Bezhin Meadow - Production

Production

Herbert Marshall argued that by 1931, government interference in Soviet artistic work was already well established, in various forms: from peers of the artists, guided by 'above'; from "the different circles competent to judge it"; and ultimately from the Communist Party and Stalin himself. This all led to the failed production of Bezhin Meadow.

Before production of the film began, the script by Aleksandr Rzheshevsky was well received by Eisenstein, but there were initial concerns about the quality of the plot and characterization involved. The commission for the production was issued by the Communist Youth League, or Komsomol, to honor their efforts in supporting collective farm work, and was to focus on "the socialist reconstruction of the countryside". Filming began in the middle of 1935, and in October 1935 the first developed film was presented to the Mosfilm Studio, which was producing Bezhin Meadow. The studio requested changes, and production continued. In August 1936, with most of the principal filming done, Boris Shumyatsky, the then-head of the Soviet GUK (Principal Directorate for the Cinema) ordered a halt in production and directed that the film be re-written. The script was again revised, with Eisenstein acknowledging errors in his production after a further version was rejected by the studio. During the creation of Bezhin Meadow, Eisenstein did not widely screen footage of the film for review.

Production on the unreleased film cost 2 million rubles, and spanned two years. When casting the production, Eisenstein had preferred to not use professional actors, instead using people who represented "types" to play a given role. Two thousand young boys were auditioned during the search for the ideal young actor to play the part of Stepok, the renamed Morozov character. Filming took place in many locations, primarily in Moscow studios, and remote locations in the Ukraine and the Caucasus. During production, Eisenstein had the foresight to save the edited-out frames from every shot in the film, which allowed for the later reconstruction of Bezhin Meadows in the 1960s, even though the original prints were destroyed.

The Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party required that it screen and approve Bezhin Meadow before its release. Multiple versions of the film were banned by the Committee, which cited them as "inartistic and politically bankrupt", and claimed that Eisenstein "confused the class struggle with the struggle between good and evil". By an order from the Chief Directorate of Soviet Cinema, production of the film was stopped permanently on March 17, 1937. Shumyatsky complained that Eisenstein had presented the conflicts of the film in somewhat Biblical terms, rather than placing the conflicts of the film in the context of the socialist class struggle. Eisenstein himself would later say that the murder of Stepok by his father was "reminiscent of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac".

After the film's final rejection, Shumyatsky took responsibility for the failure in the Soviet media, with an essay detailing the film's history in Pravda. According to Shumyatsky, Bezhin Meadow was a slander against the Soviet countryside, and an example of Formalism that needed to be eliminated. Shumyatsky went on to say, " making Bezhin Meadow only because it offered him an opportunity to indulge in formalistic exercises. Instead of creating a strong, clear, direct work, Eisenstein detached his work from reality, from the colors and heroism of reality. He consciously reduced the work's ideological content." Shumyatsky would lose his government position two years later, when he was charged with being an English spy, arrested, and shot. One of the reasons Shumyatsky gave for shutting down production of Bezhin Meadow was that Eisenstein was wasting money and resources in producing it; conversely, before his execution, Shumyatsky himself was charged with wasting money and resources by cancelling films such as Bezhin Meadow. The suppression of Bezhin Meadow was also said to be part of an ongoing campaign against the artistic avant-garde in Joseph Stalin's Russia.

Following the order to stop production of the film from the Soviet government and Shumyatsky, Eisenstein contracted smallpox, followed afterwards by influenza, and the film was destined to remain unfinished. He worked further on the story with the Soviet author Isaac Babel, but no material was ever published or released from their collaboration, and the production of Bezhin Meadow came to an end. The unfinished and unreleased film reels were destroyed during a World War II bombing raid in 1941. In a later published response to Shumyatsky titled "The Mistakes of Bezhin Meadow", Eisenstein pledged he would "rid myself of the last anarchistic traits of individualism in my outlook and creative method". Eisenstein finally wrote, "What caused catastrophe to overtake the picture I had worked on for two years? What was the mistaken viewpoint which, despite honesty of feelings and devotion to work, brought the production to a perversion of reality, making it politically insubstantial and consequently inartistic?"