of the movement by slowing it down on screen and thus letting it be seen particularly vividly and incredibly clearly?

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9. The troops ranked preparing to shoulder rifles

A short sequence in slow motion may be situated between two longer normal-speed sequences, concentrating the audience’s attention for a moment on the desired spot. Slow motion in montage is not a distortion of an actual process. It is a portrayal that is both more profound and more precise, deliberately guiding the attention of the audience.27 At the end of the sequence, Bair is urged to escape to the taiga, just as the original Genghis Khan escaped in his youth from captors intent upon his murder. Bair’s fellow trappers variously donate their own mittens, hat and pipe, to wish him well on his way. The fact that no date is attached to the two first sections of Storm over Asia (corresponding to the first two reels of the original version) lends them a timeless, immemorial quality, as though it has ever been so.

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The Partisans and the Mountain Forests of Siberia ‘Civil war is a tragedy for the nation-state’ argues the cultural historian Susan Buck-Morss, ‘a threat to its very being, whereas for class revolution it is a step towards the desired historical goal’.28 ‘The representation of the Soviet present as an historical present moment’, Emma Widdis has added, ‘was fundamental to the Bolshevik propaganda campaign through the 1920s and into the 1930s’, and, in turn, the Civil War, as a founding myth, remained of immediate relevance in 1928.29 Stephen Kotkin has concluded: [T]he Civil War not only gave the daring, opportunistic Bolsheviks a modus operandi and helped solidify their still amorphous identity as the consummate builders of a socially orientated, powerful state; it also furthered the process whereby the Bolsheviks’ being in power came to be identified with the cause of ‘the Revolution’.30 During the 1920s, Soviet studios made 670 feature films. Their key themes were 1) adaptations from literary classics; 2) films set abroad; 3) Civil War epics; 4) Revolutionary epics; 5) dramas of everyday NEP life.31 Maya Turovskaya has noted the prevalence of Civil War themes and settings – exemplarily and sensationally rendered in Dmitri Furmanov’s novel and the Vasilievs’ 1934 film Chapaev.32 It also provides the dramatic setting for Pudovkin’s A Simple Case and Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s We are from Kronstadt [My iz Kronshtadta, 1936], telling the uplifting tale of the 1919 defence of Petrograd against White Guardists and interventionists by the renowned Baltic Fleet sailors, whose allegiance to the Bolsheviks had been one of the most decisive factors in the Party’s success. Lev Knipper made a musical adaptation (North Wind) of a play about the killing by the British during the Civil War of twenty-six commissars from Baku, also filmed in 1932 from Rzheshevsky’s scenario. Counter-intuitively, Mikhail Bulgakov’s stage version for the Moscow Art Theatre of his own novel The White Guard (detailing the warring factions of Ukrainian Nationalist Cossacks, Denikin and the Bolsheviks in Kiev), his 1926 The Days of the Turbins, remained a firm favourite with Stalin, who saw that there was no victory in conquering a weak enemy: Do not forget that the main impression with which the spectator is left, is one favourable to the Bolsheviks. If even such people as the Turbins are forced to lay down arms and submit to the will of the people, confess their cause finally lost – that means that the Bolsheviks are invincible; nothing can be done against the all-powerful might of Bolshevism.33

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‘The recent history of Mongolia’, cautioned the China expert Michael Lindsay, writing in 1948, ‘is complicated: The Manchu emperors of China conquered Mongolia but ruled it through local tribal chiefs. As the Chinese empire declined, Russian influence started to spread. After the Chinese revolution, the northern Mongol chiefs claimed that their allegiance to the Manchu emperors could not be transferred to the Chinese republic. In 1913, Russia and China signed a treaty by which China granted autonomy to Outer Mongolia, and gave the Russians the right to station consular guards there. In 1919, during the Civil War in Siberia, Chinese troops moved into Outer Mongolia to prevent invasion from Russia and the Mongol chiefs put themselves under Chinese protection. But in 1920 a force of White Russians, under Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the ‘mad baron’, moved in and occupied Urga, the capital of Outer Mongolia. Soviet forces soon drove out the White Russians, but the Chinese could not drive out the Soviet forces. Since then Outer Mongolia has really been a Russian protectorate.34 From the mid 1920s, Catriona Kelly has noted, exemplary Soviet children were supposed to pass their free time playing with educational toys, including natsmen [natsional’nye men’shinstva] dolls (dressed in the costumes of the Soviet national minorities). These were a softer, mass-produced version of the ceramic figures now to be found in museums, intended less as decorative exotica than as a means of inculcating internationalist attitudes in the young.35 Maxim Gorky, whom Richard Stites has dubbed ‘the semi-official bard of Bolshevism’, had presented his audience with a representative cast of characters in his 1906 novel, The Mother, the source for Pudovkin’s 1926 film: the comrades who take care of Pavel’s mother while he is in prison are individually identified by name and origin, serving to demonstrate the solidarity of proletariat (Pavel), peasant (Andrei) and intelligentsia (Riabin and Sonia).36 Gorky provided assiduous, detailed descriptions of typical ethnic physiognomy and physique, including a Ukrainian: The stranger leisurely removed his short fur jacket…His head was perfectly round and close-cropped, his face shaven except for a thin moustache, the ends of which pointed downward…his eyes large, grey, transparent, protuberant…In the entire angular, stooping figure, with its thin legs, there was something comical, yet winning. He was dressed in a blue shirt and dark loose trousers thrust into his boots.37 Gorky’s My Universities (1921) provided a description befitting Bair or one of the fellow Mongolians who translates for him at the partisans’ camp:

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‘His head was shaven Tartar fashion and he seemed to be tightly sewn up in his grey Cossack jacket which was hooked right up to his chin’.38 This typological model was the chosen Soviet form of address abroad. In 1918, the delegation sent to peace talks in Brest-Litovsk contained several Russians, an Armenian, two Jews, a woman revolutionary, an old soldier and a rough-hewn worker. ‘To complete the sociological mosaic of the worker-peasant state, they picked up on their way to the station in Petrograd a peasant from the streets and pressed him into service as the embodiment of the People’.39 Political posters of the 1920s and 1930s similarly show a range of types. In silent film production (which continued in Soviet Russia well into the 1930s) such visual forms of identification and communication remained especially significant. Meanwhile, attempts were made to counter the high rates of illiteracy, notably amongst the rural populations, inherited from the pre-Revolutionary period. According to Stephen White, the 1897 census revealed that only 28% of the population in the Russian Empire between nine and fortynine years could read and write; by the next census in 1920, no more than 40% of the population was literate.40 The journals and contemporary commentators reported the activities of regional studios and of Russian companies in the regions: Goskino and Mezhrabpom both made films in the Caucasus, Proletkino in Turkestan; there were studios in the Ukraine, in Georgia, in Uzbekistan and Tatkino made films with Tartar intertitles. Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World [Shestaia chast’ mira, 1926] was commissioned by Kultkino and Gostorg, the central State Trading Organisation, to encourage internal trade and as an international advertisement for the achievements of the new social order of equality and the interdependence between republics. Vertov, on a grand scale, endeavours to present and address the totality of the Union, from Daghestani villages (in the South) to the Siberian forests (of the North), ‘you Tartars…you Buriats, Uzbeks, Kalmyks, Khakkass, mountaineers of the Caucasus, you, Komi people of the Komi region’; ‘you the owners of the Soviet land, hold in your hands a sixth part of the world’. Interspersed with images of various agricultural and industrial produce, ethnic populations, creeds and cultures, distinct landscapes and climates, flora and fauna, Vertov’s film urges: From the Kremlin/ to the border with China/ from the Matochkin Shar / to Bukhara / from Novorossiisk / to Leningrad / from the lighthouse beyond the polar circle / to the Caucasus mountains /

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Storm over Asia from the golden eagle perched on the hand of a Kirghiz / to the terns perched on the rocks of the Arctic Ocean / to the northern owls / to the seagulls of the Black Sea / all this is in your hands / your / your / buffalo / goats of Ulu-Uzen / camels from the steppes of Kirghistan / the deer / the squirrel / the trapped polar fox / the marten / the brown bear / the sable tracked in the Far North / the Astrakhan / all yours.41

The leader of the partisans, according to Pudovkin’s shotlist, is ‘a miner from the far-distant Don Basin’, a precursor of the heroes of Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1930). There are other Mongolians, Kazakhs and both young and old Slavs in the group, who share the joke when Bair, goggle-eyed, realises that Daria, the partisan who has rescued him, is a woman: in the depths of her fur coat, she suckles a baby, then proudly holds him up for him to gurgle in agreement. But she instantly becomes stern and silent when the final minutes of the leader’s life are announced: he is dying of his wounds. He is carried in on his death bier and a Mongolian strokes his hand. Pudovkin said that the ‘full-bearded types’ were found in Tarbakhatai, south of Verkne Udinsk, used for filming as the headquarters of the occupying forces (from here there was a difficult trek for the crew of a half a verst or a verst – approximately 1.06 kilometres or 0.66 miles – into the hills to film the partisan camp and the fighting with the Whites). As the architecture of the village suggests, it had been built by partisans who settled in the region after their active service in the Civil War. Their number included, he says, a real hero, a genuine ‘Surikov Ermak’, an itinerant, peasant figure.42 Judith Mayne has rightly observed the importance of ‘the Woman Question’ to the Soviets as an aspect of social egalitarianism and draws attention to the new equality instituted in state benefits, rights in marriage and education. She has construed the representation of women in Soviet films as ‘problematical’.43 The social enfranchising of women was in some sense shown to have been earned by their active part in the revolutionary struggle. The shop-girl Louise (Elena Kuzmina) in Grigori Kozintsev’s and Leonid Trauberg’s The New Babylon [Novyi Vavilon, 1929], unlike her progenitor in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames (1883), does not marry the shop owner but instead remains true to her class. Her war-weary soldier lover, Jean (Petr Sobolevsky), meanwhile deserts the Paris Commune to serve the Provisional Government in Versailles – and is ordered to dig her grave when the Commune falls and the Regular

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Army exacts revenge; another woman meanwhile drops her sewing to pick up her dead husband’s rifle and fires over the barricades. Other films (such as Otsep’s adaptation of Lev Tolstoy’s posthumously published play The Living Corpse) also re-worked and contemporised ‘classic’ source material to conspicuous ideological effect – and to effect ‘a bridge between classes’.44 In Protazanov’s adaptation of Lavrenev’s Turkestan Civil War romance The Forty-First [Sorok pervyi, 1927], exotically located on the borders of the Aral Sea (yet more camels), the Red partisan, Mariutka (Ada Voitsik), who chalks her tally of victims on her rifle butt, eventually shoots the White officer whom she has been guarding as a prisoner of war but who has meanwhile become her lover. The girl gunner and later nurse, Mashenka (Evgeniia Rogulina) in Pudovkin’s A Simple Case and Anka (Varvara Miasnikova) in the Vasilievs’ Chapaev (1934) were similarly cast. This acknowledgement in film was predated by the appearance of ‘the new Soviet woman’ in novels (such as Sonia in Gorky’s novel and her surrogate in Pudovkin’s film, The Mother) and periodicals, in the guise of ‘nurse, political leader in the army, even as combat soldier’: She was modest, firm, dedicated, sympathetic, courageous, bold, hardworking, energetic and often young, gave no thought to her personal welfare and could leave her children, although with regret, if she was needed at the front; she could put up with physical hardship, face combat and torture if captured and even endure death, believing that her sacrifice had contributed to the building of a better world.45 These films and periodicals also engaged with campaigns for the further politicisation of women, but as women fighting for society rather than on issues exclusively of interest to women. Figures such as Daria in The Heir to Genghis Khan were in some measure drawn from life, but more significantly were intended as an inspirational ideal for proletarian women, whom the Party leaders believed to be inherently conservative: The Party leaders insisted that agitation among women must do nothing to rouse ‘feminist’ attitudes, which meant that such agitation must emphasise women’s responsibility to the ‘general revolutionary cause’ … women were to be persuaded to work for the good of all and to pursue their own special interests only to advance the revolution.46 Pudovkin said that he had problems casting the woman partisan (fig. 10), eventually resorting to the help of two members of the local women’s division. They found the wife of a farmer, who was ill, and who allowed her to participate in the filming in exchange for payment. But none of the local women, he said, wore the fur hat in which he filmed his Daria.47

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10. The woman partisan

The taiga is confined to the summit and the shrubs which grow in the crevices between large rocks (fig. 11). The sparse foliage of the trees allows through a lot of light, which are typically scarified and brokenbranched, easily dislodged by the steppe winds: their profiles are sharply defined against the limpid sky. Both Pudovkin and Golovnia recalled searching for particular, characteristic elements in nature while the death of the partisan leader, intercut with a symbolic sunset, was deliberately contrived and stylised in its lighting. Moscow It is historically significant that the focus of The Heir to Genghis Khan should be symbolically centred on Moscow: the death of the partisan leader and the held silhouetted shot of the far distant Kremlin against a blaze of light is structurally pivotal to the film. Pudovkin produced an ending for The Heir to Genghis Khan which differs from Osip Brik’s scenario, in which the city was splendidly and emblematically reiterated:

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11. Scarified trees and rocks – a typical landscape

Sulim rides across the plain. Past Mongolian yurts. He gallops through rivers. Through hills. And a mirage floats towards him A city appears in the haze. Sulim rides still faster. Now the city is closer to him, and it becomes clear that it is Moscow. And the Kremlin.48 Katerina Clark has described the process whereby, after the Revolution, power devolved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the ancient, pre-Petrine capital of Russia. Its status was consolidated during the First Five Year Plan, launched in 1928: ‘On the one hand, [the Soviet Union] was already a relatively old and long-established nation. But, on the other, the country had in some senses colonised itself; the Bolsheviks had formed a colony out of Russia’. The creation of the myth of Moscow, with the Kremlin as the iconic symbol of the grand Soviet capital, was a ‘defining act in establish-

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ing a cultural identity for the new nation’.49 But Moscow was nearly twenty times closer to the Western edge of the Soviet Union than to the East.50 Marx had indicated that Communist revolution would occur worldwide. ‘The Kremlin’s belief … in its imminence’, George Kennan has commented, ‘and not only in its imminence but in its essentiality to the preservation of Communist power in Russia’, continued throughout 1920.51 Informed by the Soviet experience, and the absence of revolution elsewhere, Lenin’s revisions to this proposition in the early 1920s (thereafter adopted by Stalin) suggested that Communism was immediately possible or necessary within this single state. Under these circumstances, I would suggest, the appeal of The Heir to Genghis Khan to foreign audiences is less an urge towards universal uprising and more a summons for support for the only state in which a revolution had been magnificently achieved. It was also an answer to fears on the part of individual nationalities of aggressive Russification. Emma Widdis has succinctly summarised the then current agenda: Even if the shape of the new Soviet empire might echo that of the prerevolutionary Imperial space, the organsisation of that space – and the experience of living in it – was to be radically reformulated. National and regional identities were to be sewn into a single category of Sovietness.52 There is an open invitation to honour Bair’s new talisman: Moscow is the word he learns from the partisan leader and the only word he understands when questioned by the occupying army. But in spite of the reach of the film to represent the periphery of the union, the partisans’ attention is centralised. The vision of ‘the radiant city of Moscow’ is pivotal in the film’s narrative and structure. Hitherto, events have been portrayed in a chronological, linear manner. Hereafter, there is a shift to parallel editing, between the lamasery and the headquarters and the continuing fighting in the mountains. There is also a shift in tone. The Headquarters of the Occupying Forces The Hon. George Curzon, future Secretary of State for India and subsequently Viceroy, travelled with an india-rubber bath through Central Asia in 1888, along the newly constructed Transcaspian railway. Aware of Prejevalsky’s previous expeditions, ‘semi-scientific, semi-political’, he noted the expansion of Russia into the region (believing her advances to be ‘expedient and piecemeal’ rather than systematic).53 Orlando Figes has said that ‘from the capture of Kazan in 1552 to the Revolution in

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1917, the Russian Empire grew at the fantastic rate of over 100,000 square kilometres every year’.54 Inner Mongolia was opened up by the Peking-Suigan railway, finished in 1914. Like Prejevalsky, Curzon made photographs of buildings and people, holding himself similarly superior to his subjects.55 He reported the continuing reverence for the dynasty of Genghis Khan. Curzon was much concerned by the ramifications of railway construction for British trade and military interests (and predicted the completion of a line linking Turkestan with Siberia) and was especially alarmed by the prospect of Russian encroachment into Afghanistan (known in Russia as ‘the near-abroad’), Britain’s buffer to India, ‘the most splendid appanage of the Imperial Crown’. ‘The name of General Annenkov’, Curzon proclaimed: was flashed to all quarters of the globe as that of a man who had successfully accomplished a feat till lately declared to be impossible and had linked by an unbroken chain of steam locomotion the capital of Peter the Great with the capital of Tamerlane.56 British intervention in the Civil War, as for France, America and Japan, was prompted by such long-standing self-interests rather than an altruistic urge to preserve the Tsarist regime against the Bolsheviks. Britain was suspicious of Japanese ambitions to control the Trans-Siberian railway. As John Bradley has noted, ‘there was no unity in Allied thinking or a plan for intervention’.57 According to John Swettenham, Austen Chamberlain, who served in the Coalition Government 1919-21 and as Foreign Secretary 1924-29, defined British policy as the prolongation of White resistance to the new regime while the Great Powers gathered sufficient strength to oppose Communist agitation abroad.58 But there was little support in Britain for Tsarism either in Parliament or in the country. Service in Russia became increasingly unpopular with conscripts and regulars in the Army, such as those in Storm over Asia, who, unlike Churchill, regarded ‘their’ war as over. ‘We had been bitterly attacked by the Socialist and the Liberal Oppositions’, he recorded in 1929, ‘and also in some Conservative newspapers, for sending fresh troops to North Russia, and had we not been deaf to these irresponsible counsels and strong enough to take unpopular action, no fresh troops would have been sent’.59 Most of the British reinforcements had been withdrawn by 1919, but to quibble over the historic feasibility of British troops remaining in Siberia and Mongolia in 1920, or whether these are White Guardists wearing uniforms supplied or left behind by Britain seems to me to be academic pedantry of the worst sort. The significance of the uniforms remains the same. As we shall see, Pudovkin’s point was not lost on his audience, either at home or abroad.

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In 1922, a motion had been passed by the Commissariat of Enlightenment requiring the screening of ‘films of specific propaganda content’ alongside the entertainment pictures, intended for amusement and income. Films ‘from the life of peoples of all countries’ were to include, it was suggested, such material as the colonial policy of Britain in India.60 Stalin explained to the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 that the world was now divided into two camps: imperialist, led by America and England, and anti-imperialist, led by the USSR, which found itself encircled by the former.61 ‘Throughout the 1920s and 1930s’, Steven Marks has said, ‘the Soviet Comintern agitated for communism and national liberation in the European empires’: As a tactic in the global anticapitalist struggle, Lenin and his subordinates explicitly encouraged the revolt of Asia against the West. Lenin’s writings on imperialism established the theoretical rationale for undermining the capitalist powers by means of fomenting unrest in the colonies which he considered to be the property of the entire bourgeois political and economic system. His works were translated and distributed abroad but the gist of his thought was spread by Comintern propagandists who in the early 1920s began calling for a ‘holy war’ against British imperialism and ‘the liberalisation of peoples of the East’.62 Mezhrabpom-film was instrumental in the Comintern campaign. S. Ermolinsky, writing in Pravda in December 1928, duly praised Pudovkin for his searing portrayal of the Whites, the traders and the occupying forces intent upon the exploitation of the territory while a Kino reviewer, tacitly quoting Lenin, confidently announced: ‘We live in the last phase of capitalism …. called imperialism. The Heir to Genghis Khan deals with the theme of imperialism’.63 Mardzhanov’s Law and Duty [Zakon i dolg, 1927] (starring Nata Vachnadze) transposes the action of Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novel Amok from a colonised Malaya to the Caucasus, subject to British attempts at colonial expansion. It is significant that in a film of this date the opposition is identified with imperialism (however insidious), feudalism and the intervention of foreign capital. No claim is made on behalf of the foreign army for support during the Civil War for the restoration of Tsarism. Pudovkin, unlike Novokshonov, makes no mention of the Baltic baron, Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, but in an interview for Kino with Kaufman in August 1928 he designated the opposition as comprising English troops and a detachment fighting under the leadership of the renegade Cossack adventurer Grigori Semenov (himself part Buriat), dismissed by Admiral Kolchak for malpractices.64 Pudovkin said that he

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employed partisans who remembered their encounters with Semenov and who, in spite of their lack of experience, delivered an unusually ‘natural’ performance on camera. In Spring 1927, fighting had erupted in Shanghai between the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang), led by Chiang Kai-Shek, and Communist Party supporters. Stalin, hoping that revolution would produce an ally in Asia, had inadvisedly supported the Nationalists and was duly criticised by Trotsky for this policy. Rather than detailing the conflict between two factions, Iakov Bliokh’s Shanghai Document [Shankhaiskii dokument, 1928] edits together footage to present the bloody events as a class war. Kino discusses this ‘documentary’ alongside Storm Over Asia in 1929.65 The Chinese and European bourgeoisie are shown enjoying idle pleasures (‘the acme of European culture: the foxtrot’ and cocktails by the pool; lazing on the deck of a pleasure boat) while coolies (‘the whole family’) load cargo in the port and drag heavy loads through the streets in the noonday sun (‘for fifty kopeks a day’). ‘From enslaved India’, it is said, ‘Regular troops were brought in to protect the foreigners’; Chiang Kai-Shek, here reported to be armed by the imperialists, supposedly turns ‘against the working class, against the heroic proletariat of Shanghai’ and betrays the revolution. The Stenberg brothers’ poster for the film opposes workers and a westernised middle class on either side of a street lit by lanterns. More sinister Chinese appeared in Gardin’s 1928 In Innermost China [Ochnyi Kitai]. Tretiakov’s play Roar, China! was also based on actual events ‘but it is not directly against any one country so much as against imperialism in general’.66 A French gunboat captain orders the execution of two Chinese boat hands in retaliation for the death of the merchant, Ashley, threatening further reprisals against the coolies if his order is not enacted. Tretiakov explained: The episode occurred in a little Chinese town more than 1,000 miles up the Yangtze River. Foreign gunboats go up and down this Chinese Volga, assuring protection to the trading and missionary settlements of the few whites and Japanese….In this town there are large American oil depots and innumerable offices of exporters who buy up cotton, mustard, skins and olive oil from the surrounding country. The American firm, of which Mr Ashley was the local representative and agent, occupies an important place among these exporters. Hundreds, even thousands, of coolies earned their living working for him.67 Tretiakov’s cast, and his scenario, are generally comparable to The Heir to Genghis Khan. The play was thought by many to be prophetic: in 1926 the town was finally destroyed by foreign guns.

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The Heir to Genghis Khan favours class type over national type in the identification of characters’ interests. The other ranks in the occupying force are clearly differentiated from the officers. Lazing on the steps of the barracks, the foot soldiers instantly jump to attention at the return of their general. Ivor Montagu says that Pudovkin hotly defended himself against the accusation that his characters were mere caricatures: I remember his defending, at the Film Society discussion, his British imperial types in Storm over Asia against the charge of being overdrawn, urging fiercely that they were no more caricatures than Dickens’ figures. And then a few hours later, as we sat in an office soliciting from the authorities a prolongation of his visa, he pointed out to me an official who in every exterior feature and movement exactly duplicated one of the personages in the film.68 Perhaps he meant by this the lieutenant’s punctilious typing; perhaps the senior officers’ fastidious grooming of sleek, neatly parted hair and pulling-on of skin-tight gloves. Much use is made here of puddles: planks are laid to preserve the immaculately polished leather of the officers’ boots (boots polished by the officers’ batmen), while the foot soldiers stride through in their puttees. An objection is made to the order to round-up 200 cattle as a forfeit for the injury to the trader’s henchman at the market. In the sound version, Boris Barnet, scraping mud from his soles (and cossetting a kitten in his lap), is pointedly given the line ‘I’m a soldier, not a cowboy’; decking out the mess hall with flags (makeshift Union Jacks), bunting and tassels in readiness for the treaty signing, the soldier now named as Ronald complains: ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ – ‘It’s for that prince they nearly shot’, says his fellow rustic. Brik, Pudovkin’s scriptwriter, said that the episode of Bair’s execution was drawn out as a matter of dramatic necessity (critics said that it was drawn out too long). It is intercut with the parallel action of the deciphering by a missionary of the amulet fragment, such that the discovery of Bair’s supposed identity and the moment of his supposed execution occur simultaneously: almost casually, the general’s lieutenant (named Charlie Bedford in the sound version) picks up the pouch containing the precious relic. However, the suspense is not used gratuitously, merely to tantalise the audience. The episode is crucial to Pudovkin’s thematic purpose. Grudgingly, the appointed soldier (Karl Gruniak) goes out to undertake the command to execute Bair – on first encounter, he smiles broadly and instinctively at this poor creature. He procrastinates, slowly putting on his jacket, then his coat, then turning up the coat collar.

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Another soldier hides behind a penny magazine carrying an advert for Bird’s Custard on its back cover (more evidence of British activity in the Civil War!): he wants no part in this affair either. Two more continue playing cards and one remains prone on his bunk throughout. The first soldier dithers over selecting a rifle, then decides to take a pistol too. On the way, he makes a detour around the edge of a large puddle, which Bair splashes through the middle of regardless. He then finds further ploys to postpone the shooting, filling a pipe for himself. Then he laboriously tears off a strip of paper and rolls a cigarette for Bair from his own pouch. He moves to untie Bair’s hands, so that he can smoke it. But this is no routine enactment of a condemned man’s ‘last request’. Bair serenely, graciously, declines to smoke, he is already resigned to his fate – perhaps, as a Mongolian, he is careless of death because he believes in his imminent reincarnation (there is, after all, a shrine in the family yurt, his father has sought the aide of a lama and Bair’s mother has the simple faith of Gorky’s Mother – ‘It will turn out well in the end!’; ‘Everyday there is good’) [Muka budet … kazhdyi den’ khorosho est’]. The soldier is then angered, I would suggest, less by the rejection of a gift kindly intended than by Bair’s dispassionate disengagement from the situation; in refusing to save himself, even momentarily, Bair equally denies the soldier a momentary stay of execution from the order he dreads to perform. In Britain, protests voiced after the screening of the original version included the allegation that he missed on purpose (certainly the importunate fellow shuts his eyes before shooting). Bair is not complicit in the act of vengeance: the refusal of the comradely offer of the cigarette, albeit benignly intended, tacitly withholds from the soldier any easing of his own conscience. In close-up, Bair’s blood splatters into the oozing mud. On the way back to headquarters, the soldier forlornly pauses to adjust his trailing puttees; then (the identity of the bearer of the amulet having been discovered) he dashes back to the slope, in the hope of saving his fellow man. Exposing a priority of interest, the commanding general later pulls rank over the merchant. When Bair snatches the pelt from the merchant’s girlfriend (coyly referred to in Britain as ‘the officer’s daughter’) he reminds the merchant that Bair is afforded hospitality and protection as an instrument of their own imperial authority. The general’s imposing, medallioned bust is shown backed by rising flames, again an abstracted, stylised, poster-like image. The merchant recoils in awe at the general’s anger: he does, after all, know his place.

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12. The preening of the Buddha

The Desert Lamasery The preparations of the lamas for the ceremony to which the commander of the occupying forces has been invited and the pampering and preening of the commander and his wife are ironically intercut as parallel action. The enormous gleaming figure of the Buddha, which is groomed and dusted for the occasion (fig. 12), was found on location, said Golovnia (despatched by Pudovkin to conduct a preliminary recce in March 1928), whereas the other shots, of the troops meeting the lamas and of the baby, the newly incarnated Khutuktu (see fig. 17 on p. 42), were taken in a Buddhist temple in Leningrad, Golovnia matching the original lighting and the smoky, exotic atmosphere produced by the burning of incense.69 The pomp and circumstance of these ‘diplomatic’ exchanges is undercut by the child god, the medium of the protective deities (after all, really a child and less of a god) nervously fingering his robe, twitching his toes and instinctively chortling at the expense of the British officer as he bows his shiny bald pate and displays the shiny

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13. The uniform of the occupying forces – on a valet stand

baubles on his chest. Numerous cut-glass bottles of perfumes and potions, the elaborate dressing and pomading of the commander’s consort by her maid (her coiffure resembles nothing so much as spun candyfloss), the putting-on of jewels, furs and medals (which, incongruously, are also awarded to the pacifist lamas and sworn upon as a seal of ‘friendship’ – termed ‘Orders of Empire’ in the sound version), corseting and cumberbunding and the batman’s polishing of the commander’s boots, is matched to the finery of the temple (and implicitly contrasted with the poverty of the ordinary Mongolians). A shot of the commander’s uniform on its valet stand (fig. 13), alongside the naked commander bathing, undermines and ridicules its authority, presenting it as merely superficial albeit fine apparel, a stark contrast to the battered, makeshift garb of the partisans. Later, Bair himself submits to being dressed like an immobile mannequin (in the sound version, he is rendered as an automaton, a mechanical toy), first in stiffly tailored Western formal attire (fig. 14) (as if for a gentlemen’s club – his trousers are turned-up by a tailor and his

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14. Bair, the ‘puppet prince’, groomed by the missionary

shoulders are brushed down) and then as an Eastern potentate in a heavy, full-length silk gown with an extravagantly plumed cap perched on his head. The women prefer him without the hat. In his memoirs, Golovnia further recalled: The feast of Tzai did not exist in the original scenario any more than the other scenes which resulted from our contacts with the actual life of the lamaseries, which still existed there at that time and made a great impression upon us. … The feast of Tzai is always celebrated on a certain date. At Ashirov’s request the Bogdo-Gegen [the Khutuktu] … agreed to bring forward the date of the festival especially so that we could film it. But the performance of the ceremony could not be modified: the ritual had to be strictly followed, independent of the filming. They paid absolutely no attention to us and of course there could be no retakes. I was just shown the plan of the ceremony in advance – what people would dance when, where, etc. ... Unfortunately, at this

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15. The dance photographed from the eaves of the temple

time there were no hand-held cameras. In order to shoot all this I had a harness which held the camera on my chest. It was an old Debrie, and the motor gave up the ghost at once so I had to operate it manually, turning the handle and all the time running right and left, 5,000 metres of film.70 Golovnia’s camera again serves as witness to old, young and very young faces in service to Buddhism, their musical instruments (large gongs and small bells summoning the faithful, hand-held cupped cymbals, mounted metal discs, vast horns, longer than those who blow them) and their dances, sometimes slow and highly formalised (fig. 15) (shown from above), sometimes frenzied (shown at ground level). Some boys, in the manner common to documentary, look queruously direct to camera. During the long ceremony, a despatch rider from the occupying forces arrives at the gallop (again, filmed at a high angle from the temple eaves, running centre frame vertically top to bottom) to inform the general of a

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resurgence of partisan and native opposition. His officers nevertheless continue to smile, as if nothing untoward has happened. Prejevalsky explained these festivities and the belief in voluntary incarnation with the proviso that ‘lamaism is the most frightful curse of the country, because it attracts the best part of the male population, preys like a parasite on the remainder, and, by its unbounded influence, deprives the people of the power of rising from the depths of ignorance into which they are plunged’: A newly born gigen [high priest] is discovered by the lamas of the temple to which his predecessor belonged, and is confirmed in office by the Dalai Lama. … The influence of the gigens is unlimited; a prayer offered up to one of them, the touch of his garments, his benediction, are regarded in the light of the greatest blessings humanity can enjoy; but they are not to be held gratis. Every believer must bring his offering, which, in some cases, is very large.71 Russian critics who complained of longueurs in Pudovkin’s rendition of the ceremony (and there were several) would have received a sympathetic ear from Mrs Bulstrode, who witnessed a similar ceremony at a lamaserie in Urga (now Ulan Bator). ‘A more bewilderingly picturesque and fantastic sight than this … I never expect to see’. She described the great state silk umbrellas, the gorgeous vestments of orange and scarlet worn by the high lamas and ‘their hard gilded hats, in shapes reminding one of raised pies’. ‘A harsh trumpeting presages the approach of their incarnate deity; continuous and raucous. ... A low droning chant rises and falls from throats’: The Dance of the Gods which took place in the spacious outer courtyard of the temple was similar in effect to the Devil Dances I had watched with such interest at the lama temple in Peking ... the Russian consul was present ... with his handsome Persian valet at his elbow. A large number of Russians also stood and looked on at the weird gyrations of masked dancers which continued untiringly hour after hour beneath a fierce sun beating mercilessly down upon the thousands of spectators fringing this gritty and treeless expanse. Picturesque and novel though the dancing was, it became monotonous after a while as troop after troop of actors, concealed beneath most grotesque masks which covered their heads and shoulders, issued forth in turn, and went through what appeared to us to be the same evolutions one after the other. It is very difficult to arrive at any exact interpretation of such religious dances, but the most likely explanation is that the scenes gone through are representations in pantomime of incidents in the early

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16. Masked dancers

history of Buddhism. The dancers are masked to represent the gods, mythological animals, and hideous devils, and they prance about the chalked-in area to the strains of the Tibetan trumpets and other weird sounds. The gods … overcome the devils in due course, but to our disappointment by means of peaceful exorcism and not by muscular conflict. This sort of thing continued for the best part of a day and it was easy to see that the spectators grew bored, for the majority were as ignorant, we were told, as we ourselves as to what it was all about.72 An earlier but better informed traveller, William Simpson, also reported Buddhist worship in Urga and offered an explanation of the arrangement of a lamesary’s pagodas and gateways and the form of the ritualistic masks and ceremonies (fig. 16). The dance, like the monks’ praying wheels, turns in the direction of the sun’s course: Living beings are divided into six classes: angels, demons, men, quadrupeds, birds and reptiles. These six classes correspond to the syllables of the mantra. It was by repeating these syllables that men

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17. A baby – the reincarnated Khutuktu

avoided transmigration into lower animals; and rose up in the scale of being till they were absorbed into the universal soul, or grand and eternal essence of Buddha. The symbol of Buddha was, I believe, the wheel which in its revolution was emblematic of the passage of the soul through the circle of various forms of existence. Hence the wheel, or whole circle, was typical of anyone who, after obtaining Nirvana, or emancipation from this mortal coil, had completed the circle of his existence and who was no longer subject to transmigration.73 Simpson also described the lamas’ ‘brazen trumpets, about six or seven feet long, which gave forth a deep sound as if it were the grumble of an earthquake’ and their drums, ‘their shape reminding one of the old traditional warming-pan, held on end’. Notwithstanding the tradition of celibacy amongst the Buddhist lamas, Mrs Bulstrode reported that the Khutuktu had a ten year old son

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whom he proposed as his heir and was about to have another son, born while she was in Urga. It may also be argued that Pudovkin has replaced the presence of White Russians with the hostile presence of another ‘occupying force’, masquerading as friends. ‘During the 1930s’, Geoffrey Hosking has said, ‘Stalin set about reversing the flowering of non-Russian national feeling. In its place, a modified Russian nationalism became the norm’.74 In the Autumn of 1937, the former Mongolian insurgent Khorloin Choibalsang (who now shares a mausoleum with Sukhebator) was instructed to send death squads into his own territory. Its indigenous culture, including the music, was suppressed and desecrated: In the space of ten months, all of the country’s monasteries were destroyed, well over 15,000 institutions, many of them hundreds of years old….About 20,000 lamas were executed outright, most of them shot in the dark of night outside the burning ruins of their temples, and thrown into pits. The rest, up to 80,000 men, were sent to prison camps, many of them in Russian Siberia. Only a few returned. Almost overnight a quarter of the male population disappeared. With them went Buddhism in Mongolia, now officially a crime.75 The Horde and the Steppe In the fuzzy mythology of the early twenty-first century, Genghis Khan is surely a by-word in the West for absolute autocratic rule and ruthless barbarity. The thirteenth-century English chronicler and Benedictine monk, Matthew Paris, described the ‘countless armies…which poured forth like devils from the Tartarus’ as ‘a detestable race of Satan’: Swarming like locusts over the face of the earth, they have brought terrible devastation to the eastern parts, laying it waste with fire and carnage. For they are inhuman and beastly, more like monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and men…they are without human laws, know no comforts, are more ferocious than lions or bears … are wonderful archers…know no other language than their own, which no one else knows, for until now, there had been no access to them…And so they came with the swiftness of lightning to the confines of Christendom, ravaging and slaughtering, striking everyone with terror and incomparable horror.76 Writing in 1930, the American commentator Louis Fischer reported that the empire of Genghis Khan, ‘the greatest and most cruel of all the world’s warriors’, had extended into India in the early thirteenth century,

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‘destroying Lahore and the neighbouring districts before the danger of annihilation by passive circumstances forced him to seek a hasty retreat’.77 Kublai Khan and the other Mongolian emperors ruled over China for more than a century and most of Russia was under Mongolian rule for 250 years. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1827 poem found the Tartar emperor Tamerlan (otherwise known as Timor Bek), a previous supposed descendant of Genghis Khan, in death-bed confession mode. Poe apologised to his readers for making him ‘speak in the same language as a Boston gentleman of the nineteenth century, but of the Tartar mythology [of the fourteenth century] we have little information’. Tamerlan, he said, was sometimes however ‘vulgarly supposed to have been the son of a shepherd, and to have raised himself to the throne by his own address’.78 The fascination of the myth has been confirmed in subsequent films (such as Dick Powell’s The Conqueror [USA, 1955], ill-advisedly starring John Wayne and Agnes Moorhead, and Henry Levin’s Genghis Khan [USA, 1964], starring Omar Sharif with Robert Morley and James Mason hamming as Chinese, alongside Telly Savalas), recent radio features, survival programmes and lavish television dramas, produced for an international audience.79 It seems worth indicating alternative representations which have suggested that this has not been an image universally nor historically consistently sustained. At different times and under different circumstances the image has been constructed otherwise. In the context of The Heir to Genghis Khan how, may one ask, does the Tartar become yoked to a distinctively optimistic and celebratory Soviet view of the future? How did Bair the Mongol figure for his audience in the new art described by Trotsky, ‘incompatible with pessimism, with scepticism and with all other forms of spiritual collapse … filled with a limitless creative faith…’ (fig. 18)?80 Meanwhile, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the Living Buddha and head of the Lamaist church in Mongolia (who became head of the autonomous government in 1911), himself claimed descendency from Genghis Khan. ‘For the Chinese’, Charles Bawden has explained, ‘Genghis counts as the founder of the Mongol dynasty, for the Russians he was a destructive leader, but for the Mongols he has always been the centre and origin of their national history, the founder of their independent statehoood’.81 In The Heir to Genghis Khan, Bair, newly declared as successor to this noble line, is visited at the headquarters of the occupying forces and paid obeisance by an envoy from ‘an Eastern Prince’. In popular literature and song before the Revolution, Jeffrey Brooks has remarked, the Tartars were unflatteringly presented as the most dangerous and terrible of peoples within the Empire, typically described in

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18. Bair leading the horde at full pelt

Suvorov’s history of the Russian Empire: ‘Out of the Asiatic steppe there surged into Russia the Tartars…These people were terrible; they were ferocious in appearance and pitied no-one. Neither rivers nor mountains nor dark forests could stop them’.82 This prevailing national myth, Orlando Figes has added, was based on an erroneous idea of the Mongolians’ cultural backwardness. ‘They ruled by terror, bringing (in Pushkin’s famous phrase) “neither algebra nor Aristotle” with them when they came to Russia, unlike the Moors when they conquered Spain’.83 It is attributed by Charles Halperin to the Westernising of Russia initiated by Peter the Great. This ‘introduced European feelings of superiority into eighteenth-century Russian historiography and racist and colonialist ideologies into nineteenth-century Russian historical writings. Imperial Russian policy towards minorities at the turn of the twentieth century engendered rabid chauvinism’.84 The suggestion that ’twas not ever thus and that a positive view of the Khans could be construed as

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the retrieval of a pre-Tsarist historiography is borne out by the account in Marco Polo’s The Travels. This refers to the founder of the Mongolian Empire as the ‘good Chingiz Khan’, the first to hold lordship and to conquer half the world, ‘a brave and prudent ruler’, tolerant of all religions: Now it happened in the year of Christ’s incarnation 1187 that the Tartars chose a king to reign over them whose name in their language was Chingiz Khan, a man of great ability and wisdom, a gifted orator and a brilliant scholar. After his election, all the Tartars in the world, dispersed as they were among various foreign countries, came to him and acknowledged his sovereignty. And he exercised it well and honourably, so that he was loved and honoured not as a lord but as a god. … The number of Tartars who rallied round him was past belief. When Chingiz Khan saw what a following he had, he equipped then with bows and their customary weapons and embarked on a career of conquest. And I assure you that they conquered no less than eight provinces. And this was quite natural; for at that time the lands and provinces in these parts were either ruled by popular government or each had its own king and lord so that lacking mutual union they could not individually resist such a multitude. He did not harm the inhabitants or despoil them of their goods, but led them along with him to conquer other nations… And those he had conquered, when they saw his good government and gracious bearing, asked nothing better than to join his following.85 Prejevalsky reported the belief that, on his death-bed, Genghis Khan had told his entourage that he would rise again after the lapse of not more than a thousand years, and not less than 800; having given one of his favourite concubines as a gift to a Russian hunter, he supposedly had despatched her with his own white banner to the land of the Tsagan Khan (the White Tsar).86 Curzon reported the more ‘beneficent and merciful rule’ of the sons of Genghis Khan (and the visit of the elder brothers Polo) and the Tartar reign established by Timor (‘savage, soldier, statesman’) for a further century.87 More recently, local politicians and celebrities have expediently claimed Genghis Khan as their antecedent in order to promote their own political ambitions, statues have been reerected and he has been emblazoned on stamps, banknotes, T-shirts and bottles of locally produced vodka.88 Halperin has suggested that Mongolian rule exerted less impact on the Russian peasantry than on the aristocracy, pressed into slavery; he has suggested that it was no worse than life under warring princely factions who seized power after the disintegration of the empire.89 I should

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like to suggest that the film The Heir to Genghis Khan engages with the revisionism of contemporaneous Eurasianist intellectuals, attempting to counter the prejudices of their Petrine precursors. Dmitri and Vladimir Shlapentokh have said that the advocates of Eurasianism praised Genghis Khan as the founder of the great Eurasian empire, which, in their view, preceded Imperial Russia and the USSR.90 While New Babylon established a historical precedent for the Revolution in the Paris Commune and SVD looked to the Decembrists, Storm over Asia found endorsement in a more ancient past. The great Khan was extolled for his opposition to the West and his antipathy towards individualism and the idea of private property. The translation of a raping and pillaging brigand into a positive figure of the revolution was not without precedent and parallel in Soviet popular culture. Stenka Razin was similarly a rebel chief famous in folk-lore and song and familiar in lubok illustrations. He was the subject of one of the most successful pre-Revolutionary films, the first (made by Vladimir Romashkov in 1908), appeared in a ballet by Alexander Gorsky, a Kashensky verse-play and numerous mass spectacles staged in the years following the Revolution. According to Jay Leyda, a scenario about Stenka Razin was prepared by Maxim Gorky, intended for direction by Protazanov in 1927, and in 1938 Olga Preobrazhenskaia responded to ‘The Historical Theme in Cinema’ with the same subject.91 Jeffrey Brooks and Felix Oinas have given examples from Russian byliny of other bandits, heroes ‘whose adventures conformed both to the peasants’ long struggle for freedom and to a traditional view on man’s helplessness before the forces of whimsical nature’.92 Popular serials told the stories of the bandits Churkin, Anton Krechet, Pugachev and Buslaevich. Eric Hobsbawm has observed that evidence of ‘social banditry’, evinced in an amazingly uniform pattern, is to be found wherever societies are based on agriculture ‘and consist largely of peasants and landless labourers ruled, oppressed and exploited by someone else – lords, towns, governments, lawyers or even banks’: The bandit chief who is regarded as a royal pretender or who seeks to legitimise revolution by adopting the formal status of a ruler is familiar enough. The most formidable examples are perhaps the bandit and cossack chieftans of Russia [who] always tended to be regarded as miraculous heroes, akin to the champions of the Holy Russian land against the Tartars, if not actually as possible avatars of the ‘beggars’ tsar’ – a good tsar who knew the people and would replace the evil tsar of the boyars and the gentry.93

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Brooks has endorsed this positively heroic image of banditry, ‘identified in apocalyptic dreams with the myth of the redeemer tsar who would regain his rightful place on the throne and bring justice and freedom’.94 Bair embraces the dual cults of Russian Tsardom, first, passively as a passion bearer imitating the holy suffering of Christ and secondly, actively, as a warrior prince (a portent of Eisenstein’s 1938 Alexander Nevsky). Iuri Tarich’s The Revolt in Kazan [Bulat Batyr, 1928] celebrates the martyrdom of the Tartar Cossack leader, Emelian Pugachev, who aided peasants in their revolt against the Empress Catherine II, masquerading as her assassinated husband, Peter II. Rufus Matthewson has seen Furmanov’s Chapaev as a peasant guerilla leader comparable to Razin and Pugachev.95 In Germany, too, ‘Robin Hood’ figures in European history had been celebrated in film. More explicitly, The Heir to Genghis Khan refers to the mythology of Sukhebator, fêted after his death in 1923 as the founder of the Mongolian Republic, leading his people in the expulsion of the Chinese from Urga and to independence. Distinguished by his personal bravery (he led four hundred men against an army of 10,000) the young Sukhebator was a member of the General Staff set up after the Party Congress in 1921. In 1924, Mongolia declared itself a People’s Republic and became the second Communist state. However, Charles Bawden has suggested that, during the Civil War, the Mongolians’ acceptance of Soviet Communism was by no means a foregone conclusion and that ‘the Soviet campaign against the Whites in Mongolia must be considered to a great extent as nothing more than an extension of the Civil War in Russia’: There was no revolutionary movement until after the October Revolution had taken place, and for the first eight years or so the most influential figures in Mongol affairs were Buriats of Soviet nationality.96 The American historian, George G.S. Murphy, has gone further, calling the Mongolians the ‘puppets’ of Russia.97 Mariamov said that Pudovkin and his assistants travelled through the Buriat settlements searching for Mongolians who had fought with the celebrated Sukhebator and who still remembered their ‘heroic fight for freedom and glory’. They were invited to participate in the filming, these ‘authentic’ partisans supplying their own uniforms and arms.98 The anecdote originated with Pudovkin. He said that while filming in the Bargonskaia steppe the crew came across the village (Tarbakhatai) of genuine partisans some thirty versts away. Their leader ‘in his hand held a pole with a banner, at his side carried an Hussar’s sabre, while his body was festooned with belts of machine-gun bullets’:

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It became apparent that the chief of the division in the village had announced an actual mobilisation. The partisans were dressed from head to toe in full military regalia, with fur caps and equipped with flint-lock rifles, extraordinary pistols and sabres. The sight of the partisans, en masse, made an extraordinary impression…. All were strong-featured characters and their outward severity was imposing.99 Although the closing sequence of Storm over Asia is generally appreciated – and sometimes deprecated – as a metaphor (and frequently ascribed to the Ride of the Klansmen at the end of Griffith’s Intolerance), Pudovkin’s scenes are far from fanciful. Prejevalsky provided a testimonial for the force of the Eastern winds: Only if you have seen with your own eyes the full might of a wind raging in the desert can you fully appreciate its destructive effect. At this time the atmosphere is not only thick with dust and sand, but sometimes even small pebbles are whirled up into the air and biggish stones rolled along the ground. We could even see how stones the size of a fist had fallen into the hollows of large rocks lying around – the wind had set them rotating, so that they had produced deep hollows, rubbing through a layer of stone as much as two inches thick.100 Pudovkin had previously incorporated elemental and environmental imagery to suit a designated ideological purpose. In The Mother, the son escapes from prison as the ice floes on the Neva are breaking with the advent of Spring (in turn recalling Griffith’s 1920 Way Down East, where Bartlett jumps across the ice to save Anna Moore – and employed for Bair’s escape, top of frame, from the market to the taiga). Shots of shadows of marching demonstrators are cast over flakes of ice flowing downstream, as though their progress is equally inexorable. In The End of St Petersburg, the quivering reflections of the palaces on the banks of the Neva recollect the unstable foundations of this fated city: ‘From gloomy forest and muddy swamp upsprung’, said Alexander Pushkin; ‘ ... the most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world’, said Fedor Dostoevsky.101 Clouds speed over the city, accelerating the pace towards its downfall. In Pudovkin’s later A Simple Case, rocks are split asunder, waters are turbulent and fruit shrivels but then life renews itself, the ground erupts into life and the fruit swells. At the end of The Heir to Genghis Khan, Bair pursues soldiers tumbling downstairs, wielding his sabre aloft, and Golovnia’s camera becomes increasingly tilted and animated, entering into the fray. At eye level, umpteen billy cans are rolled over the steppe by a tempest, followed by soldiers’ caps, followed by

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soldiers themselves unable to stand against the force of the storm, gusting and billowing a thousand leaves, sticks and pebbles against them, just as the original Genghis Khan accumulated power and gathered momentum in his advance Westwards. But Golovnia acknowledged that St Petersburg was generally known, in imagination at least, from the writings of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Benois and Gogol whereas the area surrounding Lake Baikal (the territory exploited for The Heir to Genghis Khan) remained novel to most audiences for its people and its landscape. ‘Every place’, explained Golovnia, ‘has its own fine density of atmosphere, its own quality of light, its own length and depth of shadow’; for The Heir to Genghis Khan this was made felt in the infinite space of the steppe, the boundlessness and transparency of the horizon, where there is always more sky than earth – but this may not necessarily be simply filmed as found.102

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3. Reception Russia ‘The Heir to Genghis-Khan – an outstanding film production’, declared Vecherniaia Moskva on 14 November 1928, ‘presenting the whole spirit of an epoch in all its richness’; announcing the forthcoming release at the ‘Koloss’ and the ‘Gigant’, Leningradskaia gazeta kino heralded it as ‘the best film of the season’.1 Kino announced that the ‘triumphant’ opening in Moscow was to be further celebrated with re-releases of Barnet’s Moscow in October and Pudovkin’s The Mother and The End of St Petersburg.2 The Heir to Genghis Khan was briefly replaced by Grigori Roshal’s The Salamander [Salamandra, 1928], a co-production between Mezhrabpom-film and the WIR-funded German production and distribution company Prometheus, with a script by Lunacharsky. It returned later in December, running into the new year, entirely overshadowing the simultaneous release of Oleg Frelikh’s Zelim Khan (described by Hobsbawm as ‘the Robin Hood of early twentieth-century Daghestan’) for Vostok-kino, Vladimir Shneiderov’s The Valley of Death [Podnozhie smerti] and Boris Mikhin’s Kniaz Tseren for Sovkino and Vostok-kino, also covering exotic ethnographic and geographical territory.3 Interviewed by Jean and Luda Schnitzer many years later, Sergei Iutkevich remembered that The Heir to Genghis Khan had been received frostily in some quarters: Pudovkin was definitely rejected and excommunicated by ... a group of theoreticians, partisans of montage cinema, ‘grand’ and ‘pure’. Storm over Asia was considered as regressive, contrary to the general direction of cinema, surrendering to its subject and to twists of fortune in the action, and other reprehensible things ... there was a conspiracy of silence around this film.4 Shklovsky, however, the Formalist critic and himself a scriptwriter (he partly wrote The House on Trubnaia as well as Kuleshov’s By the Law and

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Room’s Bed and Sofa) had not keep quiet, robustly voicing his preference for Brik’s scenario: It is my conviction that the script for Storm over Asia is much more interesting than the film that we have seen. In the script there were no dubious (from the point of view of taste) allegories or metaphors, no ‘fountains of oratory’ or ‘trees falling when the leader dies’. But, while in the script there was little that was exotic, there was a certain irony at the expense of the exotic. In the script there was a different ending – a real escaped Mongolian gallops through a real town. Nature changes around him: the leaves grow larger, the forests grow sparser, to greet him flowers bloom that have never blossomed in Mongolia. The horseman gallops. The partisans are with him and something appears in the distance coming nearer. Moscow becomes visible. The Kremlin. The Mongolian gets off his horse and comes like a friend. If behind the theatre stage someone beats on a sheet of bronze and simultaneously the whole troupe reads different extracts from the newspapers and then the lights go up to a crescendo of music, there will be excitement in the audience. This is a realistic device but a nonspecific one. It is a bad musical device. The end of Storm over Asia with the whirlwind is realistic theatrically and emotionally but is non-specific and therefore bad. It is bad because there is no ‘spirit’ in it, no calculation and no closure. A miracle: the elements depersonalise man. Real partisans with exaggerated wounds are blown away by the wind: they are unnecessary and forgotten. A propeller and the elementary realisation of a metaphor – the ‘whirlwind of revolution’ – saves the situation. Rzheshevsky, like Pudovkin, is a talented man. But in the excitement of the search for a rhythmical cinema we must not forget the semantic side of cinema, its plot – semantic baggage.5 Trauberg, on the other hand, Iutkevich’s FEKS co-founder, enlisted Storm over Asia (and his own 1927 SVD) in an ironic complaint against Boris Shumiatsky’s call for ‘artistic expression that is intelligible to the millions’ – which became a mantra of criticism in the 1930s. ‘What kind of experiments are these? Crude attempts at a transition to literature, at discovering a new language, have been smuggled into them. They are simply “not very agreeable” and therefore “unintelligible” films’.6 Storm over Asia, indeed, met with mixed reviews at home, the controversy indicating both healthy debate and an increasing sense of unease about critical parameters. Sergei Ermolinsky, in Pravda, safely praised it

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for its searing portrayal of the Whites, the traders and the occupying forces intent upon the exploitation of the territory, while Mikhail Bronsky in Kino, in 1930, complained that the representation of the lamas had been unduly sympathetic: one is included in the general’s entourage at the headquarters of the occupying forces.7 Nikolai Osinsky’s review for Izvestiia (repeated virtually verbatim by BuriatoMongol’skaia pravda) complained that the ‘symbolic’ ending of the film was open to misinterpretation and that both the ending and the beginning of the film were too attenuated; he even suggested (horror of horrors) that the scene of Bair’s escape was slightly reminiscent of such scenes in mild comedies made before the Revolution. Nevertheless, he concluded in up-beat mode: On the release of The End of St Petersburg, an American critic asked: what can be given to the Russian film industry, if at the outset it can produce such a film? Answer: it can already produce The Heir to Genghis Khan and is fully confident that it shall produce even better yet.8 Feldman, reporting for Rabochaia Moskva, commended Golovnia’s photography, anticipating the response of many foreign reviewers.9 Khrisanf Khersonsky, a scriptwriter, critic and regular reporter for Kino, provided one of the first Moscow reviews of The Heir to Genghis Khan. He started routinely, stating that silent cinema has distanced itself from the theatre but that current directors (Abram Room, Fridrikh Ermler, Eisenstein, Kozintsev and Trauberg) had sought inspiration in literature instead (the classics, proletarian writing or newspaper stories). Some, he said, dreamt of film as epic or verse. Pudovkin’s The Mother, he said, was an adaptation from Gorky by way of Tolstoy.10 Khersonsky echoed Shklovsky’s famous description of The Mother as ‘a centaur’ – a hybrid of poetry and prose – saying that Pudovkin combined an ability to portray real, living people with a particular sense of rhythm. His lyricism and pathos, said Khersonsky, was sometimes achieved by the virtuoso use of allegorical imagery, not necessarily drawn from actuality: The Heir to Genghis Khan found Pudovkin very much in his own niche. But here the review got into its stride and Khersonsky proceeded to deliver a blistering rebuke. ‘The film’, he said, ‘is altogether not of a piece. It speaks in a different language from episode to episode’: There is an excessive preoccupation with everyday habits [bytovizm] in the scenes showing the lives of the Mongolians. There is no sense of the author applying himself to an appropriate treatment of the visual material. The scene concerning ‘the shedding of white blood’ is handled somewhat contrivedly and conventionally with a sudden shift

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Storm over Asia to rhythmical emotionalism. ... The scenario prompts comparison with the ‘exoticism’ purveyed in the novels of Pierre Benoit. Meanwhile, it is also stuffed with sheer ethnography. The lamasery is shot ‘as found’. Golovnia’s camera and Pudovkin’s eye abandon themselves in amazement, recording the event entirely passively and indiscriminately.11

Nevertheless, there was generous praise of Inkizhinov’s performance and for Pudovkin’s presentation of his psychology and temperament. Khersonsky, politically more on message than Iutkevich – and pre-empting the official response to Pudovkin’s next film, A Simple Case – concluded by saying that he preferred the profound and powerful Pudovkin ‘we know and love’: Pudovkin the realist. But realism, as ever, proved to be particularly slippery critical terminology.12 Eisenstein delivered two lectures in October and November 1928 on the subject of The Heir to Genghis Khan. Present at the former event, held prior to the film’s first public screening, were Alexandrov, Bliokh, Vasiliev, Rzheshevsky and Khersonsky. Eisenstein used the occasion to pursue more general points concerning the different methods of literary and cinematic symbolism and to continue to berate Pudovkin individually and in particular for perceived technical flaws (he asked that The Mother be taken into consideration also). However, unlike some commentators, he approved the final storm sequence: ‘There the method works almost perfectly’ (the highest praise Pudovkin could expect from Eisenstein); There he moves in the direction of pure dynamism. Spontaneously one is seized by the commotion, swept along by the subject (the expulsion of the British troops) and an artistic figure attached to this theme, and a perceptible shift is effected in one’s reaction directly towards abstract thought.13 For Eisenstein, unlike the majority of foreign commentators, Inkizhinov’s contribution to the film was insignificant and he suggested that Pudovkin had systematically restrained the actor’s customary ‘theatrical manner of working’: Inkizhinov is excised from the film. There is an awful sameness to this character’s appearance, it is forcibly pruned, which happens in all our films when, to some extent, the director does not consider the actor or when he does not receive such effects or accents as are required.14 Here, it needs must be said that Pudovkin understood actors and acting somewhat better than Eisenstein and that, as he had already acknowledged, had indeed deliberately ‘curbed’ his star’s performance. When it

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came to the film’s editing, Eisenstein admittedly returned to an old stomping-ground: ‘There is in Pudovkin’s work a very curious feature – the feeling that he assembles the shots without taking into account the photographic aspect of the picture. Moreover, it can be justifiably alleged that this is not an accidental thing’. On the principles of this matter, he said, they had intermittently argued and cursed one another in the past: ‘He speaks of montage as the cohesion of shots while I speak of montage as the collision of shots’. In The Heir to Genghis Khan, asserted Eisenstein, Pudovkin’s system failed him (presenting the lamasery dance in evidence), ‘a waltzing 3:4 rhythm cut against pieces of varied length in which images are alternated, repeated and so forth’.15 In other words, Eisenstein employed an example from Pudovkin to prove his own point. By February 1929, Pudovkin’s film was being discussed in the Russian trade press under the title acquired in Germany: Buria nad Aziei [Storm over Asia]. In his article ‘Asia in Europe’ for Kino, Mikhail Beliavsky triumphantly cited the reviews of critics abroad. ‘The echo of the storm summoned by the success of Battleship Potemkin had hardly time to fade before the attention of the press in the West turned to other Soviet films’; ‘in cinematography, light comes from the East’. In spite of previous criticisms voiced in the same journal, Beliavsky said that the frankness and candour of such ‘untheatrical dramas’ as Shanghai Document and The Heir to Genghis Khan came as little surprise in Russia but in the West, where films in general did not aspire beyond more than the choice of a winning subject, technical competence and formalist innovation, these films were less expected. Beliavsky thus employed standard rhetoric to exalt Soviet achievements and to denounce their foreign counterparts.16 Kino, on 8 January 1929, reported a crowded foyer at the Artes Cinema (‘as always’) for the film, including a delegation of students from the Mongolian School (‘yellow and narrow-eyed young faces’) speaking in a gutteral tongue. On the screen, they saw one of their own and they greeted him and their relatives from the yurt with shouts and applause: ‘like Bair, these students find themselves on the streets of Moscow’. The final frames, recounting Bair’s uprising, were met with much delight. The head of the School, Comrade Indiu, is said to have acknowledged the colossal political potential of the film, made with the support of the Buriat-Mongolian Republic, and especially its significance for the Eastern provinces resisting the threat of imperialism. A Mezhrabpomfilm spokesman was said to be gratified and encouraged by their response. ‘The film The Heir to Genghis Khan’, urged the Kino correspondent, ‘must be promoted without delay by all our cinema organisations in the East’.17

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A further audience survey (unremarkable in Soviet journals of this period) was carried by Sovetskii ekran in August 1929. Surveys were most often interested in the spontaneous reactions of spectators unfamiliar with the conventions of cinema (such as, reputedly, the Mongolian students on their Artes trip). Kuleshov, in accordance with his scientistic principles, logged comparable working class and middle class audiences, as did Meyerhold for his theatre.18 Children and screenings in the countryside were also grist to the journals’ mill, while a peasant girl newly arrived in Moscow, attending her first theatrical performance, was the object of an affectionate lampoon in The House on Trubnaia. For propaganda purposes, and increasingly as Shumiatsky’s 1928 directive towards ‘a form intelligible to the millions’ became enforced, workers’ clubs and test screenings in front of worker audiences became of crucial concern.19 Iulia Menzhinskaia interviewed two groups of students and children about their responses to The Heir to Genghis Khan for her Sovetskii ekran article. The first group, including a number of ‘pioneers’, were students who had already received social and political instruction; the second was drawn from the children of artisans and construction workers. ‘Many episodes of the film’, she said, ‘were understood and interpreted by the second group no less keenly than the first’. One child replied that he thought it a remarkably fine picture and had seen it three times already – he knew about imperialism before, but not the vileness of it. Asked whether the film should be recommended to children, another piped up: ‘Yes, rather! It presents the ordinary life and customs of the Mongolians and the brutality and injustice of the English towards them’. Others commented on the parading of the English and their indulgent luxurious finery and frippery, contrasted with the poverty of the Mongolians: It’s a shame [observes one] that fighting should break out over nothing more than a skin. What’s interesting [replies another, ponderously] is that it is a skin and that everything starts there. Always war is caused by want. This is an eternal truth. A third, a more precocious youth (probably a pioneer) interjected to correct their analysis: The Mongolian works hard to obtain this skin, perhaps for as much as a month; but the English take this skin by force, offering only a few kopeks in payment. In order to confirm that the children had grasped the theme of The Heir

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to Genghis Khan, Menzhinskaia proceeded to question them about the appointment of Bair to his own principality: They show no respect for Bair but instead turn him into their own instrument. This is shown by the way they dress him up in a suit, as if he’s a dummy in a shop window. ‘They walk around him as if he’s in a zoo’, agreed another. Menzhinskaia again pressed her interviewees to say more and was duly rewarded: Thus we see the hypocrisy of the English. When they spoke to the Mongolians in the monastery of friendship they were at the same time rounding up their cattle. They spoke of their future shared interests but at the same time were toying with their revolvers. A confident youngster admitted that there were bits of the film he had not understood and others joined in: The ending doesn’t make sense. Here in the cinema, we laughed when the storm came and everything was blown about – it was a very awkward moment. And then, finally, it was as though the hurricane only blew away the English and for the Mongolians, leaping onto their horses, it was nothing. We laughed because the English are therefore shown to be impotent, that seemed funny. For us this is not a terrible tragedy, we see the revolution and with it we grow. The director, it seems to me, wanted to show that the whirlwind of revolution sweeps up everything. The overwhelming force of man is symbolically tied to the force of nature. A further student felt prompted to acknowledge that there were other episodes which remained unclear for him: when Bair throws down the tumbler of water and when the fish squirm around on the carpet. The first explanation volunteered invited a reaction from the class: Perhaps this emphasises the weakness of the Mongolian people – he feels weak like the fish. In the shot with the tumbler, it seems to me, Bair thinks that after all their mocking of him, the English want to poison him. I think that when he threw down the glass he was trying to express his feeling of disgust – it was a protest on his part against the English.

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These ‘amateur’ critics seemingly unwittingly repeated the complaints with which serious and grown-up commentators admonished Pudovkin and his film, while ultimately finding in its favour.20 In spite of the canonical status of his first two features, in the ‘troubled period’ of the late 1920s and early 1930s the climate became increasingly hostile. As we shall see, in 1949 Pudovkin was given the chance to make amends with a revised version of The Heir to Genghis Khan. However, what went down badly in Russia often found favour in Germany and France (including, I confess it, his ‘poetic ambiguity’); what went down well in Russia was, unsurprisingly, not generally well received in Britain.

Germany The contemporary Russian press and Pudovkin’s biographer, Alexander Karaganov, reported the phenomenal success of Storm over Asia in Berlin, matching and benefitting from the reception of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, two years previously – although the director himself claimed that it had been shown with the tarpaulin execution scene moved from before the mutiny to after, drastically changing both the motivation and the moral of the story.21 Pudovkin’s German reception was also reported by the New York Times.22 Pudovkin’s ‘masterpiece’, proclaimed full-page adverts in the Berlin Film-Kurier, was a ‘second’ Potemkin, ‘the greatest hit since Potemkin’.23 By 26 January 1929, the Marmorhaus was celebrating its fiftieth sold-out screening and 200 Berlin theatres were said to be showing the film.24 In Holland, too (which Pudovkin visited on a day permit in January 1929 – also reported in Russia), the film received general distribution rather than being confined to private, Filmliga screenings.25 Pudovkin and Golovnia attended the gala premiere at the Berlin Capitol on 26 December 1928. While in Germany, Pudovkin met Walter Ruttmann, whose 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City [Berlin: Symphonie einer Großstadt] he much admired, G.W Pabst and the playwright Ernst Toller. Pudovkin used the visit as an opportunity to investigate new synchronised sound systems.26 In the same issue that reported the Viennese Catholic Church’s scandalous film campaign against Bolshevism, Film-Kurier reported Pudovkin’s visit and an address at the Capitol ‘with the whole of literary Berlin’ assembled in his honour. Pudovkin (who had learnt some German as a prisoner of war) described how he had come by the idea for the film, which was duly greeted with enormous applause. Afterwards, he answered questions and expounded his theory of contrapuntal sound

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19. Full-page advertisements in Licht-Bild-Bühne and Berlin Film-Kurier

in cinema, an ‘artistic’ use distinct from American practice which he designates as merely a record of spoken theatre.27 Hans Wollenberg reported the event for Licht-Bild-Bühne, noted the musical accompaniment and corroborated the thanks afforded to Golovnia by Pudovkin in his introduction: ‘But we thank him less for overcoming so many practical difficulties, than for the mobility and acuity of his camerawork, which seems to participate in the action, and for his artistic sensibility which infallibly draws his eye to shots which are both pleasing and fascinating’. He circumspectly avoided discussing the film’s politics but recalled the previous release of The End of St Petersburg. He mentioned the publication in German of The Film Director and Film Material and The Film Scenario, including the theory of acting developed under Kuleshov (by now considered outmoded in Russia). Pudovkin has become the absolute master of his technique, he controls it like a tool with which he is well acquainted. One can already anticipate the sequence of his montage and his method of editing is firmly established. With transparent certainty he constructs a complex edifice.

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Wollenberg admired the sequence at the headquarters of the occupying forces in which a ‘flirty’ young woman, with gushing excitement, received Bair’s silver fox as a gift from the trader (a fountain gushes in accordance). ‘The avant-garde in film ironically laughs in the face of the established film order’.28 Film-Kurier and Kinematograph itemised the ringing endorsements of the trade and regular press, ‘On all sides, nothing but praise and enthusiasm!’. Vossische Zeitung declared ‘Storm over Asia – Pudovkin’s new film, is a masterpiece’ and the Berliner Tageblatt said ‘Pudovkin’s grand vision in Storm over Asia is awesome and compelling – a storm in the cinema’. The Berlin Börsen-Kurier was quoted as saying ‘Storm over Asia has become the greatest film sensation yet known in the history of cinema. Its achievement is enormous. It surpasses every previous triumph’ and the LichtBild-Bühne reviewer added ‘This film is a total film scoop. The storm over Asia has swept over the screen of the Capitol and now the hurricane seizes, the storm rages over “the house”’.29 But even on 7 January 1929, a front page article in Kinematograph, pronounced ‘For and against Storm over Asia’, voicing a more measured response. While ‘Pudovkin’s great work’ may be lauded as unique, extraordinary and a ‘showpiece event’, it was suggested, it was also no more than fair to acknowledge that it marked the culmination of a particular tendency which no-one can have failed to notice. Even with the omission (or garbling) of a couple of intertitles, the film was class propaganda, ‘no less than Potemkin or many other Russian films’. The film had an elementary emotional power, the reviewer acknowledged, with scenes which stirred and transported the viewer. As an ethnographic work [Weltfilmliteratur], it was unrivalled in its authenticity: ‘It is fascinating for us Europeans to grasp the life and travails of a people in a land almost as distant from us as the moon’. Unlike Khersonsky in Kino, Kinematograph commended the leisurely naturalism of Golovnia’s photography and his ‘unchained camera’, revealing more than the pointed composition conventional cinematography allowed – a novelty in Russian cinema, it claimed. Critics were struck by Pudovkin’s brilliance and artistry. But this immediate impression, said the reviewer, was not sufficient to sustain the public interest. Echoing Khersonsky, this reviewer also complained that the scenario was weak and that the material required further editing. Beautiful pictures were not enough. Pudovkin was fortunate, it was admitted, to have found Inkizhinov, his performance combining the ‘stillness and tempest’ of his Asian-Mongolian character and the deliberate art of European and Nordic acting: ‘it is an accomplished, world-class performance’.30 Similarly, the diplomat Edgar Schmidt-Pauli, writing for Politik und Gesellschaft, acknowledged the film’s artistic quality

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but cautioned that the politically tendentious representation of the British officers (hardly to be taken seriously in Britain itself, he reckoned) would incite rebellion and anarchy in the East. It provided, he said, welcome propaganda for communists in Germany. ‘Storm over Asia’, he concluded, ‘is perilous for Europe’.31 Like Wollenberg, the critic and historian Siegfried Kracauer referred to Pudovkin’s The Film Director and The Film Scenario in his review in January 1929 for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Kracauer noted that the director applied his own principles and praised the intercutting of the preparations of the commander and his wife with the cleaning of the Buddha; he praised the parallel editing of the ceremony at the lamasery with the occupying army’s brutal assault on the native population. Kracauer admired Pudovkin’s deep understanding of details of the Mongolians’ lives and their environment. Storm over Asia, he said, shared with many other Soviet films a consistently epic dimension: the final storm was skilfully executed and prophetically powerful. However, Kracauer lamented the sterility of Pudovkin’s theme, pitting the enslaved (eventually victorious) against the powers that be (eventually defeated). Such a primitive, didactic argument, he said, may have been appropriate to the first few years following the Revolution but had now grown stale with all too frequent repetition. Kracauer insisted that a thorough analysis of contemporary events would provide a better subject and called upon Pudovkin to address it. ‘Pudovkin has reached a standstill. When will he escape from the Revolutionary thunder and turn his attention towards the changing situation of post-war Europe?’32 A context for the artistic reception of Storm over Asia in Germany was provided by Alfred Kerr’s 1927 Russische Filmkunst. Kerr’s essay was accompanied by a lavish selection of stills from films, including Eisenstein’s The Strike [Stachka, 1924] and Potemkin, Iakov Protazanov’s 1924 Aelita and The Forty-First, Pudovkin’s The Mother, Zheliabuzhsky’s adaptation of Pushkin’s The Stationmaster [Kollezhskii registrator, 1925], Room’s Bed and Sofa [Tret’ia Meshchanskaia, 1927] and Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s The Overcoat [Shinel’, 1926]. Less wellknown films, such as Minaret of Death/The Harem of Bokhara [Minaret smerti, Viacheslav Viskovskii, 1925], shelved in Russia itself, and The Female Muslim [Musul’manka, Dmitri Bassalygo, 1925] were also included, and Wings of a Serf [Kryl’ia kholopa, Iurii Tarich 1926] was accorded the front cover. Many of the pictures (with neither actors nor directors credited) were chosen to support Kerr’s fascination with Russian exoticism, in itself and as distinct from the Hollywood product. Kerr did not concern himself with the scenarios of films nor with their particular

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circumstances of production (Potemkin was the only film he mentioned having seen) instead providing a vague and romantic (and sometimes bewildering) commentary on how films naturalistically demonstrated his notion of ‘Russianness’: Watch these films. Where does their peculiar relaxed, quiet, matter of fact self-assurance come from? From an easy, pliant, patience. Moreover, you will be struck by the ethnicity [Völkerschaftlichen]. (We in Germany also have our ethnic types and tribes, people who dress strangely: the women who live in the Spree Woods. But no Turkomen, no Georgians. Russia contains its own Orient). ... This is an art of patience, stillness, leisurely slowness; in a word, an Oriental art.33 In his seminal study of Orientalism, Edward Said pertinently demonstrated ‘that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self ’: [A]s much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.34 Kerr ascribed the temperament and atmosphere of Soviet cinema to the pull of opposing forces – Slavic and Tartar, radical and resigned. The ‘naturalism’ which he found in Soviet cinema he related to the theatrical practice of Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose company he had seen in Berlin four years previously.35 Workers’ International Relief had been distributing Soviet films in Germany since 1922, promoting them through the tireless efforts of Willi Münzenberg and WIR newspapers. Christopher Horak has estimated that some forty Sovkino and Mezhrabpom titles were distributed between 1926 and 1931, many of them by older, ‘safer’ directors. But, as Bruce Arthur Murray has noted, left-wing critics here tended to regard Soviet films as an undifferentiated political body: For them, the power of Soviet film derived generally from its ability to evoke a strong emotional response and ultimately to encourage an emotional identification between a filmviewer and a fictional protagonist. ... According to Communist critics, Soviet films were successful [moving viewers to accept a proletarian perspective] because they were realistic. Reviewers characterised them as ‘Lebensnah’, ‘natürlich’, ‘sachlich’, ‘wirklich’ ... ‘the actors seemingly disappear, one is no longer aware of an actorly performance as “art”; we are shown life in all its stark reality, portrayed by actual people’.36

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Die Rote Fahne (the Communist daily paper which we see being sold on the streets of Hamburg by Greta [Tamara Makarova] in The Deserter – who is apprehended by the police for so doing) – praised Storm over Asia as an example to German film-makers and found it exemplary of the superiority of the Soviet system which fostered such talents. The review celebrated the defeat of Ungern-Sternberg, the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic and the friendly relations established with the Soviet Union: People and landscape are bound together in a completely unanimous and inseparable unity. The whole world of this Mongolia on the eve of its liberation takes life-like shape. The barbarity of the clique of White Guardist officers, the reactionary religious cult of ‘the living Buddha’ and the misery of the plundered, defrauded and abused hunters and shepherds is given the form of an interaction of antagonistic forces, from which then, irresistibly and inevitably, emerges the revolutionary conclusion, the great, sweeping storm of freedom, the Storm over Asia. How all this is approached and carried out, can only be poorly put into words, as it is so incomparably arranged in images. This film is a great cultural feat, which could only be achieved in the country of proletarian dictatorship, under the ruling ideology of the victorious Proletariat. None of the ridiculous products of the professional studios of the capitalist film industry in America or Germany can match this miracle of Soviet film art; as the capitalist world declines, bourgeois culture has nothing more to offer. Certainly we admire with enthusiasm the talent of the director Pudovkin, the keen eye of his cameraman Golovnia and the mastery of the star Inkizhinov, here appearing for the first time before the camera. We are glad that such skills are applied to the promotion of our cause. But above all else, we notice with satisfaction that they are only capable of performing so exquisitely, of defeating the ‘competition’ of the bourgeois film industry so easily and so completely, of accomplishing such ‘great art’, precisely because they fight for our cause, for the cause of the victorious proletarian class, for the cause of the future, the ascending culture of a new era in the history of mankind.37 Kenneth MacPherson, the editor of the international journal Close-Up, based in Switzerland, was privileged to witness a private screening of Storm over Asia in Berlin prior to its release. He anticipated that it would be cut for distribution and said that a tactfully worded synopsis located the action in Mongolia, ‘whose insurgents fight for their independence

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against foreign troops, who have forced their way into Mongolia with the object of conquest’.38 An enthusiast of Pudovkin’s previous films, he gushingly extolled ‘the unfathomable thing that we call the Pudovkin method ... a thing that is not style or mannerism, but a state of mind or soul – a kind of permeation we call typical’, here reaching ‘its classical zenith’; ‘it is, indeed, an amazing thing to plunge from the half-lewd idiocy of the average film to this. ... It will last forever’. McPherson reserved his only minor criticisms for the ending (echoing Shklovsky), suggesting ‘supernatural intervention’, and for the moments when the ‘method’ is repetitive and obvious (he cites the sequence of shots showing Bair’s yurt and his mother in ever increasing distance). Remarkably, but less remarkable given the concurrent concerns of other contributors to the journal, he concludes that ‘the film is by no means anti-British’: It is certainly and definitely anti-militaristic, and therefore not particularly kind to the classes that seem to go on caring nothing about war and living their lives in readiness for it.39 Foreign reviewers seemingly found in Storm over Asia what they wanted to find, mapping the film on to one or another artistic and political agenda.

France The French release of Pudovkin’s film in 1929 translated the title adopted in Germany: La Tempête sur l’Asie. Unlike The Mother (half its original length, noted the Close-Up correspondent, Bryher) and The End of St Petersburg, Storm over Asia was passed for theatrical screenings without the intervention of the censor. Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin continued to be banned, ‘for reasons of social order’. Cinémagazine declared that there was nothing subversive to be found in Storm over Asia: ‘the commander of the occupying forces’ (here called Petrov) and his men are, it claimed, of no particular nationality.40 The French trade press generously covered American extravaganza (such as Sam Taylor’s 1928 Revolutionary romp, The Tempest, with John Barrymore), Soviet directors and the work of Russian émigrés abroad: Ivan Mosjoukine (the subject of the famous Kuleshov experiment, reported by Pudovkin) remained a favourite; Victor Tourjansky’s Volga Volga had been recently reviewed. The same issue of Cinémagazine (19 April 1929) reported a forthcoming release featuring the émigré character actor Nikolai Kolin, alongside Storm over Asia and Women of Riazan (Le Village du péché) [Baby riazanskie, 1927], directed by Pudovkin’s former fellow student under Gardin, Olga Preobrazhenskaia. The journal’s reviewer was especially struck by

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Storm over Asia’s visual metaphors (the storm flattening trees in its wake and the charge of the Mongolian horde over the steppe), by its documentary elements (the festival at the lamasery) and, above all, by Inkizhinov’s performance. Inkizhinov was compared to the Japanese-American superstar Sessue Hayakawa, but a Hayakawa stripped of ‘the surface and shaping’ of western culture.41 Cinémiroir (which in November 1928 had reviewed Protazanov’s Aelita) in April 1929 reviewed the Armenian film Andranik, starring and directed by A. Chakakuny. This celebrated the liberation of Armenia in the wake of the Great War, assisted by the Red Army in the Caucasus. It discussed Sovkino’s Volga en Feu (Revolt in Kazan) directed by Tarich. There was extensive coverage of the Soviet industry, in Moscow, Leningrad and the regions. Apparently without prejudice, it also discussed the star vehicles of émigré Lev Petrovich, The Tsarevich (directed by J. and F. Fleck from a Franz Lehár operetta) and Schwarz’s The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna (starring Brigitte Helm as Nina). Like Cinémagazine, it amply covered the release of Preobrazhenskaia’s Women of Riazan, appreciating ‘this magnificent human drama’ set against the First World War especially for its unsentimental, documentary handling of country work and leisure; ‘and the admirable, powerful rhythm common to Soviet films’.42 Jean de Mirbel, in an article devoted to Storm over Asia in March 1929, also regretted the infrequency with which Soviet films were allowed to reach a general audience in France, but exempted Storm over Asia from the usual accusation of propaganda. He praised the artistic and documentary value of a film in which ‘the actors give the impression of really living rather than acting their roles’. The cinematographer, while selecting particular expressions and details, seemed to have come across them by chance. De Mirbel cited Léon Moussinac’s famous distinction between Eisenstein and Pudovkin: ‘an Eisenstein film resembles a shout; a Pudovkin film evokes a song’, noting the careful, ‘scientific’ assembly of shots.43 He singled out the episode at the market, where the merchant and Bair argue over the price of the silver fox: When Pudovkin has to show a man getting up from a desk, he is not content simply to photograph the action, but shoots in succession, in close-up, the man’s two fists resting on the desk, his two feet on which he raises himself, the chair which is knocked over and finally the man’s head filling the frame, conveying to the viewer, by appropriate montage, a dynamic sense of a person in movement.This could not be achieved by merely positioning the camera in front of the subject. As Pudovkin himself explained, ‘to show something as everyone sees it

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is to have accomplished nothing’.44 In May 1929 Jean Robin asked ‘Quel est l’avenir du cinéma russe?’, agreeing with Kerr that there was intensity, morbidity and violence (conveyed by a particular selection and repetition of shots) in the films received abroad.45 Again comparing Inkizhinov with Hayakawa, Claude Doré was surprised to find that this cosmopolitan star in the making could speak French, albeit with a strong Russian accent, and reported his saying (opportunistically, I suspect) that his favourite star was the gangster, George Bancroft.46 The review Odéon declared that Storm over Asia should not be regarded as an historical film but an epic. It also recorded the music performed for Paris screenings: Borodin (for the Central Asian steppes), Cherepnin (for a Tibetan theme – presumably at the market), Akenchenko (‘tableaux Ukraïniens’) and Gabriel Dupont ‘La Mort d’Antar’ (presumably accompanying the death of the partisan leader). Honegger’s ‘Le Roi David’ followed, along with Auber’s ‘Les Diamants de la Couronne’, Bizet’s ‘Patrie’ and Haydn’s ‘Oxford Symphony’ (suggesting that, here and elsewhere, the British designation of the ‘occupying forces’, had been accurately identified).47 Maurice Bex, in Valonti, recalled the use of Borodin, compared Storm over Asia with Flaherty’s Moana [USA,1925] and Nanook and credited Griffith’s Ride of the Klansmen at the end of Intolerance as Pudovkin’s inspiration for the closing sequences.48 Other reviewers compared the film’s appropriation of mythology to Joan of Arc (adapted for film by Marco de Gastyne in 1927, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). Dreyer is also invoked for his use of non-actors and his use of close-ups of actors stripped of make-up.49 For the launch of Storm over Asia at the Colisée des Champs-Elysées in October 1929, a number of journals used stills from the film for their covers. There was more praise for the grandeur of Pudovkin’s art and ambition and the admission that Inkizhinov would indisputably prove an exotic attraction. The Cinéopse reviewer suggested that Pudovkin had tried to make the audience feel the spirit of a whole people – perhaps a whole race – and had produced a film which seized the viewer by its force and emotion. Again, the ethnographic and travelogue aspects of the film received comment and Pudovkin was praised for matching the beauty of nature with equivalent artistry: ‘the images have an evocative power, an hallucinatory beauty’.50 Jacques Vivien, writing for Le Parisien, similarly appreciated Pudovkin’s ‘poetic’ handling of landscapes, although in a somewhat bizarre contribution to L’Ordre Provençal, Commander C. Hubert (of the Colonial Infantry) complained at the absence of camels, as unthinkable for Mongolia, he said, ‘as the Sahara without caravans

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and China without the Chinese’. Hubert believed (or wanted to believe) that the troops were American and that the film was a reconstruction.51 Colonel E.L. Strutt, D.S.O., also saw the film in Paris, in the company of a French General connected with the Army Secret Service. ‘On my asking why such a film was permitted he replied: “Probably because it is only British anti-propaganda and not anti-world”’. Strutt subsequently wrote to the Film Society to protest against its programming in London: I feel that a strong protest is due against the present programmes of the Film Society, since these are nothing more than a series of Bolshevik propaganda. I have no doubt that the Council have no political motives, but Storm over Asia is quite beyond the pale politically and is designed to show up the cruelty of Great Britain towards the natives of Asia, i.e. India. As such, its exhibition will lead, as one [sic] two previous occasions, to unseemly exhibitions by the bolshevik or socialist minority in the audience. I can assure you that I am not expressing only my opinion; it is that of all my acquaintance in the audience.52 Jean Mitry, writing for Cinéma revue, thought Storm over Asia without doubt the greatest film he had seen in a long time while Edmond Gréville, in Vu, thought it the most important Soviet film yet to be released in Paris, dubbing Pudovkin ‘a Michelangelo of the screen.’53 Greville, having seen previous Soviet films in full in private clubs, complained of their mutilation by the censor for cinema release. Mitry praised the documentary material and atmosphere of Storm over Asia, and particulary its editing and rhythm, which were, he determined, ‘the very essence of cinema’. His definitive appraisal, as we have seen, was already considered outmoded and suspect in Russia itself. Mitry said that cuts to the film (at the end – cut from one hundred shots to twenty-seven – and in the scene of Bair’s execution) resulted from the print having been obtained at second hand from Germany rather than directly from Russia and also remarked that it was, indeed, exceptional for a Soviet film to be passed without intervention. Mitry also assigned the imperfect image quality to this source, saying that it had been much sharper in the Russian version. But he said that re-naming the commander ‘Petrov’ in the subtitles and suggesting that he was leader of a band of Russian rebels convinced absolutely no-one: from their uniforms alone the troops could be readily identified. Gréville also noted the exaggeration of English mannerisms.54 In his biography of Pudovkin, Alexander Karaganov acknowledged the praise accorded to Pudovkin by the French Socialist author, and friend of Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, who enjoyed great popularity

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in Russia and visited Moscow in the summer of 1935. Rolland preferred its silent precursors to the Socialist Realist triumph, Chapaev, especially the rhythm, atmosphere and landscapes of Storm over Asia. Rolland noted that when he first saw the film, in Montreux, Switzerland, English members of the audience loudly manifested their disapproval and irritation.55 Raffaele Calzini, writing for Illustrazione italiana remarked in June 1930 that Storm over Asia was soon to be cleared by the censors for distribution in Italy. However, he had been fortunate enough to be invited to the Film Society screening in London several months previously. Calzini compared reports of the film in British newspapers (perceived, he said, as ‘moral poison’, citing its anticapitalism and labelling it anti-European and, more especially anti-British) and those in France equally concerned with a nation’s colonial and imperialist interests. He corroborated the French reviews, noting the attempts to minimise the impression of the military forces represented being British (for instance, in the re-naming of the Commanding Officer).56

Britain At Ivor Montagu’s invitation, Pudovkin came to London’s New Gallery Cinema in February 1929 for the first screening of The End of St Petersburg, subsequently shown at the Scala in 1930. Airing sentiments inscribed in the manifesto ‘A Statement on Sound’ (co-authored with Eisenstein and Alexandrov) and the later essay ‘Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Films’, he lectured the Film Society audience on the potential of the technology he had investigated in Berlin.57 Montagu accepted the authorities’ conditions to cut the film: he removed a close-up of ‘a woman in the pains of childbirth’, removed blows to a prisoner at a police station; reduced the number of shots of dead men in the war scenes, a close-up of a man’s face covered with blood after a shell-burst and ‘lengths of battlefield covered with corpses’. He also queried the requirements to cut shots (‘soldiers or police firing on an unarmed mob’) not actually present in the film, which the censors seem to have imagined. Similar sweeping objections were levelled at The Mother (‘its scene is Russia’).58 Notwithstanding his efforts, the screening of The End of St. Petersburg was reported to the Home Secretary,William Joynson-Hicks, prompting a debate in the House of Commons. The Conservative M.P. Sir Robert Thomas (apparently relying on an item in The Times) complained that the words ‘All Power to the Soviet’ were greeted with cheers by the audience and that the National Anthem was hissed; but another Member of Parliament repudiated this account.

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News of these proceedings reached Russia and were reported in Kino.59 Joynson-Hicks concluded: ‘I am disposed to think, from information that has reached me independently, that such incidents have been exaggerated and I do not contemplate any further action in the matter’.60 Montagu found it easy to obtain a copy of Storm over Asia from British Instructional Films, which had acquired it in France in the hope of distributing it commercially, and was reputedly interested in hiring Pudovkin to work in Britain. But Montagu was unhappy with the terms offered by the company and the mangled condition of the print. Although the film was generally banned by the British Board of Film Censors (‘we think that the conduct of the British troops wearing British uniforms is such as to make this film unsuitable for exhibition in this country. ... This film was produced to satirise the exploitation of undeveloped peoples’) an exception was made for private societies, such as the Society for Cultural Relations and the Film Society itself, under application to certain local authorities (such as the London County Council). Montagu was consciously following the example of the Stage Society and its imitators, performing plays not licensed for public exhibition: Roar, China! was one such, first produced in Britain by the Unnamed Society in Manchester in 1931. The declared aim was ‘to interest the public in films or pictures of a high class character ... and to introduce films or pictures which might not otherwise be produced’. Middlesex (which had sent a contingent to serve in the Civil War) did not show Storm over Asia until 1935, with a caption describing the military force as ‘symbolical’ rather than real.61 Similarly, Storm over Asia was not licensed in the dominions where, as far as possible, British film production and distribution were encouraged: it was suppressed in Canada and Australia following a request from the Colonial Office.62 In his chatty general notes to the 37th programme for the Film Society (23 February 1930), Montagu referred to Pudovkin’s 1929 lecture and Eisenstein’s comments on the lamasery sequence in Storm over Asia, made on his own visit to London: In this, his Wild-East film Mr Pudovkin shows not only his technical debt he has himself acknowledged to Griffith but also an emotional identity, particularly in certain scenes of lyric sentiment ... strange and untutored raw material has been adjoined to the narrative of a drama film. There is an interesting attempt, in the ending, at the pictorial resolution of a metaphor ... the titling follows closely that of the Russian version. It is customary in most title lists to identify the soldiers shown in British uniforms as Russian White soldiers and it has been stated that . . . counter revolutionary forces equipped with old uniforms . . .

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Storm over Asia obvious however, from the Russian titles re colonial reference Imperial necessity etc. that the theme of the picture cannot credibly be interpreted in this sense.63

But more trouble lay in store for Storm over Asia. After its first screening, attacks were made in the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph upon the supposedly subversive activities of the Film Society and the London Workers’ Film Society (led by the Communist, Ralph Bond) and a copy of a memorandum concerning Soviet film, issued by Conservative Party Headquarters, found its way to Montagu’s secretary. Montagu intended to challenge the editor of the Telegraph to concede publicly that he had never actually seen any of the films about which he was complaining.64 The memorandum cited Storm over Asia as ‘an attack on the British army’ and quoted the Daily Worker review, identifying the film as symbolising ‘the triumphant victory of oppressed peoples of all countries, creeds and races’ and Pudovkin’s films in general as taking ‘for their theme the growth of class consciousness in individuals who symbolise the mass’. Objection was made in this memorandum not only to the content of the films but to the frequency of their exhibition: Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg was, it was claimed, shown five times daily for a week at the Bow Super Cinema in London. The memorandum suggested that Shanghai Document (correctly evaluated by The Times as an attack on the British in China) was deliberately placed in East End cinemas because of the presence of local Chinese and Laskar audiences. Sydney Carroll, writing with regard to the 1930 screening of Storm over Asia, represented a moderate position: The picture has undoubtedly its dangerous and destructive aspect. I am not inclined to disagree with the decision of the Board of Film Censors as to the undesirability of allowing this picture unconditioned distribution. When we come to reflect on the value of the picture as a work of art and deal with it not as propaganda but as a form of aesthetic expression we have, however, to admit its astonishing superiority over nearly all pictures of a less offensive character politically but with not one tenth of its technical skill.65 In 1930, the Daily Worker (the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain – the British section of the Communist International) was enthusiastically welcoming Nationalist riots in India, Arab resistance to Zionism in Palestine and the progress of the First Five-Year Plan in Russia. It greeted the Film Society’s screening of Storm over Asia in like mode (banned, it notes, by the BBFC but released in Germany and France) and reported the fulmination of a Daily Express columnist against

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it. Arthur West, who attended the Film Society screening, commented: It has been described as anti-Imperialist. It is. It is denounced as antiBritish Imperialist. It is. And that is why it is of such tremendous interest to British workers and why British workers must not see it. ... To represent Imperialist aggression most typically, the forces in this film are dressed in British uniforms.66 In the same issue, the Daily Worker covered ‘Twelve Years of the Red Army’ (‘its frontiers were encircled by the forces of Imperialism – of Churchill and his friends – well-armed and subsidised’) and, later in the same year, reviewed Anna Louise Strong’s Red Star in Samarkand and included an excerpt from Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armoured Train no. 14-69 dealing ‘with the struggle of Red peasant partisan troops against the White Guard and imperialist intervention in Far Eastern Siberia during the Civil War’. The completion of the Turksib railway, reduced working hours and unemployment in the Soviet Union were contrasted with hunger marches and lay-offs in Britain. In October, the Daily Express was still on the rampage: The London County Council is understood to be giving some attention to the Film Society and its productions. This society started by being an innocent diversion of the intellectuals, for whom Sunday afternoon is always a trying time. But the films it is now in the habit of presenting suggest that, knowingly or unknowingly, it is engaged in furthering the subversive propaganda of the Bolsheviks – an extremely undesirable form of activity for a British society. If it were merely the intellectuals who were concerned it would not matter so much. But Moscow films are now witnessed, week by week, by so many thousand of people that the LCC is justified in keeping a close watch on their character and tendency.67 Writing in 1930, Louis Fischer observed that: [T]o Britain, Soviet Russia seemed to combine the former menace of Russia with the novel threat of communism ... it is difficult to determine where the anti-Russian motive ends and the anti-Bolshevik motive begins. ... British statesmen may have been aiming at the old antagonist, the bear, when they seemed to be pointing a shot at the red revolutionist. Arch-interventionists ... would paint Russia not as a rival of Britain in Central Asia but as a menace to civilisation and a power for evil in Europe. The anti-Bolshevik factor was strongest with Churchill, the active executor of British interventionist policy. In 1919 Europe stood on the threshold of revolution ... Churchill realised how quickly the movement could be stemmed by destroying first the soviet

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Storm over Asia regime from which inspiration went out to all its potential imitators.68

As far as Churchill was concerned, the Allies had left their task unfinished and could but ‘save as much possible from the wreck’. But increasingly after 1919 there was a sense that Britain (the most generous supporter of the White cause) could indeed brace herself to deal with the Bolsheviks and Lloyd George (who led the government from 1916-22) alluded publicly to the possibility of so doing. After the First World War, Britain was mostly concerned for the maintenance of stable government in Russia, of whatever complexion. Once Tsarism had collapsed, it was something of an embarrassment to be found stalwartly supporting it. Although discussion of the relative merits of the old and new regime continued in Parliament to the mid 1920s, the actions of White Guardists such as Denikin and Kolchak continued to be defended in the House, and sanctuary was offered to the defeated generals, pragmatically Britain was concerned less with ideological differences than with the restoration of stability and the resumption of trade.69 There were frequent complaints in Parliament in the mid-1920s of Communist and Russian propaganda, especially after the Rapallo Pact of 1922 (reinstating diplomatic relations between Russia and Germany – generally held to have instigated Bolshevism), the affair of the Zinoviev letter in 1924 (urging British Communists to revolution) and the General Strike of 1926 (during which striking miners received aid from the USSR). Labour MPs in turn complained of Conservative anti-Soviet counter propaganda. In 1927, relations were temporarily severed. The discussion often connected the issue to matters of trade and the 1921 Trade Agreement: the Labour leader (and first Labour Prime Minister in 1924 and again in 1929) Ramsay MacDonald claimed that propaganda would reach Britain even if no such agreement appertained (certainly, it was experienced in other countries with no such agreement) and that Churchill’s vociferous oppositional stance (he referred in public in 1919 to ‘the foul baboonery of Bolshevism’) succeeded only in antagonising Russia, in increasing hostility and in threatening manufacturing connections. MacDonald observed that, with the institution of the New Economic Policy, the situation in Russia was much altered from the early post-war period.70 Paradoxically, given these frequent complaints at the apparent ease with which propaganda was circulated, Ivor Montagu, translator and friend to Eisenstein and Pudovkin, found it extraordinarily difficult to obtain Soviet films from their distributors. Films on their way from Germany were, at least in one instance, confiscated by Scotland Yard. In May, July and August 1925, at the invitation of Willi Münzenberg (on

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behalf of WIR and Comintern), Montagu visited Moscow to meet the agents in person, but became exasperated by their reluctance to hire material even to private societies for which outright purchase was prohibitively expensive: ‘We are here only to buy or sell’, they told him.71 He found it difficult to view material and even harder to pin down the representatives whom he presumed responsible for trade.72 He duly wrote to Misiano in forthright terms, explaining the censorship and distribution difficulties in Britain: Dear Comrade Messiano [sic] You must allow me to speak frankly. Your business methods are those of an idiot or a child. How many times have I told you that I have not got any money, that I do not and cannot buy films? Don’t you realise I am just as anxious to help Russian film productions in England as you are, probably more anxious judging from the ridiculous way in which your organisation has wasted the last ten months? Don’t you understand that no matter what good reports I ... give by hearsay of Russian films, NO BUSINESS MAN in England will pay a penny piece for them until he has seen them in this country for himself ? Why then don’t you send copies over here for an agent to hawk around trying to sell? The answer is 1) Because your agent at W.I.R. in London is a poor over-worked comrade with no knowledge of the film trade and no time to do anything anyway, and 2) Because to import them costs money in duty etc, Very well then, why haven’t you taken advantage of my offer, made to you last August, and by letters and telegrams (unanswered by you) about twice a month, to place at your disposal the services of myself and my organisation in defraying the cost of import and helping to sell any copies you send? You do nothing but talk rubbish about the successes of your films in Germany. Have you never been outside Russia? Don’t you know that German culture, German politics, German artistic tastes, above all the German film world are different from those in England? Your films are good enough, certainly, but exploitation methods that succeed with them in Germany will have to be very different before they succeed with them in England. Producers from all Europe jump to avail themselves of the aid we can give to so-called artistic films, and yet you, owing to your stupidity, think that because we offer to give Russian producers the same aid free and without profit we must be trying to deceive you.73 Montagu continued to make proposals to the relevant Russian offices in Berlin, well into 1927. Montagu rather minxily suggested that it might

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prove possible to imitate the procedures used for Conservative propaganda films, exhibiting material ‘by motor car with an open air screen’, although admittedly this method presented practical difficulties. Furthermore, he advised the agents for the Soviet films that, while retaining their own right of censorship to prevent any counter-revolutionary twist being given, they ‘should always be ready to accept our recommendations for the alteration or toning down of films to suit English tastes’: It is possible to show films in England in exceptional circumstances without submitting them to the censor in places where the local County Council has a Labour majority or for single performances in halls and theatres not usually licensed for films etc.. If propaganda films were sent over it may be possible to arrange their non-commercial use – but the propaganda must never be exclusively Russian nor direct. English people react always against direct propaganda. It must be subtle, not obvious, the best kind are adventure stories with propaganda inferences.74 By this measure, Bryher judged Shanghai Document ‘definitely propagandist in the wrong sense of the term’.75 Montagu’s frustration was, he said, shared by colleagues in America who experienced similar problems. Meanwhile, he was criticised by Society members for failing to screen Soviet material, even while privately admitting to making more strenuous efforts in this quarter than anywhere else: Some of the English newspapers have begun to blame me for not showing Russian films at the Film Society. I do not wish to reply that they have fallen through owing to the incompetence of the Russian departments concerned and so I remain silent.76 Ivor Montagu was always keen to show the most artistically progressive material, to show Soviet cinema to best advantage, whatever coincidental political difficulties its content might present. He was reluctant to show Sanin’s Polikushka, for while its content was less contentious politically, its theatrical style was deemed artistically regressive and damaging to the reputation of Soviet cinema which he was seeking to establish; the Kozintsev and Trauberg film SVD [Soiuz Velikogo Dela – the monogram worn by an unsuccessful band of insurgent officers serving in the army of Tsar Nicholas I] was judged to pose difficulties for the censor but to be good for the Film Society’s reputation. He thought the generality of Mezhrabpom films better qualitatively than Sovkino’s output. The documentarist and critic Paul Rotha, with Montagu and the CloseUp contingent, a staunch advocate for German and Russian films (and

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‘die neue Sachlichkeit’ therein exemplified), in 1933 claimed, perhaps disingenuously that ‘the anti-British theme of Storm over Asia was too childish to be efficacious because Pudovkin was not in the least concerned with that aspect of the picture’, asserting that Pudovkin and Eisenstein were more concerned in their current films with technique than propaganda. He also reported that Turin’s Turksib had been booked by more than 200 British cinemas. It was, he said, considered by Stalin to be exemplary propaganda, as opposed to Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth [Zemlia, 1930], castigated by Stalin as ‘bourgeois’.77

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4. Revivals Announcing the start of work on the re-release of The Heir to Genghis Khan in November 1949, Sovetskoe iskusstvo recorded that the first such experiment in sonorisation was The Stationmaster (with Ivan Moskvin, in the title role): A number of films were made in the first vital years of cinematography which brought fame to the artistry of young Soviet directors. ... The Heir to Genghis-Khan, this splendid production of Soviet cinema, has withstood the test of time and even now, twenty years after its initial release, remains remarkably vibrant. Its director, V. Gonchukov, says that this new version, significantly shorter than the original, was being supervised by Pudovkin.1 In Iskusstvo kino in 1949 Pudovkin provided his own rearguard defence of his earlier work: Without a doubt we come across the roots of Socialist Realism even in the first Soviet films. It was not merely by chance that Lenin suggested that new film production, imbued with communist ideas, should commence with historical subjects. The early Soviet history films were already characterised by the new party-mindedness of Socialist art. The progressive aspiration for a newly authentic image of the people and their lives was there at the outset and had an enormous impact on Soviet audiences. Already an appropriate Soviet art was being created and exerting its influence through these films. Unfortunately, the significance of the first Soviet history films has been largely neglected in the story of Soviet cinema.2 Ivor Montagu agreed with the thrust of Pudovkin’s argument, commenting to him that the ‘historical classic’ film succeeds in ‘creating a reality so vivid that it even replaces history itself in the imagination of the beholder’.3

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Interest in Mongolia and the Genghis Khan myth had been sustained by Trauberg’s Son of Mongolia [Syn Mongolii, 1936], appreciated by the British critic and author Graham Greene (alongside The New Babylon) for its ‘genius for legend’, and by His Name is Sukhe-Bator [Ego zovut SukheBator, Alexander Zarkhi and Iosif Kheifits, 1942], produced in Tashkent. Greene (in the 1930s, still sympathetic towards Communism) had previously praised Storm over Asia for its open-air filming, in natural surroundings, in ‘the Siberian plains’. He also compared Son of Mongolia to New Babylon in its depiction of the awakening of a political consciousness (which he calls ‘intelligence’) in its protagonist, while finding Trauberg’s officially approved shift towards happier endings ‘more difficult to accept’. As the film is now virtually unavailable outside Russia, it seems worth quoting Greene’s evocative review at length: This son of Mongolia loves a shepherdess (the Trianon title could hardly be less applicable than to this girl astride her stocky pony – small, rough and almond-eyed). A rival bribes a fortune-teller in a caravanserai (full of bicycles and old priests telling beads, spittoons, and acient melancholy traditional songs) to get rid of him, and the fortuneteller reads the Mongolian’s palm. ... And so poor simplicity starts out in the usual manner of a youngest son, slipping in a sandstorm past the border-posts into Manchuria, into a world of feudal justice, of astute Japanese spies, of the casual execution, where human suffering goes on and on like breathing and sleeping. He befriends a shepherd who has been flogged for saying that Mongolia will one day be free; he listens to a Japanese officer plotting a secret assault with a wrestler in a circus, and when he denounces the spy, he finds himself shut up in a cage in the enchated garden of his imagination, condemned to death by the local Chinese Prince who is preparing his country. There is a rescue and a flight – little fairy-tale ponies pursued by a tank across the long Mongolian plain; there is last-minute salvation by means of a Biblical subterfuge. ... Let us forget the crude propaganda close, and remember the curious mixture of the very old and the very new, of melodrama and fairy-tale. Inside a Daimler decorated with flower-pots on the hood and quilted with satin the Chinese Prince makes desultory and lubricious love; the spy swings in a hammock dressed in long Oriental merchant’s robes and discusses troop movements with a half-naked wrestler; a clown in a long white beard packs an army revolver; and while the executioner stands by with a naked blade, the Prince’s secretary, in a lounge suit and horn-rimmed glasses, reads the Arabian Nights. ... There is one magnifent panoramic shot when the camera sweeps down a whole long Chinese street:

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camels and bicycles: criminals squatting on a little platform with their heads stuck through great square wooden collars: butchers’ stalls and tea-drinkers: soldiers on an unexplained hunt through the crowd: rows of sewing-machines: a gable gateway through the ancient walls and the dusty plain outside.4 Vasili Grigorevich Ianchevetsky’s officially sanctioned, revisionist novel Chingiz-khan was published in 1939 (and awarded the Stalin Prize for prose in 1941 alongside Ilia Ehrenburg’s The Fall of Paris [Padenie Parizha]) even while the culture and religious practices of his actual descendents continued to be ruthlessly surpressed: Stalin, Orlando Figes has reminded us, was himself popularly known as ‘Genghis Khan with a telephone’, much as Alexander Herzen had compared Tsar Nicholas I to ‘Genghis Khan with a telegraph’.5 Like his French antecedents, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, in their own epic treatments of Russian history, Ianchevetsky conscientiously footnotes his ‘realist’ account with dates and citations. The Tartar horde causes alarm in Kiev as it advances to the banks of the Dnieper – the battle commences – but the alien force is at last repelled and the ‘magnificent city of Samarkand’ contained ‘in an iron cage’.6 P.B. Sinha, in the Indian National Liberation Movement and Russia, has observed that, while Lord Curzon sought to secure the safety of India from the ‘danger of Russian invasion’, Indian intellectuals were all the more attracted to Russia. On the other hand, in India, the RussoJapanese War (1904-5) was regarded as a European-Asian confrontation and from Japan’s victory India accordingly derived encouragement in its own struggle for independence from British Imperialism. Indian revolutionaries were inspired by Russian events of 1905 and 1917. Mahatma Gandhi, much influenced by Tolstoyan pacificism, became leader of the Indian National Congress Party in 1917.7 From 1920 to 1921, Gandhi staged a series of civil disobedience campaigns. John Higgins has commented that: The Second World War turned the seething discontent with British inactivity into an absolute and grim determination to end British rule and end it soon. ... Although a number of Hindus … expressed sympathy for the British cause, it was pointed out that after the 1914-18 war (which India had supported unconditionally) no reward in terms of independence had been offered; that India was now engaged in a war which she had not provoked, and had been involved without being consulted; that, if this was indeed a war of freedom, then some postwar guarantee of Indian freedom must be given.8

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In July 1947, an Act, negotiated by the Viceroy Admiral Viscount Mountbatten, was unceremoniously passed by the new Labour government, granting independence to India (under the leadership of the Hindu, Jawaharlal Nehru) and Pakistan (under the leadership of Mahomed Ali Jinnah). Contrary to British stories of a peaceful albeit hasty transition, Pravda reported Independence Day being commemorated by armed fighting between police and soldiers and Indian nationalists. In Hyderabad, demonstrators were beaten up and more than 30 members of the Indian National Congress were arrested. Meanwhile, the British embassy in Moscow remained suspicious of Soviet policy motives in the region; in his first dispatch of January 1946, Frank Roberts advised: Under Soviet rule there is an even stronger sense of mission in bringing Western civilisation and material progress to the backward peoples in Central Asia. There, in contrast to Europe, there is no doubt that Soviet civilisation has much to offer. It can bring material benefits and, above all, the raising of the standard of living, as has been shown already in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Soviet rule, which, despite its democratic façade, is in essence a despotism, is also more familiar and probably more popular with such peoples than any attempts to establish democratic institutions on western models.9 These, then are the historical circumstances which provided a background to the re-release of Pudovkin’s 1928 film. After the Declaration of Independence, key figures in the Soviet film industry travelled to and lectured in India. Pudovkin toured India in 1950-51, on the occasion of the first festivals of Soviet film in the new state, addressed a meeting of the Cine-Technicians’ Association in Calcutta, and received applications from would-be students in India to attend the State Cinema School (VGIK) in Moscow.10 Accompanied by the celebrated actor Nikolai Cherkasov (best known abroad for his starring roles in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible), Pudovkin recalled in his ‘Journey to India’ that Bombay served as their ‘gateway’ in more ways than one. He provided a thumbnail sketch of Portuguese and British colonialism in the area, saying that the East India Company’s deed of purchase, several centuries ago, inaugurated the process of military support for ‘systematic, cruel robbery which later developed steadily into the colonial policy of Great Britain. To commemorate this event, the English built a triumphal arch on the coast which remains intact to this day’. Pudovkin’s audiences included Indians who had studied in British universities.11 A survey, Soviet Cinematography, and Pudovkin’s Soviet Films: Principal Stages of Development (written with Ivan Pyriev and Grigori Alexandrov)

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were published in Bombay. Socialist Realism (and exemplarily the Vasilievs’ Chapaev) was extolled for its concern with ‘the real life of people and its problems’, tying art ‘closely with live reality’. Here, perceived artistic progress in Soviet film-making was directly equated with ideological superiority. Pudovkin routinely denounced the bourgeois formalism of an earlier period: the first works of Kuleshov idealised American detective films with their empty and only superficial dynamics ... FEKS ... expected to produce cinema actors and films which first of all would strike spectators by the unusualness of their affected form. Young Eisenstein produced ... The Strike ... filled with mere formal tricks. Instead of showing a serious and important stage in the history of the Russian labour movement, the formalist freaks of the author led spectators away from real life, confused and sometimes distorted the link of the film with actual historical reality.12 American films were blamed for ‘the forcible export of hollow and perverse pictures propagating war to the Marshallised countries of Europe’ and the American industry was accused of pursuing its desperate cause through the persecution of ‘progressive’ workers. Significantly, the authors referred to regional production in the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Turkestan and Armenia and equally laid claim to activities in the newly aquired territories, Latvia and Estonia.13 Regional production was also reported in Britain by Catherine de la Roche, notably in Alma Ata, to which many of the Moscow studios’ personnel were exiled during the war.14 Meanwhile, American aid to the Communist sector of China, containing half the population, had been grossly exceeded by support for the areas controlled by the Kuomintang. Michael Lindsay (endorsing the historical background to Son of Mongolia) said that, for Mongolia, the world’s war began in 1937, while conflict between Russia and Japan over Manchuria had been reported by Pravda throughout the 1930s. In 1948, civil war again broke out in Inner Mongolia, between Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang, in territory heavily looted after the declaration of peace in 1945. Inner Mongolia appealed for help to Outer Mongolia, ‘the Soviet Union’s oldest political satellite’.15 The contemporary relevance of the re-released version was not lost on foreign commentators, although Pudovkin himself was somewhat piqued to find that in Britain he was no longer considered a political threat and that Montagu could obtain a visa for him without raising any objection.16 The BFI’s Monthly Film Bulletin appreciated that ‘the pace is now considerably sharper, the story develops more strictly – the detailed

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background of a market town and the festival scenes which, many critics complained at the time, overburdened and unbalanced the film, have now been pruned’: Nor, as might be expected, have opportunities to salt the film with political topicalities in the dialogue been avoided. The dishonest trader becomes an American and the lynx-eared will detect in one passage of dialogue an opprobrious reference to Mr Churchill. Technically, the sound version is a remarkable success, and there can be no doubt that Storm over Asia wears extremely well as a dramatic and exciting film.17 The passage concerned occurs after the doctor and nurse have discussed the donation of a white man’s blood to save Amogolan (Bair) and are patching him together as an Imperial puppet: ‘Details have been sent to London. ... Mr Churchill approves our plan ... the capital invested will yield high profits’. Churchill (who had led Britain through the War from 1940, but was defeated in the General Election in 1945), had remained a stalwart opponent of Indian Independence throughout his parliamentary career. His position had been forcefully expressed in his 1929 volume of The World Crisis (dedicated to ‘All Who Hope’): The Russian Empire which had been our Ally had been succeeded by a revolutionary government which had renounced all claims to Constantinople, and which by its inherent vices and inefficiency could not soon be a serious military threat to India.18 Meanwhile, in Russia, the practices of the earlier avant-garde were by then being loudly renounced, even by the practitioners themselves (Pudovkin castigated not only Eisenstein, Kozintsev and Trauberg but also his own ‘Formalist’ lapses in A Simple Case).19 However, it was on the strength of his work in the 1920s that Pudovkin’s reputation abroad rested and which stood him in good stead as an official Soviet cultural ambassador thereafter, even in spite of the vicissitudes in his position at home and his expedient self-criticism. Though not exempt from official censure, the later films of Pudovkin were safe in style and subject matter (for instance, the heroic bio-pics Suvorov [1941] and Admiral Nakhimov [1946]) and his writing delivered received platitudes. In an atmosphere where, as Denise Youngblood has noted, it became ever more difficult to make anything at all, let alone anything which could aspire to universal approval, the safest option may have been to revive a popular success and to re-invest it with more contemporary ideological content.20 In the rereleased version, Moscow retains its central position.

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In France, in 1950, Storm over Asia was claimed to have anticipated wars in China, Korea and Vietnam with Inkizhinov figuring as the precursor of Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh and Kin Ir Sen: in Marxist terms, the Mongolians were construed as a World Historical People.21 In 1956, Ivor Montagu published an account of his own recent visit to Mongolia.22 Re-releases of the sound version in the 1960s prompted comparisons from the Left with Joris Ivens’ 1966 The Threatening Sky [Le Ciel, la terre], filmed in North Vietnam.23 Gillo Pontecorvo’s magnificent and totemic The Battle of Algiers [La Battaglia di Algeri, Algeria/Italy, 1965], narrating the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule, was meanwhile awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 (when, in protest, the entire French contingent refused to watch) and cinemas in Paris and Rome screening the film in the 1970s were fire-bombed by right-wing sympathisers. Nikita Mikhalkov’s Urga / Close to Eden [France/Russia, 1991], also awarded a Golden Lion, returned to the broader, historic territory of the Mongolian people. Again, the landscape, the sky, the wind and the wildlife are accorded as much time and space as the film’s protagonists and there is acknowledgement of such ancient customs as bride-chasing. ‘The frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia’, explained Michael Lindsay in 1948, ‘was originally only the boundary between grazing grounds of different tribes’.24 Here a Mongolian, Gombo, and his family find themselves living within the bounds of China: ‘we’re Mongolians but we live in China’. His wife, Pagma, who comes from the city, is concerned that they have three children already and that Chinese policy discourages more. She tells Gombo that he is backward and urges him to buy a television (he might learn things) and some condoms, but Gombo insists on seeking the advice of a lama at the temple in Ulan Bator. A Slav from Irkutsk, Sergei, who is employed in road-building in Mongolia (where his ancestors were stationed as soldiers a century previously), stalls his truck near Gombo’s yurt and is treated as a guest. Like Prejevalsky before him, Sergei is appalled by the Mongolian custom of leaving the dead bodies of the nearest and dearest in the open as carrion for birds of prey and finds it difficult to stomach the fresh sheep’s entrails and fatty tea which his hosts generously provide for him. In turn, Gombo’s son, Bouin, is amazed by Sergei’s tattoos: ‘he’s got writing on his back’. Bourma, Gombo’s daughter, entertains Sergei by playing Russian folk songs extremely well on the accordion (she has been taught by her uncle, a hotel pianist). At the market, Gombo’s horses jostle with bicycles and boys and girls in jeans; Sergei and Gombo visit a club with flashing lights, shiny disco balls and disco dancing. Shots of telegraph wires are intercut against Pagma, dressed in a fabulous headdress and

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costume, aside Genghis Khan at the head of his cavalry, banners aloft, appearing to Gombo in a dream; Sergei’s daughter recites her homework poem about Lenin and October. Eventually, Gombo and Pagma have a fourth child, whom they name after another fourth child, Genghis himself. The internationally well-received recent film The Story of the Weeping Camel (Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Farloni, Germany/Mongolia, 2003), quietly observational in style, records the landscapes and lives of nomads in Southern Mongolia, on the fringe of the Gobi Desert. Davaa’s 2005 The Cave of the Yellow Dog leisurely observes the life of another nomadic family, its herds, its rituals, its religion (there are praying wheels, rosaries and a Buddhist yurt shrine, as in The Heir to Genghis Khan, and libations are offered to the earth), its folklore and customs. There are lush valley pastures, winding streams and rolling rocky hills beneath a vast, limpid sky. The Story of the Weeping Camel is equally lusciously photographed. As in Storm over Asia and Urga, a trip to a market provides an opportunity to present a young boy’s fascination with uncustomary delights, from ice creams to television to computer games. The boy and his father follow the power lines to reach the town, reminding one of the camels and horses galloping along the railway tracks in Turksib. Ugna, the boy, proudly wearing his new Gola fleece cap with earflaps, decides to ask for a television set when he gets home, although he is advised that it will cost 20 to 30 sheep – and the electricity supply a whole flock. But grandad tells him that it’s no good to watch glass images all day. In Urga, the grandmother finds the bubble-plastic wrapping more entertaining than the fuzzy, intermittent and unintelligible pictures on the television set itself; Bouin, in his baseball cap, makes a poncho from a sheet of plastic and happily falls in and out of the cardboard box. The nomads in The Weeping Camel live intimately with their animals, sharing the yurt with kid goats and lambs, and hiring musicians (who arrive on motor bikes) to charm a camel which stubbornly refuses to suckle her first colt. Like Urga, the film records the changing life of the tribe – a brief sequence at the end shows a satellite dish attached to the family’s yurt. The mesmerically beautiful State of Dogs (Peter Brosens, D. Turmunkh, Mongolia/Belgium/Finland, 1999) is set against an Ulan Bator undergoing social and cultural changes consequent upon industrialisation and urbanisation. Basaar, an abandoned dog, resists his reincarnation as a man. The film closes with a Mongolian contortionist, slowly performing her poses on a raised platform in the open terrain of the steppes against a gloriously coloured sky. All these recent films exploit the spectacular potential offered by their locations. Like Storm over Asia, Urga makes use of Russian history, the region’s history and its mythology. Narratively, they are

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ambivalent about the products of a consumerist, market-driven economy. While Mongolia may not be paradise, it is nevertheless posited in these films as a place of pre-lapsarian beauty and virtue, mostly uneasily compromised by contact with the vices of Eastern and Western modernity. Amidst the current vogue for modern scorings for ‘classic’ silent movies, Storm over Asia has received its due attention. Timothy Brock has also scored Flaherty’s Nanook and various Chaplin films, following Chaplin’s own guidelines. His score for the currently available DVD and video release, like Nikolai Kriukov’s 1949 score, uses temple gongs, cymbals, drums and trumpets for the lamasery sequence (the ‘weird sounds’ recounted by Mrs Bulstrode and William Simpson), and a pentatonic scale. Ringing bells at the eaves of the temple, metal discs and so forth are synchronised to their appearance on screen, underscoring a strong contrast with the parallel action (the fighting between the partisans and the troops of the occupying forces) in the hills. Each full-frame appearance of Bair’s ‘splendid pelt’ is accorded its own particular, recurrent motif. For atmosphere, Brock uses agitation in the string and woodwind sections in anticipation of Bair’s supposed execution – which cues the partisans’ theme. For the finale, this is mixed with reedy temple strains. Like the Paris screenings of 1929, and in approved Giuseppe Becce style, Brock uses a pastiche of familiar themes from Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky and even Mahler.25 Anachronistically, he uses trademark Shostakovich rhythms, melodies and harmonic structure at the opening. Shostakovich himself, by the way, had been a silent film accompanist and had used snatches of Offenbach to evoke the atmosphere of Second Empire France in his scoring of The New Babylon.26 The National Film Theatre’s 2001 toured screening (produced by Marek Pytel and presented by REALITY), with ‘Tuvan Yenisei punk throat-singing sensation Yat-Kha’ (a band also known for its covers of seventies rock songs) advertised itself as the silent ‘premiere 140 minute uncensored full-size English title film projection’ (which it was not) Russian ‘formalist’ (which it most certainly is not) with a live and ‘unplugged’ (which it was not) accompaniment. It may, however, still qualify as the ‘masterpiece’ the promoters proclaimed. I was rather annoyed by this. The performance benefited from a resurgence of interest in World Music, similarly illustrated by ‘Voices of Central Asia’ at the London Coliseum in 2004, involving singers from Afghanistan, Azerbaidzhan, Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan and Uzbekistan, organised by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Instruments played included the threestringed komuz, which soothes the Weeping Camel. The journalist Peter Culshaw commented that:

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Storm over Asia Such instruments are easily portable and it is likely that this music was once played at the court of Genghis Khan after a hard day’s conquering and pillaging. Tengir-Too [a Kyrgyz group] are the closest thing anyone is ever likely to hear to Genghis’s house band – and what could be more rock’n’roll than that?27

The titles for the NFT performance of Storm over Asia appeared to have been freely adapted and re-written from Ivor Montagu’s Film Society screening. These modern intertitles (although heavily augmented in a uniformly ostentatiously stylised font – and intrusive) correspond loosely with the Pudovkin and Brik original, with an explanatory foreword introduced to place the opening action in 1918. This copy has other peculiarities, notably the insert showing the magazine article presented by the three women visitors to Bair at the headquarters of the occupying forces: ROMANTIC DISCOVERY: this young Mongolian Prince, who was discovered by our troops living as a shepherd in the hills, is heir to the great conqueror Jenghis Khan. He is shortly to be proclaimed Emperor of All the Mongolians. He is strikingly handsome and we predict that he will soon set hearts a-flutter across the Atlantic. In the sound version, we are told that the ‘prince’ will be a success in London. There are further problems. Although Pudovkin and Brik are unequivocal in their designation of the duplicitous trader as English, and in the 1949 version this same trader becomes the American, Henry Hughes, in this version we are shown the Chinese servant informing another two merchants of the arrival of Bair’s silver fox at the market. One seems to be Asian (Japanese, as in Brik’s scenario, or Chinese), the other presents a dollar bill in enormous close-up as a tip to his informer. These scenes do not exist in Pudovkin’s shot list.28 Via nose flutes and temple brass, the accompaniment at the NFT also lazily meandered through a medley of chords and riffs from Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple and the Rolling Stones. There were bits of balalaika-type business for the death of the partisan leader. Overall, Yat-kha’s delivery was rather reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam/Cambodian epic Apocalypse Now (USA, 1979 – in turn adapted from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 African epic, Heart of Darkness, duly adopted as the title for Coppola’s film of the film). Here, The Rolling Stones shared the stage with The Doors, The Beach Boys, Creedance Clear Water Revival and Richard Wagner. I was less bothered by the anachronistic ‘inauthenticity’ of this aural performance at the NFT than that it could so readily be marketed as

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authentic. While posing in the guise of a newly rediscovered Urtext, in itself a somewhat fanciful notion, the presentation of the visual material was rather disrespectful. Furthermore, Soviet silent cinema now seems to be cast as a strange and exotic landscape, as remote to Western audiences as the Baikal territory which Pudovkin and Golovnia carefully depicted in 1928. Like the Lenin badges Sergei’s boorish mate insensitively (and unsuccessfully) attempts to flog to Gombo in Urga, it is as though the film survives as a souvenir of a lost age – bereft of the relevance which French commentators, at least, continued to find in the 1960s and 1970s. These trinkets did, after all, once mean something to somebody. The film is thus doubly hitched to a programme of ‘virtual’ tourism. As far as the landscape is concerned, Lake Baikal continues to exert a particular fascination, as ‘last best place’ on earth. I conclude with an excerpt from an item in the business magazine Plus Seven, published in the summer of 2005 to encourage British tourists to visit and invest in Russia: On our small planet, there are few places left where nature is still in its virgin state. Siberia, especially the Baikal Region, is no doubt one of such areas. … Siberia is an ‘unknown planet’ for world tourism. One can even get the impression that the world community knows more about the Moon than about Siberia. And Baikal, the greatest freshwater lake in the world that is situated in the middle of Siberia, is as much mysterious and enigmatic. … Here, one can find endless taiga forests … with practically no people inhabiting them, mountain ranges with never-melting snow on the peaks, forests dunes, steppe and marshes.29 It is to be hoped that the lake, the landscape and the people benefit from current forms of exploitation, consumerism and colonialism. Preservation of their ‘virgin state’ seems a romantic delusion.

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Notes Chapter 1 1 C.A. Lejeune, Cinema (London, 1931), pp. 3-4; see also D. Powell, Films since 1939 (London, 1947), p. 20: ‘When we think of the grandeur of the Russian cinema, it is of Potemkin, Storm over Asia, The End of St. Petersburg that we think’. 2 See H. Marshall, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (London, 1983), p. 18; J. Leyda, Kino (Princeton NJ., 1960), p. 143 and V. Kepley Jr. and B. Kepley, ‘Intolerance and the Soviets’, Wide Angle 3.1, 1979 3 See A. Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant Garde (London, 2000), pp. 12-15; R. Yangirov tells me that Kuleshov originally intended Mr West to be performed by children – hence some of the child-like, gawping gestures which survive in the final version 4 See ‘Beseda s rezhisserom V. Pudovkinym’, Kino 28 February 1928 ed. R. Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays (London, 2006), pp. 143-43; I.M. Novokshonov, Potomok Chingis-khana (Moscow, 1966), p. 193 5 A. Mar’iamov, V.I. Pudovkin (Moscow, 1951), p. 92 6 See E. Khokhlova, ‘L’Histoire’, in A. Kherroubi and V. Posener (eds.) Le Studio Mejrabpom (Paris, 1996), pp. 23-31; Khokhlova, ‘Meschrabpom: zwischen Kunst und Politik’, Berlin – Moskau (Munich, 1995), pp. 193-98 and V. Kepley Jr., ‘WIR and the Cinema of the Left’, Cinema Journal 23.1, 1983; for a journalistic and sensationalist account of Münzenberg’s official and unofficial activities see S. Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (London, 1994), pp. 15-27 7 Khokhlova, p. 27 8 K. Thompson, ‘The Rise and Fall of Film Europe’, in A. Higson and R. Maltby (eds.) Film America, Film Europe (Exeter, 1999), p. 69; see also M. Turovskaia, ‘The 1930s and 1940s: Cinema in Context’, in R. Taylor and D. Spring (eds.), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), p. 45 for earnings of a number of Mezhrabpom films of the 1920s 9 B.A. Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic (Ann Arbor MI., 1985), p. 258 10 Film-Kurier, 13 Aug. 1928, p. 1; see Murray, p. 118 for Ufa’s response 11 K. Shutko, ‘Mezhrabpom-fil’m’, Sovetskii ekran, 25 September 1928, p. 1 12 See K. London, The Seven Soviet Arts (London, 1937), p. 9 13 British Film Institute/Special Materials/Ivor Montagu Collection item 101 14 BFI/SM/IMC item 97

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Chapter 2 1 See N. Kaufman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Kino-gazeta 9, 28 February 1928, p. 4 2 V. Inkizhinov, ‘Les Souvenirs d’Inkijinoff ’, Cinéma 167, 1972, p. 116 3 See, for instance, Sight and Sound, 22, 1953, referring to ‘Inkizhinov, who had never acted before, the trapper-king of Storm over Asia’ 4 V. Inkizhinov, ‘Bair i ia’, Sovetskii ekran 33, 14 August 1928, pp. 8-9 5 Kaufman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Kino, 28 August 1928, p. 5 6 D. Obolensky, Bread of Exile (London, 1999), p. 24; N.M. Przheval’skii, Travels in Eastern High Asia I (London, 1876), p. 60 7 S.M. Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. R. Taylor (London, 1988), p. 200 8 E. Barkhova, ‘Realism and Document’, D. Elliott (ed.), Photography in Russia (London, 1992); there were also cheaper versions of such pictures, more widely available: see R. Stites, Russian Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992), p. 26: ‘A postcard series called “Russian Types” offered images (often distorted) that helped people envision social categories’. The BP Ethnography Showcase at London’s Museum of Mankind in 1997 presented ‘Striking Tents – Central Asian nomad felts from Kyrgyzstan’ , the best documentation of yurts I have seen outside Russia. 9 Przheval’skii, Travels II, p. 100 10 E. Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (London and New Haven CT., 2003), pp. 100 and 111; see also (various authors), Nicholas and Alexandra: the Last Tsar and Tsarina (Edinburgh, 2005) for figures from the ‘Peoples of Russia Series’, 1907-19 11 See programme to the 23rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival, 2004, pp. 36-39 and translations of articles in Y. Tsivian (ed.), Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona, 2004) 12 ‘S kino apparatom po Buriatii’, Sovetskoe kino 5, 1927, p. 13; ‘Zadushevnoe slovo o puteshestvii vokrug sveta’, Sovetskoe kino 4, 1927, pp. 18-19 13 Vecherniaia Moskva, 31 July 1928, p. 3; Sovetskii ekran 24, 1929, p. 11; Sovetskii ekran 13, 1929, pp. 6-7 14 Widdis, Visions of a New Land, p. 104. For a foreign expert’s contemporary appreciation of Kalatozov’s film, see P. Rotha, Documentary Film (London, 1936), p. 95 15 R. Yangirov, ‘Le cinéma non joué’, in Kherroubi and Posener, Mejrabpom, p. 93 16 A. Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora (Moscow, 1945), p. 123; see also Sargeant, Pudovkin, p. 108 17 Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, p. 127 18 Inkizhinov, ‘Bair i ia’, p. 9 19 Inkhizhinov, ‘Les Souvenirs d’Inkijinoff ’, p. 117-18 and Sargeant, Pudovkin, p. 12 20 R. Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London and New York, 1998), p. 87 21 N. Iezuitov, Pudovkin (Moscow, 1937), pp. 3-4 22 M. Devidov, ‘Naschet geroev v kino i v literature’, Sovetskii ekran 50, 11 Dec. 1928, p. 7; see also issue 47, V. Shklovskii’s contributions to issues 48 and 49,

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‘Sovetskaia shkola akterskoi igry’, and the Shklovskii collection Za sorok let (Moscow, 1965), pp. 107-9 G. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History [1898] (London, 1940), p. 23; see also Sargeant, Pudovkin, pp. 131-32 B. Bulstrode, A Tour in Mongolia (London, 1920), pp. 1 and 112 O. Figes, Natasha’s Dance: a Cultural History of Russia (London, 2003), p. 377 Pudovkin, ‘Naturshchik vmesto aktera’, Sobranie sochinenii I, p. 183; see Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays (London, New York and Calcutta, 2006), p. 161 See Pudovkin, ‘Vremia krupnym planom’, Proletarskoe kino 1, 1932, p. 30, later re-written and re-published as ‘Time in Close-Up’; see Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin, pp. 185-91 S. Buck-Morss, Dream World and Catastrophe (Cambridge MA., 2000), p. 24 Widdis, Visions of a New Land, p. 27 S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley CA., 1997), p. 14 J. Graffy, ‘Cinema’, quoting M. Tsikounas, in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds.), Russian Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1998), p. 173 M. Turovskaya, ‘The 1930s and 1940s: cinema in context’ in R. Taylor and D. Spring (eds.), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), p. 47; see also Julian Graffy’s KINOfile Chapaev (London, 2008) Cited by L. Milne intoduction to M. Bulgakov, The White Guard (London, 1971), p. xiii M. Lindsay, ‘Mission to Mongolia’, Picture Post, 20 Nov. 1948, pp. 25-26 C. Kelly, ‘Byt: identity and everyday life’, in S. Franklin and E. Widdis (eds.), National Identity in Russian Culture (Cambridge, 2004), p. 159 R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford, 1989), p. 33 M. Gorkii, The Mother, tr. I. Schneider (Secaucus, 1977), pp. 21-22 M. Gorkii, My Universities, tr. R. Wilks (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 41 See L. Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs I (London, 1930), p. 33 and Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 131; also G. Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (London, 1990), pp. 93-96, enumerating the variety of peoples in the empire S. White, ‘The Art of the Political Poster’, in Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, p. 154 Tsivian (ed.), Dziga Vertov, pp. 187-93 [p. 188 and 190]; see also G Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera (London, 2000), pp. 25-27 See Kaufman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, 28 August and Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin, pp. 148 and 309 J. Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question (Columbus OH., 1989), p. 26 J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton NJ., 1984), p. 317 B. Evans Clements, ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’ in Gleason, Kenez, Stites (eds.), Bolshevik Culture (Bloomington, 1985), p. 220: ‘In 1920, 66,000 women were serving in the Red Army [2%]’; see also B. Farnsworth’s contribution to the same volume and M. Turovskaya in L. Attwood (ed.), Red Women on the Silver Screen (London, 1993) Evans Clements, ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’, p. 225 Kaufman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’

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48 VGIK /695 and 1711; see also O. Brik, ‘Theory and Practice of a Script Writer’, Screen 15.3, 1974 49 K. Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge MA., 1995), p. 297 50 E. Widdis, ‘Russia as Space’, Widdis and Franklin (eds.), National Identity, p. 38 51 G.F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (London, 1961), p. 166 52 Widdis, Visions of a New Land, p. 7 53 G. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Question (London, 1889), pp. 251 and 310. Charles Dickens was a leading figure in the expression of the popular nineteenth-century opinion in Britian ‘that Russia MUST BE stopped, and that the future peace of the world renders the war imperative upon us’. His opposition continued even after the Crimean War of 185356. In Our Mutual Friend [1865] (London, 1997), p. 793, Mr Podsnap effectively voices Dickens’ own views: ‘Podsnap always talks Britain, and talks as if he were a sort of Private Watchman employed, in the British interests, against the rest of the world. “We know what Russia means, sir,” says Podsnap; “we know what France wants: we see what America is up to; but we know what England is. That’s enough for us.”’ See also A. Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford, 1971), p. 46 54 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 376; see also Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: the TransSiberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia 1850-1917 (London, 1991) 55 Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, p. 227: ‘A Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments should be at once formed in Russia Central Asia and a custodian should be appointed to each of the more important ruins. But this is a step which can hardly be expected from a Government which has never, outside of Russia, shown the faintest interest in antiquarian preservation or research and which would sit still till the crack of doom upon a site that was known to contain the great bronze Athene of Pheidias, or the lost works of Livy’. 56 Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, pp. 1 and 14. Much of the engineering expertise and steel for the expansion had been supplied by American firms. British alarm over Russian activity in Afghanistan continued: the Daily Mail, 3 January 1928, p. 9 carries an item ‘Moscow Menace to Afghan king – plots to dominate him – stepping-stone to India – red hopes of blows to Britain’. For a discussion of railroads as a tool of Russia’s ‘military-political’ interests and competition with Great Britain over Afghanistan see Marks, Road to Power, pp. 41 and 144; 31-32 57 J. Bradley, Allied Intervention in Russia 1917-1920 (London, 1968), p. 11 58 J. Swettenham, Allied Intervention in Russia 1918-1919 (London, 1967), p. 284. See also, A Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia (London, 1919) and R.H. Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War (Princeton, 1968) 59 W. Churchill, The World Crisis: the Aftermath (London, 1929), p. 240 60 See S. Ermolinskii, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Pravda, 5 December 1928 and P.Babitsky and J. Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry (New York, 1955), p. 272 61 I.V Stalin, Sochineniia VII (Moscow, 1953), p. 281 62 S.G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World (Princeton NJ., 2003), p. 313

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63 Arsen, ‘O Potomok Chingis-khana’, Kino, 11 December 1928, p. 4 64 Kaufman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’. David Fraser, The Times correspondent in Peking, explains in his introduction to Bulstrode’s A Tour in Mongolia, p. xii, that at Chita ‘the Japanese maintained the Cossack adventurer Semenov’, ‘dismissed from command of the Trans-Baikal Division … but the Japanese refused to allow his removal by force’. The Mongolians, he says, were genuinely alarmed by Semenov, who had inaugurated a pan-Mongolian movement. The Chinese government, meanwhile, was proposing an extension of the Peking-Suigan Railway to Urga; see also Kennan, Russia and the West, p. 263 and D.J. Dallin, The Rise of Russia in Asia (London, 1950), pp. 187-89 65 M. Beliavskii, ‘Aziia v Evrope’, Kino, 26 February 1929, p. 4; see also N.J. Cull and A. Waldron, ‘Shanghai Document: Soviet film propaganda and the Shanghai rising of 1927’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16.3, 1996, pp. 309-31. Chiang Kai-Shek had also briefly trained in Moscow: for a discussion of his shifting allegiances and Soviet manoeuvring between factions in China see J. K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution (London, 1987), pp. 204-16 and J. Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions (Oxford, 1990), pp. 214-31 66 S. Tretiakov, Roar, China!, tr. F. Polianovska and B. Nixon (London, 1931), p. 3 67 Tretiakov, Roar, China!, p. 5 68 I. Montagu preface to V.I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (London, 1967), p. 15 69 Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, p. 128 70 See Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, p. 129 and E. Gromov, Kino-operator Anatolii Golovnia (Moscow, 1980), pp. 83-84. Golovnia says that sections of the dance were repeated for him by the lamas the following day; Ashirov was the local political worker. I am grateful to Dr. Phil Cavendish for drawing my attention to this source. 71 Przheval’skii, Travels I, p. 77 72 Bulstrode, A Tour in Mongolia, pp. 175-86. See also ‘Dance of the Gods’ and ‘Dance of the Magicians’ in H. Haslund, Men and Gods in Mongolia (London, 1935), pp. 39-63 73 W. Simpson, The Buddhist Praying-Wheel (London, 1896), pp. 14-15; 22; 3032; 49 and 272 74 Hosking, A History, p. 43; foreign visitors, such as the liberal Kurt London, commented on the standardisation, centralisation and Russification of culture in these years: see The Seven Soviet Arts 75 S. Stewart, In the Empire of Genghis Khan (London, 2000), p. 198 76 Quoted by Stewart, Genghis Khan, p. 60; Paris says that the Mongol Khan later converted to Christianity, but this rumour proved untrue: see R. Vaughan (tr. and ed.), The Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris (Stroud, 1993), p. 111 77 Fischer, The Soviets I, p. 416 78 The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe I, ed. T.O. Mabbott (Cambridge MA, 1969), pp. 26-39 [II and XV] 79 Against the vaunted expense of locations, horses, extras, leather armoury and archery and naked female torsos viewed from the back only (and a few subtitles, parchmenty hand-written maps and dates in the commentary), Edward Bazalgette’s 2005 Genghis Khan for BBC 1 employed throat music

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Storm over Asia and nose flutes (heavily overpowered by a loud and nondescript ‘epic’ backing track). What was so secret about The Secret History of ‘the real historical figures’ to which Bazalgette repeatedly refers? I have no idea, nor why he was so vastly indulged to tell us nothing beyond the raping and pillaging myth. Channel Five produced a documentary about Kublai Khan’s fleet in 2005. BBC Radio 4 featured Genghis Khan on Great Lives in April 2005 while Ray Mears wrestled with diminutive Mongolian counterparts for BBC TV. L. Trotskii, Literature and Revolution [1924] (Ann Arbor MI.,1960), p. 15 C. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia (London, 1968), p. 417 Suvorov, quoted by J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, p. 228 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 367 C.J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (London, 1987), p. vii M. Polo, The Travels, tr. R. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 93; see p. 97 for a description of the nomadic and pastoral life of the Mongolians. Polo was in the service of Kublai Khan in China and his account may not be impartial; he is also so hedged about with mythology himself that he may be an entirely reliable source for quotation. See also D. Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia I (Oxford, 1998), pp. 399-409 and 426: ‘The Mongolian explosion marks a turning point in the history of Eurasia as a whole, for it realigned patterns of trade, diplomacy and politics for several centuries. For a time, it brought the different parts of Eurasia closer than they had ever been before. Though the Mongol conquests were destructive, they also created for some 75 years a huge zone of relative stability, which allowed for an intensified exchange of ideas, goods and people. These did much to stimulate the intellectual and commercial changes that eventually led to the emergence of the modern world’. Przheval’skii, Travels I, pp. 204-6 Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, p. 162 Stewart, Genghis Khan, p. 243. The post-perestroika and glasnost’ revival of interest in Genghis Khan is worth noting, for instance, the new monument in Delgerhann, Mongolia; Genghis is now officially regarded as a great strategist and unifying leader. ‘Heights of the Heavens’, an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1994 documented this resurgence while BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and BBC 2 TV’s Correspondent in February 1996 recorded the appeal of a millionaire chess champion to his descent from the Khans in his political campaign. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, pp. 104 and 107; see also his ‘George Vernadsky, Eurasianism, the Mongols and Russia’, Slavic Review 41.3 (1982) and Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 423 D. and V. Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography (New York, 1993), p. 93 Leyda, Kino, p. 349; for Pudovkin’s verdict on the 1938 interpretation see ‘Khoroshii fil’m’, Stepan Razin’, Sobranie sochinenii II, pp. 206-7 Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, p. 174 and F.J. Oinas, ‘Russian Byliny’ in F.J. Oinas (ed.), Heroic Epic and Saga (Bloomington IN, 1978), pp. 236-56. See also J. Haynes, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester, 2203), pp. 163-64 E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969), pp. 15 and 87

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94 Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, p. 177 95 See T. Binyon, Pushkin: a Biography (London, 2002), pp. 402-4 and 413-20; R. Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Stanford CA, 1975), p. 183 and M. Cullerne Bown and B. Taylor (eds.) Art of the Soviets (Manchester, 1993), pp. 178-79 96 Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, p. xv 97 G.G.S. Murphy, Soviet Mongolia: a Study of the Oldest Political Satellite (Berkeley CA, 1966), p. 2 98 Mar’iamov, Pudovkin (Moscow, 1951) p. 94. For further discussion of Pudovkin’s mythologising of Sukhebator, by way of Bair, see V. Mikhalkovich, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Iskusstvo kino 5, 1988, pp. 99-101 99 Kaufman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, 28 August; Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin, p. 148 100 Przheval’skii quoted by Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, p. 19 101 A. Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman [1833] (London, 1961) and F. Dostoevskii, Notes from Underground [1864], tr. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 17 102 Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, pp. 126 and 127 Chapter 3 1 I. Kruti in Vecherniaia Moskva, 14 November 1928, n.p.VGIK/VIP; Leningradskaia gazeta kino, 20 November 1928, p. 4 2 Kino, 6 November 1928, p. 1 3 Hobsbawm, Bandits, p. 36. For Mikhin’s earlier, but equally exotic, Abrek Zaur (1926) see D. J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 79-80 4 Iutkevich, interviewed by Luda and Jean Schnitzer, Poudovkine (Paris, 1966), p. 159; Iutkevich uses the Aristotelian term ‘peripeteia’, defined by J.A. Cuddon in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 700 as reversals of fortune: ‘In drama, usually the sudden change of fortune from prosperity to ruin; but it can be the other way about’. 5 R.Taylor’s translation of V. Shklovskii, ‘Eksperiment ... ..’ Zhizn’ iskusstvo 1 January 1929; in The Film Factory (London, 1988), p. 251; for shifts in Shklovskii’s ‘militant’ formalism and increasing ambivalence, see V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History – Doctrine (The Hague, 1965), pp. 14851.Shklovskii continued to complain about Rzheshevsky’s deficiencies as a scenarist with his work on Pudovkin’s Life is Very Good, comparing it unfavourably with the previous collaborations with Zarkhi. In April 1932 he submitted a list of amendments for Pudovkin’s attention, to add to the seven pages of detailed corrections supplied after his official interview: see R. Taylor’s translations of ‘Beregites’ muzyki’, Sovetskii ekran, 1 January 1929 and ‘Laboratoriia stsenariia’, Kino i zhizn’ 17, 1930 in The Film Factory, pp. 252 and 294; also Gosfil’mofond 759/2/1, 23 April 1931; ‘Prakticheskie predlozheniia po peredelke kartiny Ochen’ khorosho zhivetsia’, 28 April 1931 6 R. Taylor’s translation of L. Trauberg ‘Eksperiment, poniatnyi millionam’, Zhizn’ iskusstva, 1 January 1929, p. 14 in The Film Factory, p. 251; for more regarding the mantra, see R. Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment’ in R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.) Inside the Film Factory (London, 1991), pp. 193-216 [p. 196]

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M. Bronskii, ‘Klassovoi vrag v okopakh Kinopechati’ Kino 34, 1930, cited by D. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era (Ann Arbor, 1985), p. 213. Youngblood says that this was ‘perhaps the most vicious article to appear in this troubled period’ but nevertheless acknowledges that The Heir to Genghis Khan was widely considered a success. 8 N. Osinskii, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Izvestiia, 14 November 1928, n.p. VGIK/VIP; Buriato-Mongol’skaia pravda, 2 December 1928, n.p. VGIK/VIP 9 K. Fel’dman, ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Rabochaia Moskva, 14 November 1928, n.p. VGIK/VIP 10 Pudovkin admitted as much in his centenary contribution to Sovetskii ekran 37, 11 September 1928, p. 5, ‘Kak ia rabotaiu s Tolstym’, republished in Sobranie sochinenenii II, p. 58: ‘With the utmost persistence he constantly reworks each piece stylistically. Departing from the canons of refined construction, he is not afraid to repeat the same word several times purely in order to take that piece to the limits of persuasiveness. He leaves no room for the reader to see anything other than what he is showing. Everything he describes is possessed of the completeness of a real object ... I permit myself to say that Tolstoy’s style of speech has a lot in common with Lenin. That same implacable desire to explain your ideas clearly to others. The form of his speech is subordinated to his thought to such an extent that it completely loses any conventional character. Like the cast of a sculpture, its form seems to flow round its content’. Pudovkin mentions that he read Tolstoy’s Resurrection [1899] when working on The End of St Petersburg. See also Taylor, Vsevolod Pudovkin, pp. 152-53 11 K. Khersonskii, ‘Pervym Ekranom – Potomok Chingis-khana’, Kino 20 November 1928, p.4. Disparaging references here to Pierre Benoit suggest his adventure novels Atlantide (much discussed in Russia in 1922 – and adapted for film by Jacques Feyder in 1921 and G.W Pabst in 1932) and La Châtelaine du Liban, published in French in 1923, in Russian and English in 1924, filmed by Marco de Gastyne in 1926 and Jean Epstein in 1933. Both are set against sand. The latter finds a French captain seduced by an intriguing English aristocrat (the Châtelaine, Countess Orlof) who, ‘like all her kind’, finds it amusing to meddle in politics and other countries’ colonial affairs – Captain Domèvre’s best friend, it transpires, is his camel. The complaints of Eisenstein and Shklovskii against The Mother have been translated by R.Taylor, in Eisenstein: Selected Works I (London, 1988), p. 102 and as ‘Poetry and Prose’ in B. Eikhenbaum (ed.) [1927] The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford, 1982), pp. 87-89. Pudovkin, ever sensitive to criticism, replied: ‘If this film was a success, it seems to me that this is because I really showed everything that I felt and experienced in a very simple manner. I like this film more than any other of my works. There is unity in it. Shklovskii calls me a centaur. Personally I think that I was a young puppy, with one paw shorter than the others. I do not want to be a mythological beast – it has no future. But I know that a puppy becomes a grown up and lively dog – and it’s this dog that I want to become’. See Schnitzer, Pudovkine, p. 129. The enlistment of literary analogy and accusations of unevenness in Pudovkin’s films continued with Life is Very Good: see Sargeant, Pudovkin, p. 146. See also Khersonskii’s interventions during Eizenshtein’s October 1928 lecture, ‘My

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dolzhny idti ne k osuzhdeniiu Pudovkina, a k izvlecheniiu pol’zy iz dannoi temy’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 68, 2004, pp. 26-48 Karaganov, somewhat laconically, says that this was ‘a difficult period’ for Pudovkin. ‘My dolzhny idti ... ’, p. 32 ‘My dolzhny idti ... ’, p. 36 ‘My dolzhny idti ... ’. p. 47; see also Sargeant, Pudovkin, pp. 168-92 M. Beliavskii, ‘Aziia v Evrope’, Kino, 26 February 1929, p. 4 Iu. A., ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, Kino, 8 January 1929, p. 5 Sargeant, Pudovkin, p. 3 See, for instance, ‘Kino i derevnia’, Sovetskoe kino 1, February 1926, pp. 14-15 and ‘Kino i derevnia – planovost’ raboty’, Sovetskii ekran 6-7, 1926, pp. 18-19 Iu. Menzhinskaia, ‘Deti i “Chingis-khan”’, Sovetskii ekran 34, 27 August 1929, p. 11 Karaganov, Pudovkin, p. 103; Bryher, Film Problems of Soviet Russia (Territet, 1929), p. 60 New York Times, 12 May 1929; however, Halliwell quotes Variety 1928 saying of the film: ‘Fetid with propaganda and thematically ridiculous to any semiintelligent audience. The more illiterate a man is in these Russian blurbs, the better his chances to make a name for himself in the Red World’. Film-Kurier, 9 and 11 January 1929; the journal also carries small ads for Storm over Asia and Prometheus between columns of text and on 1 January provides a long list of Soviet films available for distribution in Germany and elsewhere Film-Kurier, 26 January 1929 Interview with V.I. Pudovkin, ‘Chto my videli za granitsei’, Kino 5 March 1929, p.3 and Karaganov, Pudovkin, p. 103; in the Netherlands, Ansje van Beusekom informs me, Pudovkin’s humanitarian appeal was considered more insidiously subversive and potentially dangerous than Eisenstein’s overt propagandising. For reception in the Netherlands, see also P. Overy, De Stijl (London, 1991), p. 33 In his 1928-29 essay ‘O montazhnom ritme’, republished in Sobranie sochinenii II, p. 270, Pudovkin says ‘In his film Ruttmann never simply “shows” something: he always “influences” the viewer through his montage of the raw material ... Ruttmann does not leave the viewer alone until he has taken complete possession of him, until he has hypnotised him, because his aim is not the straightforward depiction of filmed objects but the exercise of influence over the viewer through the rhythmic montage of those objects’. Pudovkin again uses this an opportunity to swipe at Vertov’s method of ‘seizing life unawares’ – Vertov, meanwhile, held a low opinion of Ruttmann’s montage techniques. ‘Rußland zeigt einen neuen Weltfilm’, Film-Kurier, 7 January 1929, p.1 H. Wollenberg, ‘Sturm über Asien’, Licht-Bild-Bühne, 7 January 1929 Full-page ads in Film-Kurier, 11 January 1929 and Kinematograph 10, p. 2 n.a., ‘Für und gegen den Sturm über Asien’, Kinematograph 5, 7 January 1929, p. 1 E. Schmidt-Pauli, ‘Buria nad Aziei’, Politik und Gesellschaft 17-18, 1928/9, pp. 47-48, tr. Kinovedcheskie zapiski 58, 2002, pp. 216-17.

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32 S. Kracauer, ‘Buria nad Aziei’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 January 1929, tr. Kinovedcheskie zapiski 58, 2002, pp. 185-87 33 A Kerr, Russische Filmkunst (Berlin, 1927), pp. 12 and 14; see also Khokhlova, ‘Meschrabpom’, Berlin–Moskau (Munich, 1995), pp. 216-17 34 E. W. Said, Orientalism [1978] (Harmondsworth, 1995), pp. 3 and 5; for a discussion of this concept within the Soviet Union with regard to later Russian films, see A.V. Prusin and S.C. Zeman, ‘Taming Russia’s Wild East: the Central Asian historical-revolutionary film as Soviet Orientalism’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 23.3, 2003, pp. 259-70 35 Kerr, Filmkunst, pp. 8-9 36 C. Horak, Jump Cut 26, p. 40; Murray, Film and the German Left, p. 228. The liberal critic Kurt London similarly extols the example set by the Soviet Union in The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 2 37 ‘Sturm über Asien’, Rote Fahne 8 January 1929, p. 11. Many thanks to Sigrid Schnögl for improving on my original mangled translation. 38 K. MacPherson, ‘Storm over Asia – and Berlin!’, Close Up 4.1, 1929, pp. 37-46; see also S. Spender (a Poet in a Blazer), World within World (London, 1951), pp.132-33: ‘Whenever we could, we went to see those Russian films which were shown often in Berlin at this period. ... These films, which form a curiously isolated episode in the aesthetic history of this century, excited us because they had the modernism, poetic sensibility, satire, visual beauty, all those qualities we found most exciting in other forms of modern art, but they also conveyed a message of hope like an answer to The Waste Land. They extolled a heroic attitude which had not yet become officialised.We used to go long journeys to little cinemas in the outer suburbs of Berlin, and there among the grimy tenements we saw the images of the New Life of the workers’ building with machine tools and tractors, their socially just world under the shadow of baroque statues reflected in the ruffled waters of Leningrad, or against waving, shadow-pencilled plains of corn’. Spender seemingly refers to Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg and Dovzhenko’s Earth 39 MacPherson, ‘Storm over Asia’, p. 41; there had been previous praise of Pudovkin in the third series of the journal from Robert Herring, and comment on the government’s control of cinemas in India; Winifred Ellerman (Bryher) had written against what she perceived as romanticised representations of militarism in Close Up, July 1927, pp. 16-22 and October 1927, pp. 44-48. 40 n.a., ‘La Tempête sur l’Asie’, Cinémagazine, 19 April 1929, p. 127 and Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), Film Problems, p. 60 41 Cinémagazine, 19 April 1929, p. 128 42 See Cinémiroir, 19 April 1929, pp. 248-49 and 10 May 1929, pp. 309-10. Shklovsky says that Women of Riazan was also popular with rural audiences in Russia – although he did not himself endorse this opinion: ‘We still entertain the notion of the spectator as something contained and yet universal. We are surprised when mounted police are required to disperse the queues for Harry Piel, when the peasants of Novosibirsk spent the night in town to see Peasant Women of Riazan’. The film was, indeed, notorious for representing country life and the peasantry as if the Revolution had not taken place. See V. Shklovskii, ‘K voprosu ob izuchenii zritelia’, Sovetskii ekran 50, 11 December 1928, p. 6

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43 J. de Mirbel, ‘A propos de La Tempête sur l’Asie’, Cinémagazine, 29 March 1929, pp. 545-47; L. Moussinac, Le Cinéma soviétique (Paris, 1928), p. 161 44 Pudovkin, ‘Material kino’, and ‘Apparat zastavliaet zritelia videt’ tak, kak etogo khochet rezhisser’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, Sobranie sochinenii I, p. 100 and 125; see also Sargeant, Pudovkin, p. xxii and J. Aumont, The Image (London, 1979), p. 179: ‘Jump cuts in Pudovkin’s silent films go unnoticed since they occur in the context of an overall montage strategy which operates by way of short and discontinuous pieces’ 45 J. Robin, ‘Quel est l’avenir du cinéma russe?’, Cinémiroir, 3 May 1929, p. 283 46 C. Doré, ‘Inkischinoff, la vedette de Tempête sur l’Asie, va tourner en France’, Cinémiroir, 22 November 1929, p. 743 47 n.a., Odéon, pp. 11-16, Bibliothèque des Arts et Spectacles, Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 II. Nikolai Cherepnin was tutor to Sergei Prokofiev at the St. Petersburg conservatoire: see Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer’s Memoir, tr. G. Daniels (London and Sydney, 1979), p. 107 48 M. Bex, Valonti, 11 October 1929, Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 I. However, John Grierson, a documentarist much enamoured of Flaherty, was dismissive: ‘Do not believe it if people tell you that you have only to go to the Russians for our guide. The Russians are naturally on the same job as ourselves and more deliberately and with less patience of the reactionary and sentimental Poets-in-Blazers who take the honours of art in our own country. But, looking at the core of the problem, what in fact have they given us? Pudovkin is only Griffith in Revolutionary garb with the sensation of a Revolutionary victory by arms to balance the Ride of the Klansmen and the other fake climaxes of Griffithian cinema.’ See F. Hardy, (ed.) Grierson on Documentary [1946] (London, 1979) p. 24 49 J. de Mirbel, Cinémagazine, p. 546 and A. Arnoux, BN Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 I 50 A Tenevain, Le Cinéopse, 1 June 1929, Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 I 51 J. Vivien, Le Parisien, 3 May 1929, Rk 8996 II and Paris Soir, 12 October 1929, Rk 8996 I; C. Hubert, Ordre Provençal, December 1929, Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 I 52 BFI/SM/FS 7a), letters dated 13 and 16 February 1930 53 J. Mitry, ‘Les présentations du mois’, Cinéma revue, p. 22, Rondelet collection, Rk 8996 II; E. Gréville, Vu, 25 September 1929, Rondelet collection, Rk 8996 I. Moussinac’s triumvirate representation of a renaissance in Russian cinema (Vertov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin) was elsewhere aligned with the Italian Renaissance masters, Michelangelo, da Vinci and Raphael – with Pudovkin cast as Raphael. André Bazin later commented: ‘Maybe it does not really matter if Russian painting is second rate providing Russia gives us first rate cinema: Eisenstein is her Tintoretto’: see Bazin, What is Cinema?, tr. Gray (Berkeley, 1967), p. 12 54 Mitry and Gréville, Rondelet collection Rk 8996 II and Rk 8996 I. In addition to the reviews cited, the Rondelet collection additionally includes illustrative coverage of Storm over Asia from Cinéa pour tous, 15 October 1929; Le Cinéophile, 1 November 1929 and La Cinématographie, 7 December 1929

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55 Karaganov, Pudovkin, p. 94; R. Rolland, Voyage à Moscou (Paris, 1992), p.120 56 R. Calzini, Illustrazione italiana, 8 June 1930, Rondelet collection Rk 8996 I. Pudovkin’s popularity in Italy continued, especially with left-wing critics and with Neo-Realist directors, in spite of his being conveniently ‘set-off ’ against them in the subsequent academic film canon; the Marxist Galvano della Volpe declared him his ‘aesthetic paradigm in cinema’. See Sargeant, Pudovkin, pp. xxvii-xxviii and S. Masi, V.I. Pudovkin (Florence, 1985), p. 127 57 Pudovkin seems to have been touting his thoughts on ‘contrapuntal’ sound around Europe. For R. Taylor’s translation of ‘Zaiavka’ see The Film Factory, pp. 234-35 and Vsevolod Pudovkin, pp. 139-42; also pp. 199-207 58 See BBFC ‘Minutes of Exception’, BFI/SM/IM item 7a) and I. Montagu, The Political Censorship of Films (London, 1929), pp. 12-14. Winifred Ellerman had previously defended Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain: see Sargeant, Pudovkin, p. 52 59 Karaganov, Pudovkin, p. 103 reporting Kino, 5 March 1929 60 See report in The Times, 5 February 1929 and House of Commons Debates 5th series, 224.1926, 7 February 1929 61 See R. Low, Filmmaking in 1930s Britain (London, 1985), p. 55 and J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace (London, 1984), pp. 94-105 62 See, for instance, House of Commons Debates 5th series 191.1515, 15 February 1928; 211; 220.1752; 222. 469 and 1363 and T. Dewe Mathews, Censored (London, 1994), p. 85 63 BFI/SM/FS item 4 64 BFI/SM/FS item 7a), letter to George Atkinson 65 BFI/SM/FS item 7a), ‘Film Notes: a Great Picture’ 66 A. West, ‘Storm over Asia’, The Daily Worker, 24 February 1930, p. 12 67 G.A. Atkinson, ‘What is the Film Society?’, Daily Express, 22 October 1930, p. 10 68 Fischer, The Soviets I, p. 222. For an astute comparison of Bolshevik rule in Russia to British rule in India see B. Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism [1920 and 1949] (Nottingham, 1995), pp. 32, 55 and 118. Bertrand Russell visited the USSR in 1920 as an impartial observer attached to the Labour Party delegation. 69 See Bradley, Allied Intervention in Russia, p. 161 and House of Commons Debates 5th series, 194.1183, 21 April 1926 and 197.699-767, 25 June 1926. See also R. Luckett, The White Generals (London, 1971) 70 See House of Commons Debates 205.2255, 26 May 1927 re Soviet support for British Communists and the General Strike 71 I. Montagu, The Youngest Son (London, 1970), p. 301: ‘I was to hear it in one form or another from Soviet film men for the next twenty years’ 72 See BFI/SM/IM item 7a), ‘Prospects of Russians Films in England’, narrating Montagu’s misfortunes with Sovkino in Moscow. In Berlin, Montagu also tried to meet Moisei Aleinikov, of Mezhrabpom, whom Ekaterina Khokhlova dubs ‘a sort of Diaghilev of cinema’, only to be told, in no uncertain terms, that he should have been dealing with the Trade Delegation in Berlin; see item 7a), letter 11 March 1926 from London Embassy of USSR and subsequent letter from Montagu and Brunel to Comrade Tushereru in Berlin, 30 September 1927 73 BFI/SM/IM item 7a); Bailey was the ‘poor over-worked comrade’ at WIR in London, presided over by the socialist M.P. and wartime pacifist George Lansbury

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74 Montagu, ‘Prospects of Russian Films in England’ 75 See Close-Up, December 1928 and Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton NJ., 1966), p. 193 76 Montagu, ‘Prospects of Russian Films in England’ 77 P. Rotha, Celluloid: the Film Today (London, 1933), p. 49 Chapter 4 1 V. Gonchukov, ‘Zvukovoi variant kartiny Potomok Chingis-khana’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 10 September 1949 (VGIK archive n.p.) 2 V.I. Pudovkin and E. Smirnova, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii sovetskogo kino’, Iskusstvo kino 4, 1949, p. 10 3 I. Montagu to V.I. Pudovkin, 28 February 1944, RGALI 2060/1/15, regarding Suvorov (see also Sobranie sochinenii III, p. 276). Pudovkin’s historical biopic Admiral Nakhimov (on which Montagu had helped with research) was well received at the Venice Film Festival, sustaining his sympathetic reception with Left-wing critics in Italy: see Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin, p. xxvii 4 G. Greene, in The Spectator 19 August 1938, in John Russell Taylor (ed.), The Pleasure Dome (London, 1972), pp. 115 and 199-200; Greene had previously praised Storm over Asia: ‘There are moods when one almost believes … that cinema is only about its proper business if it is in the open air, in natural surroundings, whether the open air be that of the American or Siberian plains or a stony Petrograd square’. See also London, Seven Soviet Arts, p. 295. Montagu recalls screening Son of Mongolia at the Film Society in 1938 when he visited Mongolia himself in 1954: see Land of Blue Sky: a Portrait of Modern Mongolia (London, 1956), p. 131 5 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 369 6 V. Ian, Chingiz-khan [1939] (Moscow, 1942), book II 7 P.B. Sinha, Indian National Liberation Movement and Russia (1905-1917) (Delhi, 1975) and Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, pp. 19 and 45; see also B. Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism [1920 and 1949] (Nottingham, 1995), pp. 32 and 55 8 J. Higgins, ‘Partition in India’, Age of Austerity (London, 1963), pp. 191-207 [p. 191]; see also A. Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (London, 1996), p. 103: ‘Apart from a few Victorian regrets over India, the official line was one of self-congratulation that Britain once more was leading the way to granting independence to former colonial peoples.’ 9 TASS transmission from Delhi, ‘Stolknoveniia v Indii v den’ nezavisimosti’, Pravda, 19 August 1947, p. 4; Roberts quoted in V. Rothwell, Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 (London, 1982), pp. 247-49. See also V. Thorpe, ‘Revealed: last fearful days in India as Empire crumbles’, The Observer, 1 September 2002, pp. 14-15. 10 RGALI/VIP 11 V.I. Pudovkin, ‘Poezdka v Indiiu’, Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow, 1955), pp. 388-89 and 395; Pudovkin is referring correctly to the ‘Gateway to India’ but mistakenly refers to a ‘West India Company’ 12 V.I. Pudovkin, G. Aleksandrov, I. Pyr’ev, Soviet Films: Principal Stages of Development (Bombay, 1951), pp. 6 and 37

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13 Pudovkin, Aleksandrov, Pyr’ev, Soviet Films, p. 12 and G. Aleksandrov and I. Pyr’ev, ‘Soviet Films on Foreign Screens’ in Thirty Years of Soviet Cinematography (Moscow, 1950), p. 44 14 Catherine de la Roche, ‘Recent Developments in Soviet Russia’, Penguin Film Review 1946, pp. 84-89 15 See M. Lindsay, ‘Mission to Mongolia’ and ‘Can Britain work with the new China’, Picture Post, 20 November 1948, pp. 24-27 and 5 March 1949, pp. 20 and 39 16 I. Montagu ‘Personal Memoir’ in V. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (London, 1968), p. 15 17 G. Lambert, ‘Storm over Asia’, Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1951, pp. 259-60 18 Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 17 19 Mar’iamov, Pudovkin, p. 17 and Pudovkin and Smirnova in Iskusstvo kino 4, 1949, p. 10; for more in the same vein see Pudovkin and Smirnova, Puti razvitiia sovetskoi khudozhestvennoi kinematografii (Moscow, 1950) 20 Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, p. 156 21 Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 II 22 Montagu, Land of Blue Sky 23 G. Sadoul, ‘Des Steppes aux rizières’, Les Lettres françaises, 10 March 1966 and C. Mauriac, ‘Le cinéma’, Le Figaro littéraire, 3 March 1966. Rondelet collection, Tempête sur l’Asie, Rk 8996 I; other reviewers, for instance in the left-wing L’Humanité, see the film as a Mongolian Western, intending its ending and its subject matter, and comparable to the contemporary trend for documentary, ‘direct cinema’, while the right-wing Le Figaro, regards Inkizhinov as an antecedent for Yul Brynner, possibly now best known for his performance as an autocratic Siamese monarch in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical spectacular The King and I (Walter Lang, USA, 1956) 24 Lindsay, Picture Post, 20 November 1948, p. 26 25 Becce produced one of the most famous catalogues or libraries of film ‘themes’ for accompanists in the silent period, as explained by London in Film Music (London, 1936), pp. 50-58 26 D. Shostakovich, ‘O muzyke k Novomu Vavilonu’, Sovetskii ekran, 12 March 1929, p. 5 27 P. Culshaw, ‘Yurts and yakkety yaks’, Observer Music Magazine, September 2004; Fairouz Nishanova, a director of the Aga Khan Trust, is quoted as saying: ‘Actually Genghis was a philosopher and brilliant military general who got a lot of bad press’; see also D. Smith, ‘Dynasty rises amid riches of the steppes’, The Observer, 19 September 2004, p. 23 28 Which and whose cut? I also felt this anxiety at the Trafalgar Square screening of The Battleship Potemkin in September 2004, the Pet Shop Boys’ scoring now released on DVD, where no-one seemed to be bothered by the mess of titles nor whence the screened DVD had come – let alone the ghastliness and mawkishness of the Théâtre de Complicité prelude – shame 29 M. Lenalpa, ‘Lake Baikal’, plusseven+ 3, June/July 2005, p. 16

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Further Reading

On Pudovkin and Storm over Asia Brik, O., Materialy k biografii (Astana, Kazakhstan 1993) Eizenshtein, S., ‘My dolzhny idti ne k osuzhdeniiu Pudovkina, a k izvlecheniiu pol’zy iz dannoi temy’ [1928], Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 68, 2004, pp. 26-54 Golovnia, A., Svet v iskusstve operatora (Moscow 1945) Iezuitov, N., Pudovkin: Puti tvorchestva (Moscow 1937) Inkizhinov, V., ‘Les souvenirs d’Inkijinoff ’, Cinéma 167, June 1972 Karaganov, A., Vsevolod Pudovkin (Moscow 1973) Kherroubi, A. and Posener, V. (eds.), Le studio Mejrabpom ou l’aventure du cinéma privé au pays des bolcheviks (Paris 1996) Leyda, J., Kino – A History of the Russian and Soviet Film [1960] (Princeton 1983) Pudovkin, V., Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow 1955) Pudovkin, V., Sobranie sochinenii 3 vols. (Moscow 1974-77) Sargeant, A., Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (London 2000) Schnitzer, J. and L., Poudovkine (Paris 1966) Taylor, R., The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917-1929 (Cambridge 1979) Taylor, R. and Spring, D. (eds.), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London and New York 1993) Taylor, R. (ed.), Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays (London, New York, Calcutta 2006) Zapasnik, T. and Petrovich, A. (eds.), Pudovkin v vospominiiakh sovremennikov (Moscow 1989)

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Historical and Political Background Bawden, C.R., The Modern History of Mongolia (London 1968) Bradley, J., Allied Intervention in Russia (London 1968) Bulstrode, B., A Tour in Mongolia (London 1920) Christian, D., ‘Chinggis Khan’ and ‘The Mongol Empire and a New “World System”’, A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia volume I, (Oxford 1998) Hosking, G., A History of the Soviet Union (London 1990) Kennan, G.F., Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (London 1961) Nazarov, P., Hunted through Central Asia [1932] (Oxford 1993) Prejevalsky [Przheval’skii], N.M., Travels in Eastern High Asia (London 1876) Russell, B., The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism [1920, 1949] (Nottingham 1995) Simpson, W., The Buddhist Praying-Wheel (London 1896) Widdis, E., Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, Ct. 2003)