The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Laughing Matters
358
The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Laughing Matters
358eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Grigorii Aleksandrov’s musical comedy films, created with composer Isaak Dunaevskii, were the most popular Russian cinema of the 1930s and ’40s. Drawing on studio documents, press materials, and interviews with surviving film crew members, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov presents the untold production history of the films. Salys explores how Aleksandrov’s cinema preserved the paradigms of the American musical, including its comedic tradition, using both to inscribe the foundation myths of the Stalin era in the national consciousness. As the first major study to situate these films in the cultural context of the era, this book will be essential to courses on Russian cinema and Soviet culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841503479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 358 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Rimgaila Salys is professor of Russian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a specialist in twentieth-century Russian literature, film, and culture.
Rimgaila Salys is professor of Russian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a specialist in twentieth-century Russian literature, film, and culture.
Read an Excerpt
The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov
Laughing Matters
By Rimgaila Salys
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-347-9
CHAPTER 1
Veselye Rebiata
Happy Guys
"We want to laugh and we have the right to laugh with the laughter of victors."
– Boris Shumiatskii, 1935
"Your work is useless. It is not yet time for the Soviet people to laugh. They have very many serious matters to attend to."
– RAPP critics
I. THE BATTLE FOR COMEDY
In May 1932, when Grigorii Aleksandrov returned to Russia after an absence of three years, he found himself in the right place at the right time, for it was precisely the centralization of cultural policy during 1931–32 that made possible the appearance of the first Soviet musical comedy film. The March 1928 Party Conference on Cinema had been the watershed moment for the still relatively diverse and fragmented film industry. The Conference resolution prescribed clear ideological purpose: "Fiction film must actually become a medium of Communist enlightenment and agitation, an instrument of the Party in educating and organizing the masses around the basic tasks of the period of socialist construction. ... The main criterion for evaluating the formal and artistic qualities of films is the requirement that cinema furnish a 'form that is intelligible to the millions'." The resolution specifically mentioned the need to "pay special attention to the creation of Soviet comedy."
The December 1931 Plenum of the VTsIK Council of Cultural Construction criticized the lack of a unified plan for cultural policy, and in January, A.S. Bubnov, the People's Commissar for Enlightenment, called for a five-year plan in the arts. At the time of Aleksandrov's departure abroad, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which stridently championed a proletarian culture opposed to modernist experimentation, was in the ascendant, though it never gained official Party sponsorship. On April 23, 1932 a Central Committee decree dissolved RAPP and established a single Union of Soviet Writers, thereby bringing writers of different persuasions into a single organization and at the same time taking control of cultural policy. The April decree served as a weathermaker for all the arts and led to analogous organizational changes in architecture, art, and music. In recalling the musical climate of the early thirties, Isaak Dunaevskii credited above all the liquidation of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and its dogmatic views as opening the door to the jazz music of Happy Guys. And it was the State, in the person of its functionaries, that for reasons of cultural policy commissioned Aleksandrov to make a comedy film and later defended him against all critics. The cinema industry had a new leader, Boris Shumiatskii, who had been appointed after Sovkino was replaced by the more centralized Soiuzkino in 1930. Shumiatskii was to play a pivotal role in the making of Happy Guys.
Yet in spite of the attention to and official encouragement of cinema, during the early 1930s it became progressively more difficult to make a film for two reasons: a proliferation of controlling bureaucratic entities in the government, the Party, and in film studios, which had veto rights over scripts, and Stalin's direct involvement in the approval of completed films for release to the nation. In June 1932, the cultural propaganda section of the Komsomol Central Committee met with film organization leaders, directors, and scriptwriters to push its agenda of greater Komsomol involvement in filmmaking. In February 1933, the State further expanded its direct supervision of the film industry: Soiuzkino was replaced by the Chief Administration of the Film and Photo Industry (GUKF), which reported directly to the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars). As a result of such moves, in 1933 the largest Soviet film studio, Soiuzfil'm, paid advances for 129 scripts, of which only 13 were approved for production. Film comedy had fared no better, in spite of the 1928 Party Conference's encouragement of comedy. Writing in 1934, a Komsomol'skaia pravda critic pointed out that of the eighty Russian films released the previous year, only three were comedies. To meet audience demand, enterprising theatre administrators were screening worn-out copies of 1920s Russian and American comedies. "'An Evening of Laughter,' 'Four of the Merriest Comedies in One Show,' 'I. Il'inskii in His Best Comedy' — these advertisements achieve their aim almost automatically: the tickets sell out long before the beginning of a performance." The same critic also noted that it had been several years since any new foreign films had been shown in the Soviet Union, a clear indicator of the xenophobia that would fuel the debate over Happy Guys during 1933–34.
At its June 7, 1933 meeting, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee established a film commission (Kinokomissiia), to be chaired by Party functionary Aleksei Stetskii, with Bubnov, commissar for Enlightenment, and Shumiatskii among the members. The Kinokomissiia's mandate was to: 1) examine GUKF annual lists of film topics and make recommendations for action to the Organizing Bureau, 2) screen and approve completed films before their release, and 3) organize a contingent of script reviewers composed of writers in the Party and highly qualified propaganda and Party workers. In addition, film topics could not go into development without the approval of the Central Committee. At the next level, Stalin became the chief curator of the arts in Russia. Film was his special favorite, which explains both why relatively few filmmakers suffered during the purges and also the decline in production as compared to the second half of the 1920s. From mid-1933 onward, Stalin and members of the Politbiuro viewed and vetted all Soviet films before their release, and his taste and reactions determined their ultimate fate.
Nevertheless, the two years preceding the assassination of Kirov in December 1934 are seen as a period of relative thaw — within the context of the Stalinist system. There had been a relatively good harvest in fall 1933, and the 17 Party Congress in early 1934 called itself the "Congress of Victors." The tempo of forced industrialization, which had driven the Soviet economy into crisis, was slowed during the second five-year plan. The ethos of asceticism and self-sacrifice propagated during the first five-year plan gave way to the ideal of a "cultured and prosperous life" that included the development of leisure time activities, which had been under strict ideological control since the time of the Great Break. It is only within the context of this measured relaxation of cultural control, which also permitted the dissemination of western popular culture such as jazz music, the foxtrot, and tango, that the making of Happy Guys became possible.
A closely managed press told the population that, with the success of the first five-year plan, a new socialist order of economic power and plenty had arrived. Reportage now stressed a joyous celebration of Soviet accomplishments that continued throughout the Soviet era but reached its performative apex during the 1930s. Even before Stalin's 1935 "Life has become happier" declaration and precisely during 1933–34, when Happy Guys was being made, the press implanted happiness with a musical accompaniment in the consciousness of their readers: under the caption "Nynche zhit' veselo!" ("Life is Happy Now!"), a 1933 issue of Komsomol'skaia pravda printed a large photo of a smiling young Komsomol boy playing his accordion. In early 1934, the headline for an initiative to manufacture better musical instruments read: "Industriia vesel'ia vykhodit v pokhod. Bol'she garmoshek, gitar, balalaek!" ("The Merriment Industry Begins a Campaign. More Accordions, Guitars, Balalaikas!"). It is not surprising then that the authorities turned their attention to musical comedy film as an appropriate correlate to the newly created image of Soviet success.
The production history of Happy Guys is a fascinating case study, brimming with passionate ideological controversy and political machinations during a transitional period of the Stalin era when a public discourse still existed in the Russian cultural community. In May 1932, the government had refused Eisenstein and Aleksandrov's request to purchase their Da zdravstvuet Meksika! (Que viva México!) footage from Upton Sinclair; their most recent collaborative project thus came to nothing. On July 8, Shumiatskii met with the two men to discuss the Eisenstein group's future plans, of which the most immediate was to make a Soviet comedy. Eisenstein announced plans to film, jointly with Aleksandrov, Samoe zabavnoe ... (The Most Amusing Thing ...), a comedy based on a script by Boris Shklovskii with dialogue by Nikolai Erdman. But nothing came of the project. In late summer 1932, Shumiatskii took Aleksandrov, who had just returned from the United States, on an informational visit to Gorky, warning him that Stalin might also be present at the writer's dacha. According to Aleksandrov, the conversation with the General Secretary initially concerned The Five-Year Plan, a documentary film the director had put together from the holdings of Amkino, the Soviet film distribution office in New York City, and had shown during his lectures on the Soviet Union that summer. Stalin then began speaking of the successful completion of the first plan: "Our people, the Bolshevik Party has every reason to look to the future with optimism. Art, unfortunately, cannot keep up with the tempo of economic construction. ... Everyone knows the people like joyous, buoyant art, but you don't want to take this into account. What's more," Stalin continued with undisguised irony, "people who suppress everything funny haven't disappeared in art. Aleksei Maksimovich," he addressed Gorky, "if you aren't against gaiety and humor, help stir up the talented literary people, the masters of laughter in art." Mark Kushnirov gives a parallel, more down to earth, account of the visit, which highlights the role of Aleksandrov's personality in his being chosen as director for Happy Guys:
Apparently interested, [Stalin] listened to the account of foreign countries, asked questions from time to time, nodded approvingly and laughed. Gorky asked Aleksandrov to sing some Mexican songs. He tuned a guitar that luckily happened to be in the house, sang "Adelita," "Sandunga," and something else. He sang like a professional, thereby eliciting the approval of his exalted listeners. Before saying good-bye, Stalin said, "As far as I can tell, you are a very witty and cheerful man. Our art very much needs such people. Especially now. Unfortunately, for some reason our art is ashamed to be cheerful and funny. It lags behind life. This is not proper."
The idea for a film-operetta had come out of Shumiatskii's conversations with Lev Kamenev, one of the formerly powerful old Bolsheviks with whom he maintained friendly relations. Once assured that Aleksandrov had made a good impression, Shumiatskii then offered him the chance to make a musical comedy film based on Leonid Utesov's Tea-dzhaz (theatrical jazz) and his current stage show Muzykal'nyi magazin (The Music Store). Shumiatskii even provided the first name for the film, The Jazz Comedy (perhaps by analogy to The Music Store's subtitle "Dzhaz-klounada") and arranged for Aleksandrov to travel to Leningrad to see Utesov's show. Happy Guys carried various names in the process of its evolution. Jazz Comedy was initially used in the press, but the first script was called The Shepherd (Pastukh). By July 1934 Shumiatskii refers to the film as Happy Guys. The GUKF chief had originally proposed the musical comedy project to Eisenstein, who wouldn't bite. Aleksandrov accepted without consulting his former teacher and colleague, which Eisenstein understood as a defection from his camp.
Stalin's comedy "initiative" became operative in fall 1932 when the Central Committee called a meeting of directors and scriptwriters under the slogan, "Smekh — rodnoi brat sily" ("Laughter is the brother of strength"), intended to push the film industry toward producing sound comedies to replace the cinematic farces and bourgeois urban songs of the 1920s. The best directors, such as Protazanov, Kozintsev and Trauberg, Dovzhenko, Room, and Eisenstein responded enthusiastically, although few were able to complete their projects. In August 1932, Eisenstein (without Aleksandrov) began working on MMM, a comedy about the adventures of a modern man in medieval Russia. In his memoirs, Aleksandrov cites his dislike of the idea as the reason for his break with Eisenstein, but it is more likely that Shumiatskii's offer of an independent project was more influential at this stage in Aleksandrov's career. In a late interview, Aleksandrov also admitted, "I consciously tried to choose another genre for myself than the one he had chosen. I wanted to, if one can express it this way, 'choose the opposite'."
Happy Guys was not in any way the product of amateurs. The scriptwriters Nikolai Erdman, whose 1925 play The Mandate had been a sensation in Meierkhol'd's theatre, and Vladimir Mass were the best stage satirists of their time. Aleksandrov had apprenticed and collaborated with Eisenstein for ten years. His cameraman, Vladimir Nil'sen, had been trained by Tisse during their years with Eisenstein. A trained dancer and singer, Orlova was already an operetta star in Nemirovich-Danchenko's musical theatre, and had acted in two films, Iurtsev's Alyona's Love and Roshal's Petersburg Night, both 1934. Dunaevskii had been composing and conducting successfully for the theatre in Kharkiv, Moscow and Leningrad since 1919. Musician and singer Leonid Utesov was a music-hall star, conductor of the most popular Soviet jazz orchestra, and had acted in three films, The Firm of "Antanta and Co." (1923), The Career of Spir'ka Shpandyr' (1926), and The Strangers (1928).
In 1932, Utesov was a much more significant public figure than Grigorii Aleksandrov. During a 1927 trip to Paris, Utesov had been bitten by the jazz bug and soon formed his own orchestra, which made its debut in Leningrad with the 1929 Tea-dzhaz program. Utesov had heard both the Jack Hilton and Ted Lewis orchestras abroad; Tea-dzhaz and Utesov's later shows, including The Music Store, were influenced by Lewis's informal and synthetic performance style. Utesov and his crew not only played in a highly professional manner, but each orchestra member also acted, danced, or sang as part of the theatrical-musical presentation. The orchestra was tremendously popular with Soviet audiences starved for good, non-ideological entertainment, and Utesov with his musicians were mobbed by crowds of admiring fans both in Leningrad and on tour in the provinces. However, in the music world and official circles, where RAPM, with its emphasis on heroic socialist construction and proletarian culture, was dominant, jazz-influenced artists and composers, such as Utesov, Dunaevskii and Blantner, were under constant attack for their "degenerate bourgeois music." Even after the April 1932 decree, former RAPP and RAPM members continued to plant landmines around Aleksandrov's Happy Guys.
Utesov's third and most successful jazz show was The Music Store (1932), a loosely connected series of comedy skits on a day in the life of a musical establishment.Utesov plays multiple roles: the store clerk Kostia Potekhin ("potekha" = fun), a visiting American jazz conductor, a naive peasant, and even arrives at the music store as a young, romanticized version of himself, whom he proceeds to parody. The script for the show had been written by Erdman and Mass; the music was composed by Dunaevskii, the musical director of the Leningrad music-hall. The show was directed by Utesov and A. Arnol'd, who later played the foreign conductor Fraskini in Happy Guys; the cast consisted of Utesov's fifteen-man jazz orchestra. In The Music Store, Utesov had already brought together the group that was to become the creative nucleus of Aleksandrov's film.
Apart from Dunaevskii's jazz renditions of Russian classical music and a tap-dancing horse that brought down the house, it was the script with Erdman and Mass's brand of political satire that assured the success of The Music Store. Potekhin lives in a large bass viol case on the premises of the music store (a reference to the housing shortage) and tells the store manager, "Please note, Fedor Semenovich, there's not a single communicating room and I have all the conveniences. Only one convenience is missing — it's impossible to live here." Blinded by the glittering instruments, a peasant mistakes the music store for Torgsin (a store selling foreign goods for foreign currency and valuables) and brings in his horse in order to sell manure, which an agronomist has told him is as good as gold, the ironic effect of Soviet agricultural propaganda. And, like a true edinolichnik (non-collectivized farmer), he will not part with his one horse. The store manager gives Potekhin sheet music to perform, the titles of which openly parody RAPM themes: "Danse industriale" to the lyrics of "Oh, My Ball-bearings," "The Complete Course of Historical Materialism," music by Davidenko, "The Meeting at the Steamboat Depot" — a sonatina. This cacophonic piece mimicked steamboat horns, the noise of machine lathes and the "voice of the people" at a political meeting. A tall son, dressed as a young pioneer, and his short father enter the store. The son treats the father as if he were a small child: "When I was born, he was twenty years old. After that he lived abroad during the whole revolution. Since he didn't take part in the revolution, I believe that fifteen years have been crossed out of his life. You're five years old — don't pick your nose!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov by Rimgaila Salys. Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Chapter 1 Veselye Rebiata Happy Guys,
Chapter 2 Tsirk Circus,
Chapter 3 Volga—Volga,
Chapter 4 Svetlyi put' The Radiant Path,
Appendix A A Day of Filming with Director G. Aleksandrov's Circus Crew,
Index,