Soviet films catch up with Soviet reality By STANLEY FORMAN HAT has been wrong with Soviet films for the last ten ‘years, or, to be more exact, for the years 1945-55, because the the last 12 months have witnes- sed a remarkable improvement © in the quality of Soviet films which London Times has quite correctly characterised as. “re- _ naissance.” oo There were many reasons for the sad decline in the artistic quality of the Soviet postwar film. Here are some of them: + An incredible bureaucracy had developed in the industry. Dozens of committees and “art councils” spent hours discussing scripts. Many of the best and most experienced film writers drifted away (or were driven away) from film work. Far too many. films were adapted from contemporary no- els and were not film scenarios in their own right. Authors who were not experienced in film work were involved in inter-. minable wrangling with the screen writers. Every chapter “left out” of the film was a victory won. The end . results were films of consider- able length with little filmic qualiy. + There was a reluctance to infuse “new blood”. into the in- dustry. This was particularly marked among screen actresses. Many feature films were mar- red by ageing actresses, well past their prime, playing young @ Soon it 7 By ALAN WINNINGTON ~ Ene toe will soon be — able to learn Chinese as easily as any other language — more easily than many because its grammar is simple. Soon it will no longer be necessary to learn thousands of complicated word-pictures, but only a 30-letter alphabet. Chinese will then become as easy to read as it is to speak and a wide new road will be opened for contact between China and the world, Impatient visitors to China often ask, “Why don't they change this crazy language?” But of course, the Chinese writ- ten language — with a contin- uous history of nearly 4,000 years — isn’t crazy, and chang- ing it is one of the toughest A scene from the Soviet film, Maximka. heroines. Patient research re- -veals that these elderly ladies were generally the wives of the film directors. + History and facts were dis- torted—particularly in the long series of biographical films, which tended to ignore achieve- ments -outside the USSR. As with all other art forms, films were considerably influenced by the “cult of the individual.” The many films made which, dealt with the’ war concentrat- will be propositions that People’s China has to face. 7 e ; Written Chinese is the same all over China but the spoken language varies as widely as the Indian languages of the Pacific Coast. ‘ It’s no use making a change that will cut off the chief means of common communication — the written language. . But change it must. This form of written language has become an obstruction to progress in China and a barrier to China's friends. Written Chinese has always been out of reach of the ordin- ary people, and only leisured people could master it. At first Chinese consisted of fairly sim- ple drawings which expressed objects. The two objects were put together to express ideas. So drawings of the sun and half the moon. together meant “bright.” ‘ed on Stalin and underestimat- ed the part played by the Soviet people themselves, in fighting and winning the war. Fall of Berlin, Battle of Stalingrad and the Third Blow were typical examples. + There was a shortage of up-to-date equipment for mak- ing movies, especially sound cameras. Ancient smoky arc lighting threw a tremendous strain on film artists and tech- nicians. : The makers of the ballet film Romeo and Juliet painfully de- scribe how Ulanova had to per- form certain passages over and over again, because of faulty equipment and bad film stock. + There was an over-em- phasis on biographical and his- torical themes and an alarming lack of films dealing with cur- rent everyday problems and personal relationships. During this whole ten-year period under review only one major feature film released dealt with the working class (Donets Miners). Hardly any comedies were made during the period. A tN * Despite these shortcomings and difficulties, a number of films of great merit were pro- duced and several major con- tributions ‘to film art and tech- nique were recorded. : Particular mention should be made of the work of the Mos- cow Popular Science film studi- os and the director, Alexander Zguridi, who created such re- markable films as Life in the Arctic and Woodland Drama. The difficult problem of trans- posing opera and ballet on tec the screen was solved during this period in the films Romeo and Juliet and Boris Godunov. Many fine films and cartoons were made for children and some splendid co-productions were created — notably Skan- derbeg, made jointly with the young Albanian film industry, and Heroes of Shipka, made with Bulgarian cooperation. In the field of documentary the spirit of the construction projects was successfully cap- tured in such titles as Moscow Constructions, Volga-Don Canal and Oilmen of the Caspian Sea. The first truly stereoscopic cinema without spectacles was further improved with out- standing results. These achievements were made despite the shortcomings I have described, but the last year has seen vigorous attempts to remove.the shortcomings themselves. * A profound change has taken place in the themes selected for easy to learn As time passed, the form of words developed away from pictures and became more and more complicated. It is no longer possible to understand the meaning of words by their appearance and some symbols have more than 30 different strokes. The disadvantages of this system are serious. A primary school, education takes two years longer in Chinese than sna language with an alphabet. A Viet Nam peasant can learn to read and write in less than a quarter of the time taken by a Chinese peasant. Because each word is a sepa- rate drawing, and there are nearly 50,000. of them alto- gether, 6000 of them in common use, mechanical typesetting, raorse telegraph and the ordin- ary typewriter cannot be used in China. Even after several years of reasonable study few foreign- ers can read a newspaper. And Jooking up a word in a dictionary is a feat involving much count- ing of strokes and a prolonged search, “We are in the age of speed,” the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said re- cently. “We must move quickly to reach socialism but learning Chinese characters is a heavy burden.” A committee of experts has been working on this problem €ver since People’s China was founded. There are three stages in the reform of the lagnuage: to simplify the characters; intro- luce a common spoken language; and replace the picture char- acters by an alphabet. Hundreds of commonly used characters have already been simplified and already the form of the alphabet is being used as a phonetic method of teaching the old written form. June 8, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 9 filming. Young film-makers, fresh from the Institute of Cine- matography, are being given in- creasing opportunities to de- monstrate their talents. A glance at the hundred or so titles recently completed, or in course of production, reveals a wealth of fresh new ideas and concepts. A high proportion of the subjects deal with) real peo- ple, with real human problems —workers in town and country, old and young, happy and mis- erable in love and out of it. In short, Soviet films are begin- ning to catch up with Soviet reality. In addition to contemporary themes, many Soviet directors have turned to the classics of world literature. A sparkling production of Twelfth Night and an inspired screen version of Othello by S. Yutkevitch (which won the pri- ze for production at this year’s Cannes Festival) are only the beginning. Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Resurrection, Cervan- tes’ Don Quixote, Gogol’s The Overcoat are all on the stocks. The first Soviet wide-screen productions (a process similar to Cinemascope) have been completed. A new color film stock has been developed which Western experts Say is as good as the best in the world. * The Soviet movie industry has indeed a new and brighter look, but we should not imagine that its problems are over. The shortage of talented script writ- ers is still severe.There are still too many committees spending - endless hours revising and dis- cussing scripts. = ; Above all there is a great deal of time wasted during pro- duction, films are still too long, and a fabulous amount of mon- ey is squandered on unneces- sary sets and costumes. But the main thing is that the Soviet film industry is on the move once more and there are no limits to what it will achieve in the future. It is certain that the Soviet films of the future will make as profound an impact on the world as the classics Potemkin and Storm over Asia made in their time. Chinese Next comes the most vital tink in the process, the pro- motion of a national language based on the Peking pronun- ciation. This common language is already in use on the radio, in the movies and the theatre and in dictionaries. But the advance to an alphabet form can only develop tothe extent that people speak the common lan- guage as well as their own dialect. By 1958 all teachers will be trained to teach the common speech and the process of change to ar alphabet will have begun. The alphabet will be used in the meantime to popularise the uni- versal spoken language. There are still some objections from intellectuals who fear that the new alphabet will cause a loss to Chinese culture and re- tard the study of Chinese clas- sics. The difficulties they raise ‘are genuine ones, but the gains will be so vast that ways have to be found to solve them.