Iron Curtain (64 page)
Authors: Anne Applebaum
As far as urban planning went, the combination of the reconstructed Old Town and the Palace of Culture was never successful, particularly when cheap, prefab apartment blocks were constructed around and in between them in subsequent decades. But in the end, the plan for the reconstruction of Warsaw was defeated not by its aesthetic mistakes but by Stalinist economics. Remarkably, the original plans had been drawn up without any consideration of costs. Because the heavy, elaborate buildings were expensive to construct, the money ran out before the façades were complete and the fountains and public sculptures were built. The grand rooms of the Palace of Culture also wasted heat, electricity, and space—no one had planned for energy efficiency, and the high cost of upkeep meant that the interiors quickly began to look tawdry. The reconstruction of the Old Town was not economically efficient either, for it did not take into consideration Warsaw’s urgent housing shortage. In the early 1950s, many young people still lived in primitive wooden dormitories, and they did not want to wait for the elaborate buildings to be finished. Within a very few years, all enthusiasm for both Stalinist projects and historical reconstruction had vanished. The city architects acknowledged, among themselves, that the bureau had failed to create any kind of coherence. In 1953, Sigalin told a group of them that “form was still lagging behind content.” He had not achieved an intellectual breakthrough after all.
At about the same time, Telakowska’s Bureau for Supervision of Production Aesthetics was defeated by socialist economics too. Despite the care that had been lavished upon them—and despite, in some cases, their high quality and originality—the hundreds of samples and avant-garde designs produced by Telakowska and her colleagues were never turned into elegant consumer products. As it turned out, Polish factories had no incentive to produce elegant consumer products: because there were shortages of everything,
anything that any factory produced would always find a buyer. Since prices were controlled, companies couldn’t charge more for a nicer vase designed by a team of famous artists than they could for a cheap and ugly vase, and they couldn’t pay more to the people who produced one either. Since factory managers were government employees on government salaries, they saw no need to exert any special effort.
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“Design for the workers” was ultimately of no interest to provincial bureaucrats and state factory managers. One art critic tactfully explained that “the leadership of the Industry Ministry completely understood the need to make art widely available—but at the level of the individual workplace, it was still not popular.” There was a Marxist explanation as well: “In the People’s Democracy, anarchy in the area of production has been replaced by socialist planning. However, in the realm of the aesthetic production of the articles of everyday life, anarchy, inherited from the era of capitalist economy, still remains.”
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By comparison to Western Europe, Polish consumer production—like East German, Hungarian, Czech, and Romanian consumer production—remained very poor in quality. Polish exports of glass and ceramics, historically a major source of income (as they are now once again) remained low. The bureaucrats responsible for choosing which products to export did not necessarily have the taste or instinct for good design.
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Output for the masses became, if anything, uglier than it ever had been, mostly because the vast majority of consumer products were rushed down assembly lines as cheaply and as quickly as possible.
Nor did the Bureau for Supervision of Production Aesthetics succeed in preserving traditional folk culture. The marketing of folk art was quickly taken over by another state company, Cepelia, which eventually became known for the production of repetitive wooden souvenirs. Cepelia has its defenders, including Jackowski, Poland’s preeminent scholar of folk art, who believes that Cepelia helped peasants make a living in a particularly difficult economic period. The “violent urbanization of the countryside” was going to destroy folk culture anyway, he argues—and besides, the demand for kitsch came from the cities, from the workers who eagerly purchased it.
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Telakowska went on to found the Institute for Industrial Design, which she ran for several years before resigning in 1968. Her influence did not last. A later generation of Polish artists dismissed her as a Stalinist and then forgot about her. She had proved that it was possible to work in conjunction with
the communist state, even if one was not a communist—but she had not proved that such cooperation could succeed.
By the time
Vsevolod Pudovkin paid his two visits to Budapest in 1950 and 1951, his days as a revolutionary Soviet filmmaker were long over. Along with
Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin had been one of the founders of Soviet experimental cinema. Famously, he once declared that film was a new art form and should be treated as such: movies should neither mirror everyday life nor duplicate the linear storytelling of a traditional novel. He had been so opposed to strict realism that he initially objected to the use of sound, on the grounds that it would force movies to become too much like plays. His most famous film,
Mother
—based on the novel by Maxim Gorky—was a 1926 silent movie that made liberal use of the then-new technique of montage. Pudovkin was one of the first directors to juxtapose different scenes and different points of view in order to heighten the emotional reactions of his audience.
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Unfortunately for Pudovkin—and for Eisenstein and the rest of the Soviet avant-garde—Stalin was an avid film buff, and he very much admired linear storytelling. As Stalin’s power increased, Pudovkin’s popularity declined. His films first failed to please the leader. Then they failed to please Soviet critics. Then they failed to please the cultural bureaucrats, who prevented Pudovkin from making any more of them. Eventually he dropped his old theories, abandoned experimental montage, and began making “realist” films in which communism triumphed, one way or another, over its enemies.
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It was at this late point in his no longer illustrious career that Pudovkin was sent to Budapest.
In principle, Pudovkin should have found it extremely difficult to teach Hungarian directors anything at all. Before the war, the Hungarian film industry had been the third largest in Europe and one of the world’s most sophisticated. In its technology and in its directors’ experience, it was far ahead of the Soviet Union. Hungarian film distribution was sophisticated too. A network of 500 cinemas had operated around the country before the war, at least half of which had not been destroyed and were still fully functional in 1945, far more than in Poland or Germany. Although anti-Semitic legislation had divided the industry in the 1930s (and resulted in an exodus of an extraordinarily talented group of Hungarian Jews to Hollywood), much of the
equipment remained. In Poland, by contrast, the postwar film industry was relaunched with cameras “captured” in Germany and removed as war booty.
The postwar Hungarian film industry had not started out with the goal of propagating communism either. In the summer following the liberation of Budapest, Hunnia, the most important Hungarian studio, applied successfully to the Soviet occupation forces for permission to begin operation as a state company. Hunnia’s carefully balanced new board of directors included three communist party members, two social democrats, officials from three government ministries, and some noncommunists as well. Private film production companies optimistically opened their doors for business at the same time. All of the four major parties founded film production companies and theoretically divided the movie theaters between them. In this, as in so many other things, the communist party was more equal than others: along with the social democrats the communists controlled the majority of the cinemas, as well as most of the funding.
Despite this relatively optimistic beginning, inflation prevented much progress—only three films were made in 1945 and none in 1946—and by the beginning of 1947 politics began to intervene too. In the summer of that year, István Szőts, a talented young director—he had won the main prize at the Venice film festival in 1942—began work on a film in conjunction with a private production company. The film,
Song of the Corn Field
(
Ének a búzamez
ő
kr
ő
l
), was based on an older novel about the tragic impact of the
First World War on a Hungarian peasant family, and it included a love affair between a Hungarian girl and a Russian POW. By all accounts Szőts adapted it with great success. But despite the Hungarian–Russian love theme he thought would protect him, Szőts had trouble with the censors. They disliked the religious scenes, which were a touch too powerful for their liking. They disliked the pacifist message, which was no longer politically correct. They also disliked the fact that the Hungarian peasants in the movie were so deeply attached to their land: that was an ill omen for a regime that was planning further land reforms and eventually collectivization. Szőts was surprised but he made some changes, declared the film finished, and, at least initially, received rapturous praise from those who saw the early screenings.
The praise did not last, as Szőts later remembered:
The premiere date and place were fixed when critics began attacking the film, saying it was reactionary, religious, and even that it supports
Mindszenty … Ten days before opening night, the film was banned without any justification … Finally the film was shown at party headquarters, though not to the end because Rákosi, when he saw the first scenes of [people] praying and singing for the beloved sons in the faraway country, stood up and went out in a demonstrative way … The case was closed, the film was banned.
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Song of the Corn Field
never appeared in theaters. Nor, after that, did any other privately produced films. In 1948 the industry was completely nationalized, Hunnia’s carefully balanced board of directors was dropped, and all pretense of artistic freedom was abandoned as well. Following Stalin’s example, József Révai, now minister of culture, began monitoring every aspect of film production, from planning to shooting. Wanting to leave nothing to chance, he immediately turned to the Soviet comrades for aesthetic advice. He invited the Soviet deputy minister of film to visit Budapest, who declared that “the first thing I can advise Hungarian film artists is that they must thoroughly study Soviet film … great art can only be made if you add your special Hungarian Bolshevik aesthetic to what you learn from us.”
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An invitation to Budapest was immediately extended to Pudovkin. Like schools, workplaces, and public space, cinemas were to become another venue for ideological education, and the Soviet director could show the Hungarians how to do it.
In later accounts, the Pudovkin who arrived in Budapest in 1950 is often described as a “broken man.” In his case the cliché seems accurate. His instincts for experimentalism had been quashed long ago. He had just been awarded the Stalin Prize for
Zhukovskii
, a dull, hagiographic film about the founder of the Soviet aeronautics industry. He could certainly teach Hungarians the psychology of subservience, but not much else. Pudovkin’s own descriptions of his experiences in Hungary are disappointingly stiff and not very revealing. If he was impressed by the architecture or the material culture of Budapest, which even after the war was still far wealthier than
Moscow, he never said so. If he admired anything about prewar Hungarian film, he never said that either.
Unusually, for a film director, there is no folk memory of Pudovkin flirting with Hungarian girls or drinking in the bar after work either. Instead, in a short book he published in Hungarian in 1952, he expounded on the importance of theory: “To understand life it is necessary to know Marxism-Leninism
… without political education it is impossible to make a movie.” He also wrote of the need for what Hollywood would call happy endings: “The drama has to show the struggle and the victory … of people walking on the path of socialism.” He highlighted the significance of positive role models: “Creating a positive character is one of the most difficult but beautiful tasks a socialist artist can ever have.” He criticized Western movies as “pessimistic” and praised the “organic optimism” of Soviet films.
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The director also gave extensive interviews to the press, one of which Szőts, now an ideological pariah, read with horror. In essence, Pudovkin argued that a historical film had to be ideologically accurate, not factually accurate:
The important thing, he said, is that a film should follow events as determined by the ideological argument. Everything that did not fit into that was considered false “naturalism,” something different from the ideological, historical reality necessary for this kind of film … No matter how much I had previously respected Pudovkin … after these comments I read in the press, I was glad not to have been introduced to him.
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But Pudovkin’s impact extended far beyond bland statements. In the Hungarian film industry, as in the Polish film industry, film projects had in the past been spearheaded by directors who conceived, designed, and organized the production of a new movie. In the Soviet Union, the leading role was played by scriptwriters who discussed with censors every aspect of a film, the themes as well as the dialogue, even before they began to write. Ironically, or perhaps tragically, Pudovkin—a director who had been an early master of visual, soundless imagery—imported this system to Hungary, and thus created a Hungarian studio system dominated by obedient scriptwriters and cultural bureaucrats. There was no avoiding his advice or influence: from 1948, anyone wishing to work as a director had to be a graduate of the Hungarian Academy for Theater and Film Art. Until 1959, they could offer their services to only one studio, Hunnia, later renamed
Mafilm. During that period, every filmscript had to pass through several stages of ministerial approval, as did every finished film.