Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agrarian Transition

Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agrarian Transition Benjamin Crais (bio) “There is no material more discredited in cinema than the village. There is nothing more difficult, nothing more frightening for the director. Yet there is nothing more necessary.”1 So begins an article published by Sergei Eisenstein in 1926 upon commencing work on The General Line (1929). Secured by the mythic status of the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), wherein the “first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory,” cinema has often been taken to be the art of industrial modernity.2 Following what Inga Pollmann identifies as a “mutual definition of cinema as a modern medium and modernity as cinematic,” film scholars have often situated prewar European cinema within the context of urbanization, mass consumption, industrial production, and other hallmarks of modernity (of which, as Pollmann writes, cinema is understood to be emblematic).3 Yet, over thirty years after Auguste and Louis Lumière pointed their camera at the factory gates, Eisenstein would declare that the most urgent task facing cinema lay in peasant villages. Cinema, he exhorted, must “make images of agricultural character and chronicles” to compel the people of early Soviet Russia to face the “urgent” problem of peasant agriculture and its modernization. Three years later and under [End Page 138] a new title, Eisenstein’s agrarian film was released.4 “How might we write a history of cinema,” Brian R. Jacobson asks, that makes concerns with nature as “central to the narrative as technological and stylistic innovations or the worlds of machines, technologies, and urban life?”5 This essay considers The General Line—a depiction of the introduction of industrial technology and collective property relations to a rural peasant village—as opening onto such a history on the basis of industrial modernity’s unevenness. Indexing this unevenness is what in the history of Marxist theory has been referred to as “the agrarian question” (after Karl Kautsky’s book of the same name). “In its broadest meaning,” T. J. Byres writes, “the agrarian question may be defined as the continuing existence in the countryside of a poor country of substantive obstacles to an unleashing of the forces capable of generating economic development, both inside and outside agriculture.”6 At the time of the film’s production, the peasantry constituted around 80 percent of the entire Russian population and worked with agricultural equipment that, in the words of one observer, was “at least as old as the Pharaohs.”7 Leon Trotsky, surveying the conditions that had enabled the Bolsheviks to make the revolution of 1917, developed the concept of “combined and uneven development” to analyze the conjunction between the peasant countryside and the presence of heavy industry in the cities. Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, he argued, was characterized by political, social, and economic backwardness and simultaneously—due to its integration in global capitalist markets—relatively advanced industrial production. “At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects outstripped them.”8 In the 1920s, Russia’s unevenness became especially problematic for the new Bolshevik government, as the success or failure of the communist project appeared to rest on the resolution of the problem of the Russian peasantry. The classical agrarian question, Sam Moyo, Praveen Jha, and Paris Yeros write, “was essentially the agrarian question of industrialization,” and this was the form the problem took for the early Bolshevik government.9 In the wake of the German Revolution’s failure, the Bolsheviks faced the problem of industrializing as an isolated country and experienced frequent breakdowns in the flow of agricultural goods and commodities between the country and the city (not least because in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period the peasantry were no longer compelled to supply grain). In the lead-up to Joseph Stalin’s [End Page 139] implementation of the first Five-Year Plan, the question of how to raise agricultural productivity...