ABSTRACT
Recent writing on Stalinist culture of the 1930s has tended to see it as ‘totalitarian culture’, a category that includes, probably most paradigmatically, the culture of Nazi Germany. Yet contemporary studies of Nazi film, such as Linda Schulte-Sasse’s Entertaining the Third Reich and particularly Eric Rentschler’s The Ministry of Illusion, have suggested that our sense of Nazi film as heavily ideological-as in the best-known example, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will-is distorted. Such ‘infamous statesponsored productions’, writes Rentschler, ‘…were the exception, not the rule; they constituted a very small portion of the era’s features. Films of the Third Reich emanated from a Ministry of Illusion, not a Ministry of Fear.’ Most films made during the Nazi era, he contends, were genre films, citing the figure 941 out of 1,094. Moreover, ‘almost half of all features-to be precise, 523-were comedies and musicals (what the Nazis termed heitere, “cheerful” films), light fare directed by ever-active industry pros’.1 ‘Studios were dream factories, not propaganda machines. Goebbels quickly grasped the fact that conveyor-belt, brown-shirt epics were box office poison.’2 In consequence, he ‘eschewed overt agitation’.3 In ‘the vast majority of films made under Goebbels’, he observes, ‘we encounter neither steeled bodies nor iron wills, no racist slurs, state slogans, or party emblems. [Rather, characters who] dance about with zest, singing of joyful lives without responsibility…’ Here Rentschler cites as an example a snatch of a song from Paul Martin’s Lucky Kids (Glückskinder) of 1936:
This generalization, however, does not apply to Soviet films of the 1930s, the overwhelming majority of which were undisguisedly ideological: Romm’s Lenin in 1918, Pyriev’s The Party Card, the Vasil’ev brothers’ Chapaev (about the growth in political consciousness of a Soviet Civil War commander), to name but a few of the best known. There is no shortage of steel wills or iron bodies in such works. Another common category was the political allegory using a historical subject (also used by the Nazis as Schulte-Sasse has shown); the only two films Eisenstein was able to complete after the 1920s, Aleksander Nevsky of 1938, and Ivan the Terrible, Part I, of 1944, fall into this class. Less common, though nevertheless strongly represented, were the comedy and the musical comedy. The first Soviet sound comedies emerged in 1934 (five of them) and
from then until the war, between five and 12 were produced annually.5 However, these also had overt ideological messages. Pure comedies lacking in clear political content were not released for viewing. A fine example of this category would be Boris Barnet’s delightful Old Jockey (Staryi naezdnik) of 1940, written by Nikolai Erdman, the principal scriptwriter for Volga-Volga, which was completed in 1938.
