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ABSTRACT
In this article, I argue that Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svaneti and A Nail in the Boot serve as examples of the production film and chart the evolving relationship of early Georgian cinema to Soviet (film) production. The term ‘production film’ here delineates a category of early Soviet films that focus predominantly on the production process. I provide a framework for reading Kalatozov’s films as production films within the history of the Georgian Film Studio, tracing the influence of Sergei Tret’iakov and his writings on the production screenplay, as well as within contemporary research on industrial film as a genre, which has tended to overlook Soviet cinema. On a formal level, I interpret scenes of the production process as organised according to the worker’s gaze in the discussed films. The worker’s gaze functions as a device to entice the spectator, imagined as a worker, to participate in and reflect on socialist construction. Reading Kalatozov’s Salt for Svaneti and A Nail in the Boot as production films complicates the centre-periphery model and the standpoint of national cinema in the context of Georgian cinema’s emergence as a significant force in Soviet film production.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Edward Tyerman for inviting me to participate in this cluster and for his guidance and feedback as I worked through various drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the UC Berkeley Kruzhok and Slavic Colloquium for listening to and offering comments on earlier drafts of this paper in November 2022 and October 2023, respectively.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For a transcript of and introduction to these debates see (Anemone Citation2015).
2. For simplicity and following the examples of White and Dzandzava (Citation2015) and Anemone (Citation2015), I refer to Goskinprom Gruzii as ‘Georgian Film Studio’, where Kalatozov would direct his first films. In 1938, the studio became the Tbilisi Film Studio (Tbilisskaia kinostudiia) and in 1953, Georgia-Film (Gruziia-Fil’m).
3. In between Salt for Svaneti and Courage, Kalatozov did direct the documentary The 15th Anniversary of Soviet Georgia (15-letiie Sovetskoi Gruzii, 1935). Between 1934–36 Kalatozov served as chairman of the Georgian Film Studio. Writing off ‘spy-mania’ as a possible reason, Anemone (Citation2015, 128) attributes A Nail in the Boot’s shelving to the polemic published in Proletarskoe kino.
4. I take my understanding of periphery in this article largely from the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (Citation1974) in the context of World Systems Theory. Here, periphery is seen as a place of extraction in favour of a ‘core’, or in spatial terms ‘centre’. In the context of Soviet cinema, the question of ‘Cinema for the East’ was one place this relationship between periphery and core manifested. Should the film studios of the ‘Soviet East’, under greater capital constraints than Sovkino or VUFKU, produce films that exoticised their national culture for profit or films that addressed common questions of modernisation but were less financially successful? See Smith (Citation1997) for a discussion of ‘Cinema for the East’ in the context of Soviet Azerbaijan.
5. All translations from Russian are mine unless a translated source is cited.
6. ‘What is immediately suggested by the cinematic mode of production (CMP), properly understood, is that a social relation that emerged as “the cinema” is today characteristic of sociality generally’ (Beller Citation2006, 18).
7. One can see the rhetorical uptake of ‘the mass spectator’ in a 1931 overview of Georgian film production by Georgian-born playwright Sergei Amaglobeli. In his article ‘Class Warfare in Georgian Cinema’, Amaglobeli (Citation1931, 36) described the formalist tendency in Georgian cinema at the turn of the decade as socially reactionary and ‘pseudo-revolutionary’, singling out Kalatozov and Shengalaia in his article: ‘[These films] divert the attention of the working spectator from contemporary questions of revolutionary struggle and socialist construction and direct him to the backward moments of the past with its romantic aspirations. [Cinema] has presented Georgian reality of the last century in its most backward features to the mass spectator of the Soviet Union, passing this off as modernity’.
8. I use ‘production film’ as, in my view, the best term to describe the phenomenon of early Soviet non-fiction films that depict the production process, particularly during the First Five-Year Plan. While the Soviet production film, it could be argued, goes beyond the early period of Soviet cinema – taken roughly up to 1938 – such research is outside the scope of this paper. Some examples of early Soviet films that could be considered production films include Dziga Vertov’s films, Abram Room’s Jews on the Land (Evrei na zemle, 1927), Iurii Zheliabuzhskii’s Another Life (Drugaia zhizn’ 1928), Eisenstein’s Old and New (Staroe i novoe, 1929) and Viktor Turin’s Turksib (1929).
9. See Jennifer Peterson’s (Citation2005) entry on ‘industrial films’ in The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. The term industrial cinema itself hails from a long tradition of actualités and, starting in the 1910s, early documentary shorts that depicted commerce for a variety of industrial organisations that often commissioned these films.
10. According to Skvirsky (Citation2020, 17), the ‘process genre’ is a transmedial genre that is most visible in cinema. All films in the process genre (i.e., process films) share the formal characteristic of ‘processual representation’, which is to say, the illumination of the various perspectives inherent to the complex nature of labour and its valorisation within profilmic reality.
11. Some examples of other films that fit the framework of the production film and were produced by the Georgian Film Studio include N. Gogoberidze’s Buba (1930), R. Mirvis’ The Great World (Velikii Svet, 1930) and I. Posel’skii’s A Day in Batumi (Den’ v Batum, 1935).
12. A helpful definition of how the gaze functions in cinema comes from film theorist Peter Wollen (Citation2007, 92) who, building on Vertov’s montage theory and the later theoretical work of Laura Mulvey, argues that the gaze operates as a composite point-of-view shot from ‘three looks – those of camera, spectator and character’. Kalatozov’s early films, I argue, minimise the distinction between the look of the labourer represented on screen and the look of the spectator who visually receives these images, thereby seeking to exploit the cinematic apparatus as a tool to move from the abstract character of recognition, or looking, to the material character of labour: in somewhat crude theoretical terms, a move from Hegel to Marx.
13. As historian Claire Kaiser (Citation2022, 24) has been recently argued, Soviet Tbilisi itself, the home of the studio, complicates the binary of centre and periphery: ‘Tbilisi emerged as an imperial centre in its own right, from the vantage points of autonomous regions within Georgia, the Georgian diaspora, and even (for a time) the TSFSR’.
14. For an in-depth account of LEF and Tret’iakov’s visits to Soviet Georgia, see (Nikol’skaia Citation2010); Irina Ratiani (in Tret’iakov Citation2010); (Razor Citation2020).
15. Among the first examples of non-fiction cinema in Soviet Georgia was a newsreel entitled Their Kingdom (Ikh tsarstvo, 1928), directed by Kalatozov and Gogoberidze. The film is composed of recycled footage from the Menshevik newsreel the Independence Chronicles (White and Dzandzava Citation2015).
16. Edward Tyerman (Citation2021, 6) has traced the origin of Tret’iakov’s ‘documentary principles’ to the writer’s early work in China, motivated by a desire to counteract ‘an exotic fantasy that constituted a form of commodity fetishism’.
17. For a thorough investigation of how Tret’iakov’s production screenplay was implemented in other feature films at the Georgian Film Studio, see ‘Author as Producer: The Georgian Screenplays of Sergei Tretiakov’ in Razor (Citation2020, 105–147).
18. For a thorough discussion of Vertov’s discursive practice of agitation, see ‘Agitation and Propaganda’ in Mackay (Citation2019, 242–256).
19. The definition of kulturfilm, a moniker adopted from the German film industry, is a notoriously fraught one, particularly in the Soviet case. Sarkisova (Citation2017, 3) opts for a broad definition of kulturfilm ‘as didactic films implying the status of objective truth’. The term operated in the early Soviet context, when the language of ‘documentary film’ did not yet exist, as a descriptor for all non-fiction films. In particular, Soviet kulturfilms often had a strong interest in the ethnographic documenting of local traditions and different ways of life in the Soviet Union as a way to educate its citizens about other cultures.
20. According to Widdis (Citation2017, 269), the camera here takes ‘pleasure in the faktura of the materials shown, its focus on the contact between hand and material, and the emphasis on the tactile immediacy of the life as lived’.
21. As Sasha Razor (Citation2020, 130) notes, Tret’iakov documented these rituals in his reportages from his visit to Svaneti. According to Katinov (Citation1932, 32), the Georgian Film Studio arranged a screening for the film for twenty-five Svans, who collectively criticised the film for factual inaccuracies in its depiction of these rituals.
22. As Marianne Kamp (Citation2006) has demonstrated focusing on Soviet Uzbekistan, the women of the periphery were critical to the Bolshevik’s unveiling, both literally and figuratively, of the patriarchal core of pre-socialist societies.
23. I follow here the claim of Radunović (Citation2014, 49) about Georgian cinema’s ‘ongoing negotiation between national and transnational definitional frameworks’. My claim strengthens Radunović’s point and his own brief analysis of Salt for Svaneti by mapping how this negotiation occurs formally in Salt for Svaneti through its representation of the worker’s evolving identity.
24. Mikhail Kol’tsov (Citation1934) notably applied the term ‘international’ to describe the relationship between national republics in the Soviet Union, much in the manner, as Siegelbaum and Moch (Citation2016) note, that one would apply transnational today. They justify the admittingly anachronistic use of transnational to understand the migration of labour across national republic borders in the Soviet Union.
25. The English parable, ‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost’ is recalled by Kalatozov’s biographer German Kremlev (Citation1964) as a source of inspiration for the film.
26. Siko Palavandishvili was also cast in Salt for Svaneti. He is the worker (in ) who appears from outside the film’s diegesis and proclaims, ‘look spectator.’
27. On the collar of the Red Army soldiers, for example, the abbreviation ‘7BPD’ is legible. The Seventh Division of Armoured Tanks (7BPD) was positioned in Transcaucasia. Kalatozov further dedicates the film to the Transcaucasian Division of the journal ‘The Young Labourer’ (Molodoi rabochii). Yet, within the film’s fabula, the question of ethnic representation is indeed absent.
28. The moniker ‘ARKers’ refers to participants and contributors to the film trade organisation A.R.K. (The Association of Revolutionary Cinematography), formed in 1924.
29. Kalatozov (Citation1932, 36) claimed that Katinov mistook in his criticism these soldiers as real soldiers rather than what they truly were, namely workers. He also took aim against the ironic formalism of the anti-formalist campaign: ‘Katinov’s formalist blindness reduced the content of [A Nail in the Boot] to form and prevented him from seeing that for us the story of the nail is not just a formal device but is about the problem of the quality of production’. I take Kalatozov’s point not as a rejection of formal devices, but rather an insistence that formal devices must impart a specific function.
30. The train crash sequence can be seen as a post-script to the construction of roads in Salt for Svaneti. What happens when a faulty product threatens the functionality of modern infrastructure for the distribution of goods and resources?
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Filip Sestan
Filip Sestan is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has also pursued Designated Emphases in Film Studies and Critical Theory. He holds a B.A. from Yale University (2020) and an M.A. from UC Berkeley (2022).