El Cine Mudo

el cine en manos de todos


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1971, Medvedkin recounted the experience of the ciné-train to Marker, Cèbe, and, by proxy, to the workers in Besançon.35 Like Dziga Vertov, Medvedkin began his career on the Bolshevik agit-trains of the civil-war years (c. 1917–1922), which traveled the breadth of the future Soviet Union, visiting Red Army outposts, distributing propagandistic pamphlets,staging small exhibitions, and screening films.36 As Richard Taylor notes, the film sections of the agit-trains had a twofold task: “first, to demonstrate in the provinces agit-films produced in the centre and, second, to supply newsreel and documentary material from the provinces to the centre.”37 Years later, amid the social, political, and productive transformations inaugurated by the rapidindustrialization and collectivization of agriculture during Stalin’s First Five Year Plan (1928–1932), Medvedkin became convinced of the necessity of reviving and reconceiving the agit-train as a means of revolutionizing the consciousness of a largely illiterate peasantry.38 Medvedkin’s train distinguished itself through its exclusive focus on film, which, because of its dynamism, its popular appeal,its potential for mass reproduction and distribution, and its silence (soliciting realtime interaction and discussion), was deemed ideally suited for the construction of the new Soviet collective subject.39 During its first year in 1932, Medvedkin’s ciné-train traveled to mines, factories, and collective farms across the USSR and produced 72 films.40 Filming at an incredible pace, Medvedkin saw histeam as “cinematic Stakhanovites”—the Soviet term used for workers who over-fulfilled production targets—following the motto “film today and show it tomorrow.”41 Medvedkin’s practice was committed not only
35. In 1971, while in Paris to make a film about the superiority of Soviet environmental policy, Medvedkin met with Marker, Cèbe, and other members of the Medvedkin Group. Marker interviewedMedvedkin at the Noisy-le-Sec train depot, and included this footage in Le Train en marche (1971), a film made to introduce SLON’s French release of Happiness. Cèbe offers a short but remarkable account of his encounter with Medvedkin in Pol Cèbe, “Rencontre avec Medvedkine,” L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 120 (December 1971), pp. 8–9. Selections of Marker and Medvedkin’s letters were recently published forthe first time in Russian in the journal Kinovedcheskie zapiski 49 (2000). 36. For an account of the genesis of the Soviet agit-trains, see Richard Taylor, “A Medium for the Masses: Agitation in the Soviet Civil War,” Soviet Studies 22, no. 4 (April 1971), pp. 562–74. For purely pragmatic reasons, Vertov will unfortunately make only brief and refractive appearances in this paper. It will sufficehere to note that Vertov was responsible for editing footage shot on the agit-trains, which he incorporated into his weekly newsreels, Kino-Nedelya, and later into his full-length films Anniversary of the Revolution (1919) and History of the Civil War (1921). Ibid., p. 568. 37. Ibid. 38. For an important account of the significance of “cultural revolution” during the First Five Year Plan, see SheilaFitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 8–41. 39. Medvedkin’s initial proposal to the Central Film Committee was vetoed, partially because of the administration’s resistance to critical satire, leading him to directly petition the Party Central Committee, which agreed tofund the train and provide their assignments. See Stephen Crofts and Masha Enzensberger, “Medvedkin: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Screen 19, no. 1 (1978), p. 73. 40. Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin, p. 24. 41. Ibid.

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OCTOBER

Medvedkin ciné-train. How Do You Live, Comrade Miner? © Les Films de l’Astrophore.

to high production rates but also, unlike the centralized...