The script form in Soviet and Russian film studies

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of the script form in Soviet/Russian scriptwriting, which has drawn particular attention in the 1920s, when a polemic arose among film theorists and practitioners concerning the ‘iron’ and ‘emotional’ script. Sergei Eisenstein and Aleksandr Rzheshevskii, among others, favoured the emotional script with its expressive record of the future film to the rigid production plan of the ‘iron script’. In the 1930s, this polemic was resolved with the emergence of the ‘literary’ script, which united elements of both forms. Valentin Turkin, a pedagogue at Moscow’s Film School and author of the first Soviet textbook on film dramaturgy, played an important role in teaching of scriptwriting. Turkin defined the script as a heterogeneous literary form, an approach that influenced film dramaturgy into the 1960s–1970s, when Turkin’s theses were developed further: the scriptwriter’s work on the future film and on the script’s subsequent screen realisation are fruitful only through the literary script form. This approach dominated in teaching well into the 1990s, until the American format of the script was introduced with the first translations of textbooks into Russian, effectively returning to the ‘iron’ script form.