Grigorii Boltianskii (1885-1953), the author of the article below, was a major figure in early Soviet cinema. While his work as a filmmaker has remained relatively obscure, he was well-known as a pioneer in initiatives promoting the art of cinema and as a visionary in developing the Soviet film industry. He is considered one of the founders of Soviet newsreel cinema and was a very early advocate for creating film archives. He was also the founder of a short-lived museum of cinema, which existed from 1925 to 1932 at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences.1 Born into a Jewish family in a village near the cities of Pavlograd and Ekaterinoslav in Ukraine, he was active in revolutionary movements since 1905. As early as 1910, Boltianskii was working on the distribution and exhibition of educational films at the local council of the Pavlograd district. From 1914 to 1916 he studied at the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute where he was a senior classmate of David Kaufman (Dziga Vertov). Like Vertov, he was deeply invested in creating a specifically proletarian cinema, and many of the texts he wrote before and during the 1920s convey this central concern.2
This article is a programmatic text published in 1926, at a time when Boltianskii was serving as chair of the section of amateur photography and film at the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema (Obshchestvo druzei sovetskogo kino - ODSK). Informed by his vision of proletarian cinema, it stresses the social utility of amateur pursuits, and suggests an organized approach to filmmaking reliant on a centralized institutional structure that would ensure access to material resources and training. This framework draws on the experience of other amateur activities developing within the network of workers’ clubs,3 along with theories of proletarian cultural development hotly debated at the time. Boltianskii’s writing also reflects the economic scarcity that affected all spheres of life in the 1920s and alludes to the effects this situation had on amateur cinema in the Soviet Union in this period.
Amateur filmmaking, in all societies, has always been contingent on technological and economic factors, namely, the wide availability of equipment such as cameras and projectors, film stock, and access to industrial infrastructure, such as film labs. By 1923 the introduction of 16mm film by Kodak and 9.5mm film by Pathé had led to a significant increase in filmmaking by non-professionals in many industrialized nations. More compact and portable cameras were easier to use in many different contexts in daily life, as part of scientific fieldwork, or as documentations of expeditions. In tandem with this growing access to camera equipment, more economical use of film stock4 made filmmaking a more affordable pursuit for the amateur. The advent of 9.5mm and 16mm safety stocks5 adopted for making new films as well as prints for home and other nontheatrical use further entrenched the nascent amateur cinema movement.
Small-gauge film equipment, however, did not become common in USSR until the early 1960s, when routine domestic production was finally established.6 During the 1920s, only those who traveled abroad could obtain the compact cameras and projectors that would become associated with amateur cinema in other countries. Domestically, enthusiasts could buy this equipment second-hand through the informal market. And the most dedicated hobbyists could even attempt to build their own equipment. Because of these informal economic practices, it is difficult to gauge how many individual amateur filmmakers actually existed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. But there is clear evidence that there was significant interest in developing an infrastructure for organized filmmaking that would enable enthusiasts to create filmic accounts of events in their community, and subsequently to use this footage as part of formal newsreel programs.
Dziga Vertov undertook the first notable attempt to build such an infrastructure in 1923, when he began to transform his Kino-Eye group,7 formed a year earlier, into an experimental film station whose task it was to coordinate a network of film reporters that would contribute materials to the Kinopravda newsreel.8 This approach mimicked that of the rabkor (worker-correspondent) movement that had been expanding in this era.9 And indeed, Vertov frequently used the term kino-rabkory, or film worker-correspondents.10 In 1925, ODSK was established by Agitprop11 with the goal to “bridge the gap between film producers, directors and audiences,”12 and started building a network of “cells” nationwide. Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), as head of the Cheka (secret police), was appointed its first president (although this appointment came as a surprise to Dzerzhinsky himself). The creation of ODSK marks the growing tendency to centralize governance of smaller grassroots initiatives begun in the mid-1920s, where the involvement of the secret police was deemed a necessary measure. At the same time, such centralization promoted an increase in film spectatorship and stimulated a rapid development of the amateur cinema movement under the patronage of ODSK. By the mid-1920s about 50 of its collectives in Moscow, and 93 collectives in St.Petersburg, had a motion picture camera. The organization’s central office ran a training program in Moscow where courses were taught by the likes of Vsevolod Pudovkin, Abram Room, and Nikolai Zarkhi. These lectures were subsequently published in the form of brochures.13
The popularity of cinema was exceptionally high, and camera-enthusiasm apparently stemmed from it. Sources rarely mention which gauge film amateurs were shooting on, but there is also little evidence that the narrow gauges rapidly gaining traction in much of the world during the 1920s, that is, Kodak’s 16mm and Pathés 9.5mm, were widely known in the USSR. In his diary note of September4, 1930 composer Sergei Prokofiev, who mostly lived in France during that time, mentions that Zinaida Raikh, a prominent theatre actress and wife of theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold – both living and working in Moscow at the time – was familiar with the Pathé Baby projector, which she was eager to operate. This shows that individuals who traveled abroad had access to contemporary small-gauge film equipment, but they were probably not representative of the majority of Soviet film amateurs in the 1920s. 16mm began to develop in the USSR during the 1930s, but was almost exclusively used for reduction prints of films shot on 35mm, as opposed to camera originals.15 We can speculate that film collectives in the 1920s, either self-started or founded by ODSK, used equipment purchased abroad via the same channels that supplied the professional industry, or, not uncommonly, hand-made devices. This equipment most likely was using 35mm film or its direct derivative, 17.5mm.
In his article Boltianskii insists that all existing photography and cinema amateur circles should formally affiliate with ODSK. Efforts to centralize the governance of amateur organizations were in part dictated by the logic of a planned economy and reflected the tendency toward increased state control over voluntary organizations in this period. An ODSK newsletter from 1927 thus states, “amateur film work in our country can only be a part of planned economic and cultural socialist development.”16 However, under the Soviet planned economy, broader availability of amateur equipment and film stock only began to materialize by the very end of the 1950s.17
While such a collectivist and planned approach was economically justified in the context of the early Soviet Union, it also implicitly prescribed the topical concerns for amateur filmmaking and interpreted the general utility of amateur activities somewhat narrowly. At the core of this vision for amateur cinema is the concern that the amateur may become a hobbyist “picture taker” who leisurely records subjects for mere convenience as opposed to social utility. Thus, the aforementioned ODSK circular letter states that “filming one’s immediate circle, relatives, piquant scenes, and the like [is] a waste of film stock should be completely excluded in our conditions, even in five years, along with tangible development of amateur filmmaking in our country, and along with the development of our own cameras and films.”18 In this article Boltianskii expresses a similar point of view. Although his main rhetorical juxtaposition is fiction film, the idea of the filmmaker as an active observer was central to Dziga Vertov’s theories of voluntarist filmmaking from the 1920s.19
Boltianskii also suggests amateurs should involve themselves in activities that go beyond shooting newsreel material, such as engaging in the maintenance of film prints in their clubs. This imperative responds to various anti-archival practices Boltianskii witnessed. For instance, one common issue mentioned in the press was the folk practice of cutting notable frames out of film prints to keep them as souvenirs. The first page of the weekly newspaper Kino, in its issue of July 1926, contains a note highlighting this problem: “In some clubs up to 40 metres of cut-out film was found, and all tricks were cut out of Swifter than Death,20 as a result of which the print lost its value.”21 The extent to which this practice was widespread is further exemplified in testimony by actor Mikhail Zharov. He wrote, in 1975, that he had had a small role in Iakov Protazanov’s Aelita (1924), but the episode disappeared from the known copies of the film. He recalled another story from the 1960s when he told a news correspondent of his very first role in cinema at the age of 15, as an extra in Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1915), starring the great singer Fedor Shaliapin. After that conversation, he writes, “I disappeared from the picture, and, as a consolation, I saw a blown-up photograph in the magazine where I could recognize myself – an absolutely child’s face put into a beard… Perhaps a similar trick was done to Aelita?”22
These examples attest to how widespread this practice likely was, particularly in silent films where the disappearance of a few frames or even entire scenes could go more easily unnoticed. This is where, Boltianskii suggests, amateurs could form a corps of vigilantes who would discourage projectionists and other people close to the booth from damaging prints.
The motif of the mobilized amateur appears again at the end of Boltianskii’s article when he mentions Aviakhim, a Red Army organization whose work with radio amateurs he likens to the role of ODSK in its support of amateur filmmaking. Aviakhim was formed in 1925 as an amalgamation of several voluntary societies promoting skills and hobbies related to aviation and chemistry.23 The broader raison d’être of such voluntarist associations was developing technological and scientific literacy amongst the masses. We can also see a similar goal manifested in the institutional structure ODSK.
Overall, Boltianskii’s vision of the social role of amateur filmmakers and photographers is in line with a vision of progress based on the ethos of society-wide popular mobilization that characterized the interwar period in the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, this framework was embraced by the state bureaucracy and the avant-garde alike. And it was certainly central to Vertov’s conception of the “army of kinoks,” which was not only militant in spirit but also militarized in its organizational structure based on strict hierarchical discipline and chain-of-command.24 Boltianskii seemed to condone the efficiency the kinok model, while remaining ambivalent about its animating principles. As he wrote in another article from 1926: “While the kinoks’ theoretical propositions represent formal sectarianism and bias, common [in our country], [their] practical works and achievements are of great interest.”25 Boltianskii thus sought to build “an army of the working youth of urban film-circles, and subsequently the rural youth,” which would “support and supersede the old small group of Soviet newsreel workers.”26 This article outlines the practical aspects of creating the proletarian cinema envisioned by Boltianskii.
1. See Svetlana Ishevskaya, “1920 – 1930-e gody. Kinomuzei GAKhN. Iz arkhiva G.M. Boltianskogo,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 84 (2007): 26-42, and Aleksandr Deriabin, “Vremia sobirat′: Sozdaniie pervogo v mire kinoarkhiva,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 55, 2011, online version, accessed March 28, 2022, http://www.kinozapiski.ru/ru/print/sendvalues/542/.↩
2. John MacKay, Dziga Vertov: Life and Work. Vol. 1, 1896-1921 (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 90-97.↩
3. On the topic of workers’ clubs, see Lewis Siegelbaum, “The Shaping of Soviet Workers’ Leisure: Workers’ Clubs and Palaces of Culture in the 1930s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (1999): 78-92. See also Lynn Mally, “Small Forms on Small Stages,” in Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 47-80. ↩
4. In 16mm filmmaking, one frame was about a quarter of the size of a frame in the professional 35mm gauge. Considering that many amateur films were shot at lower frame rates, such as 16 or 18 frames per second, as opposed to the standard 24 frames, the economy could be even more significant. ↩
5. Unlike the highly combustible nitrate stock used in 35mm filmmaking.↩
6. It should be noted, though, that 16mm film was used for prints since the early 1930s. See Peter Bagrov, “Preliminary Notes on Soviet Nitrate Film Stock and Other Aids to Identification of Russian and Soviet Films,” in Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification: New Expanded Edition, ed. Harold Brown and Camille Bolt-Wellens (Brussels, Belgium: Fédération international des archives du film, 2020), 290.↩
7. The initial Kino-eye included Vertov himself, his brother cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and film editor Elizaveta Svilova, who was also his wife.↩
8. Dziga Vertov, “On the Organization of a Film Experiment Station” [1923], in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 21-24.↩
9. On the history of the rabkor movement see, for instance, Katy Turton, “The Revolution Realised,” in Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 85-91.↩
10. Dziga Vertov, “Osnovnoe ‘Kinoglaza’” [1925], in Stat’i, dnevniki, zamysly, ed. Sergei Drobashenko (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 81.↩
11. Its full title is Department for Agitation and Propaganda of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).↩
12. Richard Taylor, The Politics of Soviet Cinema, 1917 – 1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 99.↩
13. Valerii Fomin, “Rozhdeniie sovetskogo kino. 1917-1930,” in Istoriia kinootrasli v Rossii: upravleniie, proizvodstvo, prokat, ed. Valerii Fomin (Moscow: Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, 2012), 217-220. Online, accessed April 1, 2022, https://culture.gov.ru/upload/mkrf/mkdocs2013/21_01_2013_2.pdf.↩
14. Vinogradova, Maria. Prokofiev translations.↩
15. Evsei Goldovsky, Uzkoplenochnaia kinematografiia. Moscow: Kinofotoizdat, 1936.↩
16. Tsirkuliarno-informativnoe pis’mo № 2 (1927): 1. RGALI, F. 2495 (ODSK), Op. 1, Ed. hr. 2, 1927.↩
17. For more on the development of infrastructure for non-professional filmmaking in the post-Stalin period, see Maria Vinogradova, “Socialist Movie Making vs. Gosplan: Establishing an Infrastructure for the Soviet Amateur Cinema” (Czech: “Socialistická filmová tvorba vs. Gosplan: Budování infrastruktury sovětského amatérského filmu”), Iluminace 26, no. 2 (2016): 9-27.↩
18. Tsirkuliarno-informativnoe pis’mo № 2 (1927): 1. RGALI, F. 2495 (ODSK), Op. 1, Ed. hr. 2, 1927.↩
19. See, for instance, Dziga Vertov, “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 47-49.↩
20. Schneller als der Tod (French title: Face à la mort), 1925, was a German-French adventure film directed by Gérard Bourgeois and starring Harry Piel. In the USSR it was distributed under the title Korol’ triuka (“King of the Stunt”).↩
21. “Porcha fil’m,” Kino 27, July 6, 1926.↩
22. Mikhail Zharov, “Ot ‘Aelity’ do Aniskina,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (1975): 73.↩
23. On Soviet volunteer paramilitary societies of the 1920s, see William E. Odon, “Osoaviakhim’s Predecessors,” in The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureauracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princenton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 58-88. ↩
24. See, especially, Dziga Vertov, “Vremennaia instruktsiia kruzhkam ‘Kinoglaza’” [1926], in Stat’i, dnevniki, zamysly, ed. Sergei Drobashenko (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 95-9↩
25. Grigorii Boltianskii, Kinokhronika i kak ee snimat’ (Moscow: Kinopechat’, 1926), 30.↩
26. Ibid., 5.↩