Harry Alan Potamkin: Film Criticism, Race and the Jews

Harry Alan Potamkin, the American Marxist film critic who died young in 1933, has long been the subject of attempts from his left wing fan base to ‘honour’ and ‘revive’ his memory. These have been partially successful as it doesn’t take long when you read ‘Film Studies’ literature to come across him (1) and his mythologised career. (2)

I say mythologised, because Potamkin only wrote for left wing publications for a grand total of six years (1927 to 1933) and his output is hardly what I would call voluminous. There superficially seems to be a lot of it to be sure, but it doesn’t take long when reading Potamkin to find large sections of his ‘reviews’ and theoretical articles are lifted wholesale from his earlier work or just slightly re-worded to make them seem new and fresh.

A good example of this are his comments on David Wark Griffith (or D.W. Griffith as he is usually known) when he word-for-word repeats all or part of his early critique of Griffith in at least seven later articles I have read. Another is his comments on the British right wing periodical, ‘The Patriot’, of which he repeats his initial (if rather amusing) attempt at criticism and contempt in two later articles.

Potamkin, the son of a Russian fish pedlar who was radicalized politically during a visit to Paris in 1927, (3) seems to have felt a deep animosity towards Griffith. We can see this in his charging the latter with appealing to ‘false sentimentalism’. (4) Although Potamkin tries to make his criticism sound more objective and less political and personal by claiming that Griffith was originally innovative, but has stopped being so.

It should not blind us to the political origins of a lot of his film criticism, which even his apologists like Lewis Jacobs (5) and Stephanie van Schilt (6) think is both obvious and simply ugly. For example Potamkin’s unfounded assertion that Griffith’s ideas and cinema were similar to Italian Fascism (7) and his later claim that it had a direct relationship with it are clearly political and not cinematic criticism. (8)

Other examples of Potamkin attempting to dress up political criticism as cinematic criticism include the laughable oft-made assertion that Griffith’s work promotes racism against black people (9) and the amusing notion that Griffith’s films are too ‘aristocratic to appeal to the workers’. (10) Hence when Potamkin styles Griffith’s cinematic work as ‘the waxen school of pathos’; (11) we know to take his claims with more than just a pinch of salt.

That said Potamkin’s aversion was more than just political; it was personal. This he admitted a short time before his death in his unpublished article ‘More Remarks on Griffith’, written in 1931/1932, where he stated that his aversion of Griffith, and why he ranked the (non-jewish) Soviet director Pudovkin higher, was for personal and ideological reasons not for technical ones. (12)

The personal element of Potamkin’s criticism of Griffith is most obvious in the fact that continually attacks Griffith for having ancestors who fought for the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War. Therefore to Potamkin Griffith is the enemy and an inferior director, because of what Potamkin associates his ancestry with not because there are any serious technical objections that Potamkin has to make. (13)

We should also note that Potamkin’s non-cinematic ‘criticism’, such as it is, is hilariously trite and simply recycled from Communist Party USA press organs. Examples of such include his bemusing assertion that German National Socialism was the ‘virulent stage of capitalism’ (a line taken by the German Communist Party [KPD] since at least 1929) (14) and his contradicting himself to the effect that ‘Fascism killed Italian Cinema’, (15) but yet ‘Italian artists prefigured Fascism in their work’. (16)

It is also worth noting that Potamkin’s use and understanding of dialectical materialism is rather suspect as well since he asserts that ‘Worker’s Cinema’ is superior because of its ‘Marxist objectivity’. (17)

One wonders, of course, how the USSR’s cinematic offerings can be superior, because they are from ‘workers’ when ‘workers’ in Marxism encompasses both the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary proletariat. This therefore implies that anti-Marxist ‘Worker’s Cinema’ (i.e. the anti-thesis) would per force be just as good as Marxist ‘Worker’s Cinema’ (i.e. the thesis) in order to create a new synthesis (presumably ‘Socialist Cinema’).

Comparatively Potamkin later asserted that the director Pudovkin was the thesis and Eisenstein the anti-thesis of Soviet cinema, which was leading to a new and greater synthesis. This he felt demonstrated the ‘truth’ of dialectical materialism, (18) but yet he forgot that Pudovkin and Eisenstein were, and are, not objective categories and elements, but rather two cinematic directors and as such there would be many, many different theses or anti-theses, which would drastically differ from each other as well as those of their own ‘kind’.

Therefore rendering the use of dialectical materialism not only redundant due to lack of objectivity in the categories/elements used, but also an intellectual fossil that refuses to evolve itself while it states that everything else is evolving.

That Potamkin tried to use dialectical materialism, albeit very badly, in one instance to demonstrate the ‘truth’ of his Marxist faith, but yet actively refrained from using it another instance. Where it would have given him an uncomfortable answer suggests that in reality Potamkim barely understood what he professed to believe was the absolute truth and reacted with censorship to uncomfortable intellectual situations, which challenged that faith.

A similar such approach is used by Potamkin in regards to the subject of race as portrayed and explored in cinema. He claims that black people are portrayed in ‘legendary form’ (19) and are as the ‘White man likes to see them’. (20) This, according to Potamkin, is portraying them as congenitally simple/stupid and/or as comic relief. (21)

The fact that black people, as a biological group of humans, might be less intelligent that white people never seems to have occurred to Potamkin, but this has been measured and demonstrated via intelligence testing (i.e. IQ measuring the mathematical variable ‘g’) and none of the many attempts to do so over the last century has been successful in altering this fact. (22)

This was all known in Potamkin’s day, but ‘non-proletarian’ science was evil according to the religion of Marxism that he followed and the USSR was busy manufacturing fake science in the form of Trofim Lysenko to attack the whole concept of genetics. (23)

Given that significant differences between human races in both physiology and behaviour are well known and scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt and were then as now. It is reasonable to assert that Potamkin’s claims about the ‘legendary form’ of the portrayal of blacks is not ‘legendary’ at all, but rather it is Potamkin who is portraying blacks in ‘legendary form’.

We can see this demonstrated in his assertion that there was ‘increasing cohesion’ between ‘white and black workers’ in South Africa and as this was a threat to the South African authorities; they simply racialised the whites workers to split the white workers from the black ones. (24)

Potamkin had never been to South Africa and knew little to nothing of the conditions that prevailed there. There was no such ‘increasing cohesion’ and the ‘black workers’ were primarily drawn from, and who maintained their loyalty to, the various tribal communities, such as the Xhosa and the Zulu, that lived within the borders of South Africa and didn’t tend to interact much with white workers.

Yet it didn’t stop him making such a ludicrous claim based no doubt on various rose-tinted reports in the Communist/left wing press on the subject. This suggests that Potamkin was drawing his narrative not from first hand objective sources, as he likes to imply he is doing, but rather getting his information from a party press with an extraordinarily strong ideological attachment to seeing presages to ‘world revolution’ in just about anything (even if they had to make them up).

This per force means that it is Potamkin who is drawing blacks in legendary form as he is both denying the objective findings of science and also drawing his information from suspect sources. Reinforcing this is the fact that Potamkin’s ideology had long denied there was any such thing as physiological differences between human groups, despite trite howls in the direction of it being ‘scientific’, as Marxism is econocentric and believes humanity is a indistinguishable amorphous brown mass rather than the obvious reality of human diversity.

We can further demonstrate this by pointing out that comparative to Griffith, who had extensive experience with blacks in the southern United States, Potamkin had little experience with blacks and black culture, but that didn’t stop him labelling Griffith as portraying blacks in legendary form. (25)

The irony is that Potamkin claimed that while Griffith’s legendary film ‘Birth of a Nation’ encouraged racism against blacks and had contributed to increasing Ku Klux Klan membership; (26) even referring to it as the Klan’s ‘Bible’. (27) Yet he, as previously stated, also claimed that White people wouldn’t dare talk to blacks like they did in films.

I rather think the Ku Klux Klan did and that was sort of the point of the organization; so one wonders how can have a situation where whites won’t dare talk to blacks like they do in American films of the period, but yet are increasingly joining a mass organization, which did just that.

One wonders how Potamkin would have solved that contradiction or whether he would have simply imploded and appealed to ideology as opposed to reason.

We can see a similar, but an infinitely more interesting, aspect to Potamkin’s writings on the subject of the jews, which Potamkin also, rightly, framed as a racial/national question rather than one of religious confession. (28)

Potamkin’s worship, through his faith in Marxism, of the Soviet Union left him in a rather difficult and contradictory situation in regards to the jews. He avidly denied and raged about the portrayal of the revolutionaries in both the 1905 and 1917 revolution as being jewish; (29) even though it is - then as well as now - well-known that jews were significantly and disproportionately represented among the revolutionaries (30) as well among the top Soviet leadership and bureaucracy up to the eve of the Second World War. (31)

This would have been well-known to Potamkin as two of his closest friends, Irving Lerner (32) and Herman Weinberg, (33) were jewish members of the Communist Party USA, while his wife Elizabeth Goldmann was also a Marxist of jewish origin. (34) It is reasonable to assume that Potamkin could use his eyes and would have known that the Communist Party USA’s leadership was disproportionately and significantly jewish. (35)

The cognitive dissonance it took to argue that something was not the case when the truth of it was plain as a pikestaff to him on the most personal of levels is really quite astonishing.

Also noteworthy is that Potamkin went on to claim, after his assertion that jews are unjustly portrayed malevolently as the origin of the evil that was the Soviet Union, that they are were usually shown in comic form to American audiences. (36) Yet he also claims they were cast as evil characters such as loan-sharks and pawnbrokers and the like. (37)

One wonders how one can be type cast as the supremely evil Bolshevik murderers and then also be type cast as comedians?

Regardless of that Potamkin also raises objections, although this time far less strong, to jews being cast in too idealistic terms in films, such as ‘King of Kings’, paid for by various synagogal authorities. (38) You get the impression when you read Potamkin’s comments on the subject of these films is that his objections are more to do with the origin of these films (jewish religious authorities; who are per force ‘counter-revolutionary’ in Marxism) rather than the content of the films per se.

We can see this frankly fetishistic attitude to jews elsewhere in the fact that nearly all the film directors that Potamkin lionises and praises are jews. He praises Sergei Eisenstein incessantly and to the point of making his comments cringe worthy, (39) Ben Hecht’s work is ‘prophetic’, (40) Jean Epstein’s camera work is exceptional, (41) Karl Freund’s use of colour cinematography is superb (42) and a certain French jew named Blum’s cinematic work is superb. (43)

Sigmund Lublin, the jewish movie magnate, is roundly praised and Potamkin writes a long hagiographic biographical article on him even though he is a ‘reactionary’ and a member of the bourgeoisie. (44)

Potamkin even goes so far as to screen the jewishness of Dziga Vertov, aka David Kaufman, and his two brothers describing them as Ukrainian rather than as jewish. (45) Naturally he also praises the Kaufman brothers as well. (46)

When we add in that Potamkin tries to portray jews as honest workers in the USSR, (47) even though this is untrue as in the Soviet Union the jews were disproportionately members of the middle and upper class in significant disproportion to relative to their population and the representation of all other nationalities, (48) and praises all things jewish among them amateur Yiddish cinema (49) while deploring all things non-jewish and American (viz his comments on Griffith and others); (50) then one suspects there is a whiff of partisanship around Potamkin’s treatment.

To be sure ideology has a role to play in it in that his Marxist faith made it beholden upon him to lionize a state that had both an obviously and disproportionately jewish leadership, but it is unlikely to have been just that. Potamkin formed links with jews on a very personal level and it seems likely that it was these personal links as much as his ideology, which formed his extreme philo-Semitism and outright denials of well-known and easily demonstrable facts in regards to jews and the Soviet Union.

Simply put Potamkin was a bad Marxist film hack who lionized and mythologised jews and blacks, while attacking non-jewish cinema directors with, not infrequently, personal and ideological insults. To this end even his apologists, such as Russell Campbell, complain that his writing is, as a whole, bad and difficult to read. (51)

Campbell, as Schenker and van Schilt have similarly done since, lauded Potamkin’s ‘hard hitting’ attacks on the portrayal of jews and blacks in American cinema, but as we have seen; such attacks can only be considered ‘hard hitting’ if one thinks an inflatable hammer hurts as much as a steel one.

References

(1) For example Zsolt Gyroi, 2010, ‘Negotiating National Identity in 1930s and 1940s British Cinema’, Eger Journal of English Studies, Vol. 10, p. 95
(2) An example of such mythologisation is Andrew Schenker’s 2010 article ‘Marxism goes to the Movies’ in the ‘Bright Lights Film Journal’ (http://brightlightsfilm.com/marxism-goes-to-the-movies-on-pioneering-activist-film-critic-harry-alan-potamkin/#.VeGRhPlVikp) and Stephanie van Schilt’s profile of him (http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/11/a-portrait-of-harry-potamkin/).
(3) Philip French, ‘As Time Goes By’, Encounter, May 1978, p. 54
(4) Lewis Jacobs (Ed.), 1977, ‘The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin’, 1st Edition, Teachers College Press: New York, p. 115
(5) Ibid, pp. xxxviii-xxxix
(6) http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/11/a-portrait-of-harry-potamkin/
(7) Jacobs, Op. Cit, p. 128
(8) Ibid, p. 348
(9) Ibid, pp. 121; 156; 184; 249
(10) Ibid, p. 121
(11) Ibid, p. 343
(12) Ibid, pp. 126; 130
(13) Ibid, pp. 120-122
(14) Ibid, p. 519
(15) Ibid, p. 164
(16) Ibid, p. 350
(17) Ibid, p. 168
(18) Ibid, p. 176
(19) Ibid, pp. 92; 154
(20) Ibid, pp. 92; 154; 179
(21) Ibid, pp. 155; 179
(22) Cf. Richard Lynn, 2006, ‘Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis’, 1st Edition, Washington Summit: Augusta, pp. 29-71
(23) Cf. Roger Pearson, 1997, ‘Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe’, 2nd Edition, Scott-Townsend: Washington D.C., pp. 100-147
(24) Jacobs, Op. Cit., p. 258
(25) Ibid, pp. 92; 154
(26) Ibid, pp. 248; 348
(27) Ibid, p. 248
(28) Ibid, p. 370
(29) Ibid, pp. 176; 262; 266
(30) Orlando Figes, 1997, ‘A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924’, 1st Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 676
(31) Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War’, 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 64-65
(32) Jacobs, Op. Cit, p. xxiii
(33) Ibid, p. xx
(34) Ibid, p. xxiii
(35) I have discussed this in the following article: S
(36) Jacobs, Op. Cit., p. 155
(37) Ibid, pp. 368; 394
(38) Ibid, p. 250
(39) Ibid, pp. 86; 177; 435; 441-443
(40) Ibid, p. 478
(41) Ibid, p. 300
(42) Ibid, pp. 306; 380
(43) Ibid, p. 73
(44) Ibid, pp. 96; 179; 553-563
(45) Ibid, pp. 62-63; 70
(46) Ibid, p. 72
(47) Ibid, p. 250
(48) Wasserstein, Op. Cit., pp. 9-10; 64-65; 80; 113-116
(49) Jacobs, Op. Cit., pp. 250; 367-369
(50) French, Op. Cit., p. 54
(51) Russell Campbell, 1978, ‘Potamkin’s Film Criticism’, Jump Cut, No. 18, p. 23