Soviet Films in Britain 1928–45

Abstract

It has been known since March 1928 that the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) had in 1926 colluded with the Home Office, under Conservative Sir William Joynson-Hicks, to keep Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) out of the new mass electorate’s sight during the mid-1920s. This first came to light during Herbert Wilcox’s eventual defeat of the Foreign Office and the BBFC over their efforts, at German instigation, to suppress his feature Dawn (1927), an account of the 1915 trial and execution of Edith Cavell by the Germans (Robertson 1984). Wilcox’s success led the Film Society, an organisation founded in London in 1925 by upper-class intellectuals, to try to emulate him over Soviet films. The leading role in this campaign was undertaken by Ivor Montagu, a peer’s Communist son with film industry experience, who had visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and thereafter for a time in the late 1920s and early 1930s corresponded with directors Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin over film technique. Montagu also conducted a running battle with the BBFC over political and other types of censorship throughout the 1930s (Turvey 2000). This article examines how Soviet films were treated before and during the Second World War by the BBFC and by certain local authorities, who possessed the legal power to ban or cut films due to be shown in their areas. The relevant events opened early in 1928, when Montagu submitted directly to the London County Council (LCC) and Middlesex County Council the famed Battleship Potemkin, which deals with a sailors’