The General Line, a.k.a. Old and New (Sovkino, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 24) I dug out one of my grey-label DVD’s and showed my husband Charles one of the few films directed by Sergei Eisenstein I’d never seen before: The General Line, a.k.a. Old and New (1929). This was Eisenstein’s fourth feature and was made at the request of the Soviet government, which was on a mission to collectivize Russian agriculture and wanted a propaganda film that would encourage Russian peasants to give up their attachment to private land holdings and join collective farms. The film begins with a scene in which two feuding brothers divide the farm they inherited from their father and put up fences between their holdings. To the extent that the film has a central character, it is Marfa Lapkina (playing a character with her own name), a farm woman who’s anxious to improve life for herself and her farming brethren and sistren by bringing the various small plots of land together and using economies of scale. To do this, she first brings in a cream separator – a bit of a surprise since her farm started out with just one cow and it was being used not to produce milk but as a beast of burden – and tries to organize the local cow owners into a dairy cooperative. Then Marfa, working with a local Soviet agronomist, tries to mechanize her farm as much as possible, including a threshing machine to harvest and bundle hay and a tractor to pull the wagons in which the harvested crops are placed to be transported.

Eisenstein and his collaborator, Grigori Alexandrov (who’s credited as co-director as well as co-writer), seem a bit unclear as to just what sort of large, organized farm Marfa and her associates are creating: a kohlkoz (“collective farm”), in which the land would be collectively owned by the peasants who tilled it and they would share in the farm’s profits; or a sovkhoz (“state farm”), in which the land was owned by the government and the farmers were paid salaries like farmworkers under capitalist agribusiness. Both terms appear in their intertitles. At one point Marfa decides that she needs a tractor immediately to bring in that year’s harvest – though we’ve already seen a tractor on her farm pulling the threshing machine (maybe we were supposed to assume that one was a loaner) – and she pleads with the local Soviet bureaucracy to be given one. At first she’s turned down on the ground that they can’t fund her for anything until her harvest crops are actually brought in, but ultimately her pleas succeed as one bureaucrat tells the others to follow “the general line” (the only explanation we get for the film’s title) and let her have the tractor. I was amused at the irony that I was seeing this film shortly after having watched the 1950 movie Summer Stock, Judy Garland’s last MGM musical, which also cast her as a farm woman begging a bureaucracy (a capitalist rather than a Communist one, this being the U.S.A.) to give her a tractor.

It was also ironic that Charles and I were watching another Soviet film made in 1929 just days after we’d seen Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera – and, not surprisingly, Vertov was fiercely critical of Eisenstein for still being rooted in theatrical conventions of storytelling instead of embracing the truly new possibilities of cinema as an art form. The General Line takes a rather odd turn in the last half-hour as Eisenstein introduces some human villains (earlier there have been some extreme close-ups of locusts, but Eisenstein’s editing juxtaposes the locusts with the mechanical blades of the thresher and the impression we get is that the machine is doing the harvest so quickly the locusts don’t have time to eat the grain). The bad people are the kulaks, relatively privileged agricultural landowners who became the great villains in the Soviet push for collective farming. They decide to starve the local collective into submission by poisoning the collective’s cow, which they’re relying on for dairy products to sustain them through the long winter. There are also some swipes at faith, both an elaborate Russian Orthodox parade held to pray for rain (which, of course, doesn’t come) and a weird character (E. Suhareva) identified as a witch, who boils frogs to cast a spell over the cow and make sure it dies just in case the poison wasn’t enough to do it in. (Yes, I know cows are female, but using “her” as its pronoun would only be confusing as to which was the antecedent – the witch or the cow.)

According to Wikipedia, Eisenstein actually started shooting The General Line in 1927 but broke off filming to make October (1928), his brilliant dramatization of the Bolshevik revolution. By the time he returned to the project, Joseph Stalin had definitively won his power struggle against Leon Trotsky and the film had to be hastily re-edited to accommodate Stalin’s line, which was essentially to force collectivization down the throats of Soviet farmers whether they wanted it or not. One fault in the film is that the benefits of collectivization happen far faster than they would have in real life – Eisenstein and Alexandrov were both urbanites with little feel for the realities of country life – and the film is best remembered for stunning individual sequences, like the one with the cream separator and the elaborate “wedding” ceremony in which Eisenstein stretches out the sequence for as long as he can before finally showing us that the “bride” is a cow and the “groom” is a bull. There’s also a brilliant ending scene in which the new tractor mows down the fences that formerly separated the farmers’ individual plots. One imdb.com reviewer faulted the film for its unabashed collectivist propaganda – they headlined their review, “Its message is about as subtle as a nudist at a Baptist potluck dinner!”

In his 1939 article on the state of Soviet cinema Dwight MacDonald conjectured that Eisenstein had been bored by the film’s political theme and had indulged himself in such virtuoso cinematic fireworks as the cream-separator sequence and the “wedding” of the cow and the bull (which seems to produce a whole army of calves far faster than nature could have provided). It’s perfectly clear that as a theme for a film, collective farming inspired Eisenstein quite a bit less than the revolutionary struggles depicted in his three previous films, Strike!, Battleship Potemkin, and October. Still, he got a killer performance from Marfa Lapkina (a real farm woman he cast after all the professional actresses he interviewed admitted that they didn’t know how to milk a cow, run a plow, or guide a tractor – not that this was unusual casting practice for Eisenstein; in October Lenin was played by a Moscow butcher with no acting experience because he looked strikingly like the real one), and the film has some really striking individual shots even if it doesn’t build the revolutionary (in both senses, political and cinematic) energy of Potemkin or October!