So it’s hardly a surprise that anything as volatile and potent as the movies might have been regarded as a primed bomb in some countries. Nowhere was that pressure more exciting than in Russia, a nation of uneducated millions and an elite culture that suddenly decided “everyone” was worthy of being enlightened and moved and raised to the highest levels of citizenry.
We know very little of whether Anton Chekhov saw or was impressed by movies; he died in 1904. But he helps lead the way for them. I don’t refer simply to the personal and social depths in his plays, but to their physicality. The stage notes to Uncle Vanya (first produced in 1899) begin, “A garden. Part of a house with a terrace can be seen. There is a table laid for tea under an old poplar in the avenue. Garden seats and chairs; on one of them lies a guitar. Not far from the table there is a swing. It is between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. The sky is overcast.” The stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky did his best with time of day and the cast of the light, just as he fashioned a naturalistic acting style that would affect the Actors Studio in New York more than forty years later, and the movies that grew out of it. But just to read Chekhov’s stage direction is to anticipate Jean Renoir as a fit director for Uncle Vanya. That overcast was decades ahead of the blast of early movie light.
It was once a part of the Bolshevik history of cinema that nothing much happened in Russia before 1917. That was not so. Filmgoing seems to have been confined to the larger cities, but Yakov Protazanov (1881–1945) was a significant director in the decade before the Revolution. He made several good films in the era of D. W. Griffith’s feature films, notably a version of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (1916), with rich period sets, intense acting, and the influence of Scandinavian cinema. Protazanov absented himself from Russia at the moment of revolution, and for several years thereafter, which did not endear him to the new regime. Still, his Aelita (1924) is a quirky science-fiction picture, with dazzling constructivist sets and Yulia Solntseva (the wife of director Alexander Dovzhenko) playing the Queen of Mars.
The striking quality in Aelita is the bold, innocent, and amused juxtaposition of alien worlds—the contemporary Russia, shot largely in real places, with air, light, space, and the passing parade of an actual city; and the Mars that is imagined and furnished through elaborate, beautiful, but comically stylized sets and costumes. (It’s like an American and a German picture of the time thrust together.) And it is the warring energy of the two styles that is most entertaining. In the Russian scenes, we meet a space engineer and his wife. But on Mars, Queen Aelita has a way of spying on Earth (and falling in love with the engineer)—a magical viewing machine—that never disturbs the reckless ultramodern style of Mars, a place where the slave population has paper bags on their heads to signal anonymity, while Aelita wears a Deco headdress of erect tendrils.
I don’t mean to claim Aelita as a great lost film, but it is inventive and fun, absorbed in the wonder of film and its proximity to experimental theater, and alert to presence, performance, and the spaces between people. What does that mean? Two-shots, group shots, depth of vision. The film’s arty design is hard to attribute now. But one name figures in costumes and set design: Alexandra Exter. We know enough about her to feel her sophistication: she studied in Paris in 1907–8, where she knew Picasso and Braque. By 1918–20 she led a production studio in Kiev that trained several future directors, and from 1921 to 1924 she was teaching in Moscow. But once Aelita was done, she moved to Paris, where she was a teacher and a painter until her death in 1949. She apparently never worked on another movie, but Aelita is sufficient proof of her talent, her cosmopolitan sensibility, and her influence. In other words, there was a tradition in Russia, essentially pre-Revolution, that thrived on the proximity of theater and film and the chances it provided for avant-garde experiment.
The thing to notice here is an alternative history to the Bolshevik orthodoxy that claimed cinema as its special child. There was production in Russia before 1917, albeit influenced by German and Scandinavian companies, with a small, sophisticated audience. Mikhail Bulgakov was writing satires for the Moscow Art Theatre. By the early 1920s, Vladimir Nabokov was in Germany, interested in seeing and writing for films, and especially delighted by the inadvertent follies of American movies—but put off by their crushing sincerity. Nabokov is an instructive case, for he shows an early appreciation of comic absurdity (as opposed to dramatic earnestness) in cinema. One could add Rouben Mamoulian (born in Tiflis in 1897), a student at the Moscow Art Theatre who was working in London and America by the early 1920s; Lewis Milestone (born in the Ukraine in 1895), educated at the University of Ghent, and in America by 1919; and Richard Boleslawski (born in Russian-controlled Poland in 1889), a director in Hollywood. Those men would make such films as The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Silk Stockings (1956), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and the Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Rasputin and the Empress (1932), and The Garden of Allah (1936).
At other levels, the company of film people who left Russia includes not just Akim Tamiroff, Gregory Ratoff, and Maria Ouspenskaya, but also Lewis J. Selznick and Louis B. Mayer, Al Jolson and Alla Nazimova, Irving Berlin and Dimitri Tiomkin. The first-generation children of Russia in American show business could include David O. Selznick, George Gershwin, and Kirk Douglas—feel that energy.
With that as introduction, we now turn to the famous directors of the Revolution and what Stanley Kauffmann (as late as 1973) was ready to regard as a moment akin to Elizabethan drama or Italian Renaissance painting: “A new revolutionary state was born as a new revolutionary art emerged, and that combination brought forth at least three superb creators in the new art: Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, and—the most important because the most influential—Sergei M. Eisenstein.”
The early 1920s was an era of intense youthful excitement over the power of the new wonder—half mechanical, half dreamy—the movies. That statement could as easily fit Hollywood after 1917 as it could the Soviet Union in the same period. But whereas in California the movies were a new business, a fast way of becoming rich and famous, and an unplanned shift in the imaginary life of the public, in Russia the stress on business was nothing compared with designs for a new world. But the assertions of contemporary history are less potent than what the future makes of them. Maybe the most profound changes in society actually occurred in the conservative America, where no one bothered much to talk or think about revolutionary art, politics, or history.
This realization—far more candid and historical than cynical or dismayed—is not to minimize the outpouring of new creative energy in Russia after 1917. Nor does it deny the stimulation that came from the new state idealists or the opportunity of film to inform and unite the far-flung but barely educated people of the new Soviet Union. Still, it is our duty to observe what actually happened as much as what people hoped for.
Consider Pudovkin first. He was born in Penza in central Russia in 1893 and studied chemistry at the University of Moscow before being drafted into the Russian army. But he was wounded in 1915 and became a prisoner of the Germans for nearly three years, a time in which he learned several other languages. After the war, he was about to start working in a chemical plant when he happened to see D. W. Griffith’s film Intolerance.
This was hardly a casual event. In the Russia of 1917 onward there was a serious shortage of films and film stock. The Revolution halted the regular distribution business, but the authorities were so impressed by Intolerance that they took steps to circulate the picture as widely as possible. Indeed, it did better in Russia than it ever had in the United States. Opening in September 1916, Intolerance was a grandiose survey of history, sharpened by Griffith’s open wounds at the adverse commentary on The Birth of a Nation and its racism. So it was two reels longer than the Civil War picture, and it cross-cut from four narratives: a Babylonian story (that required the construction of the biggest sets yet built in Los Angeles); a Judean story, involving Christ; a French story attached to th
e massacre of the Huguenots in 1572; and the Modern Story, about two lovers (Mae Marsh and Robert Harron) threatened by the execution of the man on wrongful charges of murder.
Intolerance had cost $2 million—twenty times the cost of The Birth of a Nation. But whereas the first film exceeded anyone’s hopes at the box office, Intolerance got fine reviews and a big initial audience, and then collapsed. Why did it fail? Perhaps because the audience felt no need for four stories saying the same thing—it seemed too close to a history lesson—and because it became confused and frustrated by the cross-cutting from one story to another. (Entertainment films seldom interrupt their own mood.) Some have suggested that the Modern Story released on its own would have been a hit: it is a gripping melodrama with exceptional performances (notably from Miriam Cooper as a fallen woman). In the Babylonian sequence, the set is stunning, but Griffith hardly knew what to do with it beyond having a camera in a balloon hover overhead. Dramatic events did not take place there. It did not help that the film had a recurring motif: Lillian Gish rocking the cradle of history (based on lines from Walt Whitman). Long ago, that image seemed laughable and a measure of Griffith’s Victorian attitudes. But the cradle of history meant so much more in the Russia of 1917–20.
The new regime loved the didactic stress in Intolerance and the innocent faith in the comparability of all situations in history. More than that, it fell upon the process of cross-cutting and the dynamic of suggestion or inference that came from it, and the unproven hope that this could be educational for the masses. Of course, in history there is little evidence that the masses have gone to the movies to be educated, though there is every possibility that, blind to formal education, they are shaped by the light in the dark in ways they hardly appreciate.
If that realization requires irony, or humor, neither was in great supply in the desperate early days of the Russian Revolution. Lenin had told his cultural commissar, Anatoly Lunacharsky, that “for us film is the most important art.” Some kino enthusiasts may have been encouraged by that; others heard it as a warning. For it meant that, at the outset, film was in danger of being appropriated for education, propaganda, or thought control. So it was part of the revolutionary zeal that, very early on, a national film school was established, driven by the need to use film “properly.” Pudovkin was one of the students at that school, thrilled by the teaching of Lev Kuleshov.
Though the vital teacher at the school, Kuleshov was actually younger than Pudovkin. He had been born in Tambov in 1899, and as a teenager he was filming newsreels of the war. He, too, was inspired by the cross-cutting of Intolerance, and was prompted to construct an early theory about editing. There was a reason for this. At most film schools the world has ever known, the kids cannot wait to shoot film—of their girl friends, of their city, their dogs, their stories. They are captivated by the fun and the slippery trick of turning life into a screened thing. But at the Moscow school, this could not be indulged—because of the shortage of film stock. So Kuleshov began to teach his students about editing and re-editing in abstract—you can use drawings or stills, and the lessons may sink in. According to the precepts laid down in Intolerance, he began to establish equations, such as a + b = something entirely different. He cut together shots of an actor’s undirected face with objects he might be thinking of and, lo, the audience “read” the connection, the linkage. The man was hungry, afraid, in love, or whatever, according to the dynamic of cutting. This theory is not incorrect, but it can turn painfully narrow and predictive. There was another power in cutting: that the audience could be removed or shifted in time, space, and story at the whim of the medium. In that opportunity there was an inherent sense of authority or violence.
Kuleshov seems to have been a naturally inventive, humorous young man. For instance, his 1924 satire, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, is a playful delight, full of jokes about Western foolishness over the Bolshevik enterprise. But that strain of comedy struggled to become a Russian tradition. The theoretical emphasis on editing, and what the Soviets would call montage, led to papers, books, and course curricula. And it had the effect of turning the shot (that basic element of film) into a still, as opposed to pieces of movie (things in which movement or duration were vital). Similarly, shots made for montage tended to isolate figures (their function smothered their vitality), whereas there is a potential in film for people being together in the shot, related by space.
Pudovkin followed that line of thought. After a few short films, he embarked on a deliberate trilogy—Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), and Storm over Asia (1928). These are humane dramas of the Revolution, utterly worthy yet heavy-handed, and with so predictable an emotional slant that they are not easy to sympathize with today. Nothing really happens in the films beyond the execution of an idea; there is more ideology and example than immediacy. There is great spectacle and there is often a burnished Russian light that owes something to the primitive laboratory work in that country. (There is a harsh sensuality in Soviet black and white that is very compelling.) The rigorous reliance on montage, though, the linkage (a key word in the theoretical disputes), is usually related to people and their desires. Pudovkin is trying to identify human stories; it is just that the structures of duty in the revolutionary narrative are always tending to simplify them.
The bickering over schemes of montage, among friendly rivals and co-revolutionaries, seems comic nowadays, but fervent. In a 1929 essay, “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein gives a concise account of the disputes:
At regular intervals he [Pudovkin] visits late at night and behind closed doors we wrangle over matters of principle. A graduate of the Kuleshov school, he loudly defends an understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces. Into a chain. Again, “bricks.” Bricks, arranged in series to expound an idea.
I confronted him with my viewpoint on montage as a collision. A view that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.
In practice, Eisenstein devoted much of several books to this argument, and he was bright enough to employ physics and cell structure as illustrations. But he seldom mentioned story. In addition, while friends say that Eisenstein was mercurial and amusing in person, and driven by the principles of montage in his writing as if they were part of the Five-Year Plan, the humor does not often hit the page or his screen. Moreover, the undoubted pathos of Pudovkin’s films still works, despite a regret in the viewer that all his people have been made subordinate to the historic argument and the ideology. If you share that feeling, you should sneak a look at Pudovkin’s eighteen-minute Chess Fever, made in 1925, in advance of his features.
Chess Fever is an endearing screwball comedy. A young man is obsessed with chess, so that it is ruining his relationship with a girl. His clothes are checkered like a chess board. He sees chess problems everywhere. The girl grows wistful—it is akin to Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) with its quest for “fun.” She leaves him and instead charms José Raúl Capablanca, the Cuban world champion (1921–27), in town for a chess tournament. Capablanca looks like a worldly Valentino cut with Irving Thalberg. He is so suave and self-sufficient; you can smell his cigar smoke and cologne. But in the face of his girl’s cunning Russo-Cuban defense, the young man is reformed and reunited with her. (Maybe in foreplay he still favors the knight’s move.) I don’t mean to overvalue Chess Fever, but I want to insist on its surrender to comic incident, ironic narrative, and ordinary silliness. It is shorter than Storm over Asia, but it works better because of its greater sense of life and human vagary.
This matter of “still working for us” is not trivial or incidental: the cast-iron gravity and political portentousness in Pudovkin’s features need to be set beside almost exact contemporaries—Sunrise, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Victor Sjöström’s The Wind, movies in which the screen comes alive with human uncertainty, transience, and a grasp of cinematic potential that exceeds the ideological textbooks by Pudovkin and
Eisenstein. On-screen, saving the world (or crushing it) usually means less than the kind of glance that feels seconds passing like a breeze on your cheek. One could add to that list Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, the most lyrical optics-mad of all the Soviet films and the least apologetic in opting for movie over life and the Revolution’s heaven.
Dziga Vertov was an invented name: it means “spinning top” and shows the man’s love of mechanics, play, and perpetual motion, and his instinct for the movies as a machine that might transform reality. His real name was Denis Kaufman, and he was born in Biaystok, Poland, in 1896. Though trained in music, he entered the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute in 1916 to study perception. This was far from the show business path to the movies that operated in so many other countries. Kaufman was a kind of scientist as well as a painter in light and emotion. He was a bit of Picasso and a lot of Pavlov. But he was a Soviet at the moment of revolution, so he easily adopted the credo that film could save the world, bind the disparate Soviet republics together, and make manifest the ideology and practice of communism. He was crazy, but touched by genius.
On the one hand, Vertov fell in love with the notion of film as a source of documentary record and inspired information. He thus became part of the film committee’s drive for newsreel, which led to the famous kino trains. A train set out to cross the vast country. As it went, it had camera crews film what they saw. As the train moved on, a compartment was the site where this material was developed and then cut together to make a newsreel—using all the lessons of montage being formulated by Kuleshov. Then, at the next stop, a few hundred miles down the line, another compartment served as a theater, to be filled with citizens who could see how the new state and their neighbors were working. It sounds marvelous, and some of Vertov’s work was as beautiful and exalted as the best constructivist designs. But modern art does not always fill the bellies or the anxious minds of peasants and kulaks. They are like the chain gang on which Preston Sturges’s director (in the person of Joel McCrea) finds himself in Sullivan’s Travels (1942): they will settle for a little relief.
The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies Page 10
