Introduction to Sergei Tretyakov: The Industry Production Screenplay

Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1937), a celebrated Soviet playwright, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and theorist, is perhaps best known in the West as one of the first translators and popularizers of Brecht and as an acknowledged source for Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer." In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, he played an important cultural role as part of a larger network of cosmopolitan leftist avant-garde artists and critics.

As early as 1923 Tretyakov was writing essays on experimentation in Soviet cinema, and in the course of the following two decades, he became one of the most prolific—and polemical—essayists advocating for documentary approaches to cinema. In the 1920s and 1930s Tretyakov published a total of about fifty articles on cinema, many of them in LEF, a radical cultural journal (1923-1925) whose objective was to "re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art's value for developing communism." After the dissolution of LEF, Tretyakov continued writing for Novyi LEF (The new LEF) magazine (1927-1928), which he also coedited. There, along with such important figures as Victor Shklovsky, Esfir Shub, and Dziga Vertov, he helped to rearticulate the avant-garde turn toward a new realist model, based on the "fixation of facts" as the foundation for socialist art.

Tretyakov's work in theater brought him into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, whose 1923 production of The Wise Man, based on a play by Ostrovsky, was adapted by Tretyakov. Over the following two years, Eisenstein directed two more plays based on Tretyakov's original texts, Are You Listening, Moscow? and Gasmasks, and he collaborated with Tretyakov on the intertitles for Potemkin (1925). In 1924, Tretyakov published an essay expanding on Eisenstein's notion of montage of attractions, which originated in their collaborative work for theater.¹ The same year Tretyakov accepted an invitation to teach Russian literature at Peking University in China, an experience that had long-lasting impact on his artistic work. Upon his return he published his travel notes under the title of "travelfilm" ( put'fil'ma), which was one of his first attempts to conceptualize journalistic writing under the aesthetic forms being developed in cinema, a preoccupation that would continue throughout his life.

In addition to his creative and theoretical work, Tretyakov was actively involved in the institutional development of Soviet cinema—in education and production—and its agitational work abroad.² In 1925, he became a member of the artistic committee of the first Moscow film factory, Goskino. In 1927, he spent half a year in Georgia to agitate for the development of the documentary section of the Georgian film industry, and he also consulted on several films which were adapted from his scripts, including Salt for Svanetia (Sol' dlia Svanetii; Mihkail Kalatozoshvili, 1930).

In 1929, he was a member of the Bureau for the Organization of Cultural Cinema as part of the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography. It was in this larger institutional context that he wrote his most widely known text, the 1928 essay "Our Cinema,"³ which was included (in German, French, and English) in the brochure for the Soviet section of the International Film Exhibition in The Hague.

Throughout his work, Tretyakov was a harsh opponent of the individualist auteurist vision of cinema, viewing it, instead, as the kind of collective industrial endeavor that made it a uniquely appropriate media for a socialist society. His cinematic theory combined an emphasis on the primacy of the raw materiality of the profilmic sets and film's own photographic qualities with the conscious engineering of such filmic material through montage, thus putting on an equal theoretical footing the material composition of the film and the organization of labor in all other domains of social and political reality. He explicitly rejected the primacy of either form or content in the arts, arguing that primacy should always be accorded to the social function of the artwork. That function was divided between two key subfunctions—the demonstration of the social facts and the activation of the spectator. Thus, Tretyakov proposed that...