Inside the Film Factory

New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

Ian Christie, Professor Richard Taylor, Richard Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134944330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This is the first collection to be inspired and informed by the new films and archival material that glasnost and perestroika have revealed, and the new methodological approaches that are developing in tandem. Film critics and historians from Britain, America, France and the USSR attempt the vital task of scrutinising Soviet film, and re-examining the Cold War assumptions of traditional historiography.
Whereas most books on Soviet giants have glorified the directorial giants of the `golden age' of the 1920s, Inside the Film Factory also recognises the achievements of popular cinema from the pre-Revolutionary period through to the 1930s and beyond. It also evaluates the impact of Western cinema on the early experimenters of montage, Russian science fiction's influence on film-making, and the long-suppressed history of Soviet Yiddish productions. Alongside the new perspectives and source material on the much-mythologised figures of Kuleshov and Medvedkin, the book provides the first extended accounts in English of the important but neglected careers of directors Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet.

1

Early Russian Cinema: Some Observations

Yuri Tsivian

A first encounter with early Russian cinema usually raises several puzzling questions. More often than not these questions are of the same kind: they concern the distinguishing features of the Russian film style that set it apart from the generally accepted practice of the 1910s. There is some sense in dwelling on these features, both to disperse doubt in the audience’s mind and to understand the link between ‘Russian style’ in cinema and certain characteristics of Russian culture.

Russian Endings

In 1918 two cinema publications, one Russian and one American, made an identical observation independently of one another. The Moving Picture World, after viewing a batch of Russian pictures that had just arrived in the USA, confirmed the view of its own correspondent:

As was pointed out in the first and favourable review of these films in The Moving Picture World, the tragic note is frequently sounded; this is in marked contrast to prevailing American methods. The Russian films, in other words, incline to what has been termed ‘the inevitable ending’ rather than an idealized or happy ending. That was the thing that gave the reviewers some slight shivers of apprehension as to the reception that might be accorded these films by our public.¹

At the same time the Moscow Kino-gazeta was informing its readers:

‘All’s well that ends well!’ This is the guiding principle of foreign cinema. But Russian cinema stubbornly refuses to accept this and goes its own way. Here it’s ‘All’s well that ends badly’—we need tragic endings.²

The Russian audience’s need for tragic endings was so insistent that in 1914 when Yakov Protazanov made Drama by Telephone [Drama u telefona], a Russian remake of Griffith’s The Lonely Villa [USA, 1909], he had to change the ending: the husband was not in time to rescue his wife and came home to find her dead body—she had been killed by burglars. In 1918 Protazanov none the less tried to make a sentimental melodrama which ended with a wedding—Jenny the Maid [Gornichnaya Dzhenni]—but it is significant that he set the film abroad. In a Russian setting such a turn of events would have seemed forced.

There is nothing strange in the fact that Russian film factories, which were working to two markets—the domestic and the international—produced two different versions of the same subject. The idea undoubtedly originated with Pathé, whose Moscow office had had the international market in mind from the very beginning. When Sofya Goslavskaya, who played the leading role in André Maître’s film, The Bride of Fire [Nevesta ognya, 1911?], wanted to watch her own film, it transpired that the film in distribution in Russia had employed other actors:

Whereas in our first version the story was treated like a lubok with a happy ending—scenes of a peasant wedding with traditional ceremonies—which was made specially ‘for export’, in the second version, made by Kai Hansen, it was a drama which, if I’m not mistaken, ended with the deaths of the main characters.³

Another actress, Sofiya Giatsintova, has recalled how the firm of Thiemann & Reinhardt solved the export problem. The film By Her Mother’s Hand [Rukoyu materi, 1913] had two endings, both made by Yakov Protazanov and both using the same actors and sets:

One ending, the happy ending, was ‘for export’: Lidochka recovers. The other, more dramatic, was ‘for Russia’: Lidochka in her coffin.⁴

On the day after the February Revolution twenty boxes of films were hurriedly exported and so a batch of films with Russian rather than export ‘tails’ arrived in America. It is scarcely surprising that American reviewers were inclined to attribute their special quality to ‘terrific Slavic emotions’.⁵ However, one has to forewarn audiences of our time: like any generalisation about national psychology, the notion of the gloomy Russian soul was naive. ‘Russian endings’ came into cinema from nineteenth-century Russian theatrical melodrama, which always ended badly. Unlike the Western theatrical melodrama, the Russian version derives from classical tragedy adapted to the level of mass consciousness. Hence the only conclusion that we can draw about ‘Russian endings’ in cinema is one that relates to Russian mass culture as a whole: the peculiarity of Russian cinema and of Russian mass culture is its constant attempt to emulate the forms of high art. As we shall see, this attempt is conditioned by several other features of the ‘Russian style’ in cinema.

The First Russian Film

The desire in Russian cinema to compete with ‘high art’ was present from the very beginning. The story of how the first Russian feature film, Alexander Drankov’s Boris Godunov, was made is indicative of this.

Traditionally Stenka Razin, shot by Drankov in 1908, has been accepted as the first Russian film. Drankov himself called it the ‘first’, conscious of the advertising value of such a description. Nevertheless Boris Godunov, a screen version of the tragedy by Pushkin, had already been made and shown in 1907 but Drankov preferred to forget all about it.

The history of Boris Godunov can be reconstructed from the texts of two unpublished memoirs, one by Moisei Aleinikov, the well-known film journalist and entrepreneur, the other by the stage actor Nikolai Orlov.⁶ The events that led to the making of this film may be depicted as a chain of accidents and misunderstandings. What is more, they are entirely characteristic of the psychology of Russian cinema.

According to Aleinikov, it all began with a lottery ticket. In 1907 Aleinikov had as yet no connection with cinema but was a student at the Imperial Technical School. One day he won a lottery prize of a ticket for the Moscow Art Theatre production of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.

Traditionally Boris Godunov is regarded as difficult to stage. Pushkin preferred a minute series of fragmented excerpts to the gradual intensification of the conflict that is usual in tragedy. This particular quality, which had frightened other theatres off, was what attracted the Moscow Art Theatre. As early as 1899 Stanislavsky was nurturing the idea of a new stage form that he jokingly called the cinematograph’ [sinematograf].⁷ In the vocabulary of the Moscow Art Theatre the word ‘cinematograph’ developed as the designation for a show that presented the audience with a sequence of fragmented excerpts instead of a single action. In a letter to Anton Chekhov in October 1899 Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko explained Stanislavsky’s concept:

One could string together a large number of short pieces written by you, by Turgenev, Shchedrin and Grigorovich, or Pushkin’s The Feast in Plague-Time. The scenes would change at the speed they change in cinema.⁸

Like The Feast in Plague-Time, Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov was entirely suited to this kind of stage experiment.

Let us return to Moisei Aleinikov’s memoirs. At the Moscow Art Theatre performance of Boris Godunov he had a conversation that stuck in his memory:

Scene followed scene…. There were twenty-two scenes in the play…. Eventually the curtain fell…. In the silence I heard the woman next to me remark: ‘It’s just like the cinema!’

I thought this remark referred to the fact that we never saw the curtain but none the less, my very best feelings having been offended and prepared to deliver a rebuff, I enquired: ‘In what sense?’…

‘In cinema they also change the scenes all the time: first you’re in one room, then another, and then you’re on the street.’⁹

After the performance Aleinikov returned home and there he had another noteworthy conversation:

In the hostel my neighbour in the next room held out a copy of Cine-Phono.

‘My uncle has started publishing a cinema paper. I told him that you write for Utro Rossii [Morning Russia] and he wants you to write something about cinema!’

I leafed through the pages and thought of the perceptive girl against whom I had taken up arms in vain. Then I remembered the arguments of Valeri Bryusov,¹⁰ whose lecture to the Literary-Artistic Circle I had heard the day before. He had warned artists of the dangers of naturalism….

Mixing all these impressions together, I wrote a muddled little article, ‘The Art Theatre’s Production and the Cinematograph’. To liven things up I began with a report that I had made up about some discussions between the Moscow Art Theatre and a certain film company. I didactically reminded Stanislavsky that naturalism, the mere copying of life, was not art…. However, the author remarked that cinema would be taking a great step forward if it were to show the achievements of the Moscow Art Theatre on its screens.¹¹

The lead story that Aleinikov devised ‘to liven things up’ (so that he had some pretext for abstract arguments) went as follows:

According to rumours a large firm is proposing to film twenty-two scenes from Boris Godunov on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre. (Based on interviews)¹²

This newspaper canard had an unexpected consequence. It excited Alexander Drankov, then a St Petersburg photographer (he and his brother Lev were the Russian photographic correspondents for the London Times and the Paris Illustration), who prepared the Russian titles for French films. Drankov was obsessed with the idea of being first to release a Russian film. The other memoir source, the actor Nikolai Orlov, recalls how Drankov, suspecting a flirtation between the Moscow Art Theatre and Khanzhonkov or the Moscow office of Pathé,¹³ resolved to forestall them and produce his own Petersburg Godunov:

When the idea came to him, Drankov was influenced by the newspaper rumours that a Moscow firm was intending to film twenty-two scenes of the Moscow Art Theatre production of Boris Godunov. Wanting to forestall this announcement, Drankov searched desperately for a theatre with Boris Godunov in its repertoire. That theatre turned out to be the Eden open-air theatre, where I was working as an actor at that time.¹⁴

As Orlov relates, the first conflict between Drankov and the actors arose over cuts. The Moscow Art Theatre took pride in the fact that, true to the structural principle of the ‘cinematograph’ discovered by Stanislavsky, it made practically no cuts in Pushkin’s Godunov. As to the Eden open-air theatre production, the reviewers reproached the director, I.E.Shuvalov, for the significant cuts that he had made in the text of the tragedy.¹⁵ None the less the conditions proposed by Drankov seemed quite absurd to the Eden actors:

Most of the actors were opposed to this ridiculous undertaking: acting at nine o’clock in the morning in the open rather than on stage, but still using the sets. And when Drankov insisted on cutting Pushkin’s tragedy, suggesting that we confine ourselves to four or five scenes, we reached an impasse.¹⁶

That would have been only a fifth of the whole play.

The second conflict arose over the sets. The actor G.F.Martini, who was playing the role of Grishka Otrepev,

went on strike when he realised that the scene by the fountain would be shot without the sets but next to a real fountain that was situated between the theatre and a café-chantant. However, it was not long before Marina Mnishek (played by K.Loranskaya) and Drankov were able to convince him that everything would turn out even better by the real fountain. So they decided to start with this scene by the fountain. But it transpired that there were no trees around the fountain, and it was the view of both Martini and Loranskaya that the whole sense of the scene derived from precisely the point that Marina Mnishek suddenly appears from out of the bushes. After endless arguments Drankov decided to pay for some trees to be felled, brought along and re-erected as artificial shrubbery…. Next day, early in the morning, a lot of tall felled trees were brought along and laboriously erected round the fountain. They produced quite a picturesque landscape, but it was spoiled by the fact that, through the trees, you could see quite clearly and distinctly various buildings that were remote in style from the sixteenth century…. Martini, seeing the whole set that had been prepared for shooting, absolutely refused to start filming. He even began to take off his costume and his make-up. Once again it was Loranskaya who talked him round—she even cried, but she talked him round. We started to rehearse many times but we made no progress. The rehearsal degenerated into arguments and altercations.¹⁷

We must not forget that, while Drankov was an experienced photographer, Boris Godunov was his first excursion into shooting film for cinema. Previously he had merely shot Russian titles for V.I.Vasilieva, who owned several Petersburg cinemas. For this purpose Vasilieva had imported a second-hand P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Notes on contributions
• General editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration and translation
• Introduction: Entering the film factory
• 1. Early Russian cinema: some observations
• 2. Kuleshov’s experiments and the new anthropology of the actor
• 3. Intolerance and the Soviets: a historical investigation
• 4. The origins of Soviet cinema: a study in industry development
• 5. Down to earth: Aelita relocated
• 6. The return of the native: Yakov Protazanov and Soviet cinema
• 7. A face to the shtetl: Soviet Yiddish cinema, 1924–36
• 8. A fickle man, or portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet director
• 9. Interview with Alexander Medvedkin
• 10. Making sense of early Soviet sound
• 11. Ideology as mass entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet cinema in the 1930s
• Notes
• Index