8.Renegade Channels and Frame Troubles

FRAME STRUGGLES OR REFLEXIVE MODERNITY?

Gregory Bateson (1972) famously described frames—or situational definitions—as labile, vulnerable to quick transformations. In previous work (Lemon 2000a) I have explored the social politics of framing: how shifts from serious to play communications are forced or contested. In this final chapter, I ask how, in this process, certain forms of expertise will out while others are submerged. Changes in frame can estrange perspectives in ways that spark creativity and pleasure, but they can also signal violence or power plays, as when recruits being hazed wonder, “Is this play?” Bateson saw a related suffering in schizophrenia, where nothing is play because every form seems intended as a serious sign, messages reaching out from late night television static. In this light, incapacity to discern a play frame tangles intuitions.

All the same, “the frame” is a trope, based on theatrical architectures that in their own turn had to be built and managed, like all made things, their shapes subject to struggle. European theaters built dividers and platforms, bolted rows of chairs into the floor to keep the proscenium stable—and later theatrical movements worked to undo all that. By analogy, people often struggle over different framings that delimit what is “going on.” The stakes in framing and in disputing a frame extend beyond the moment. To define an act as “hazing” rather than as “just a joke” can be to assert perspectives upon a fleeting interaction that challenge even durable hierarchy. This is true especially in spaces in which the playful and the serious can quickly shift, where “what is happening here” remains a live and slippery question, but it can be the case also in places where the boss sets the parameters, and where meetings, auditions, exams, and checkpoints seem to run on automatic.

Situational definitions harden through divisions of communicative labor and other means to channel and restrict contact. The making of play frames differs from the making of lab walls, and the making of state borders and prison fences in terms of material process—but their purposes overlap, as do many of their effects in channeling possibilities to communicate, with whom, about what. The idea of the frame may be a metaphor, and a European metaphor grounded to European stage practices, yet, it is a metaphor that many have found all too useful to justify and to build national borders and prison walls.

Bateson gives us a clue to the hierarchies that historically bind frame-making when he claims that, the capacity to discern framing signals is revelatory of sentience. Animals, in his view, are more like humans in this way than we admit. Wolf cubs and kittens learn early to tell a teasing nip from a bite (actual pain speeding that learning) and to recognize “the nip” as a meta-sign, a signal declaring that ongoing communication is now in a state of play. Bateson noted that what comes fairly easily to animals (recognizing play signs) is more complicated for humans. A plethora of Internet videos depicting cross-species animal play, feathered beast curling up with furry, testifies to the ways that animals respect play signals made by other species. Humans can do this, too, but we also try to force frames. We are capable of inflicting pain for a photo, to make a game of torture to show high ranking trolls or bully buddies. To counter that a joke is “not play” becomes a matter not simply of batting aside a play signal, but of politics or social resistance.

Claims about abilities to distinguish frames are buttress claims to social superiority, especially where such abilities are thought to mark a modern capacity to reflect and to abstract, thereby to make reasoned moral and social choices. Jane Austen’s wiser characters deserve good fortune because they recognize the conventionality of social dances as play, as but metaphors for marriage, emulating channels for marital communications without being them. Less wise characters, who take play conventions too seriously, accede to bad marriages with good dancers as if they were fated (Segal and Handler 1989). In this way Austen’s foolish dancers resemble the insane, who treat television personalities as if they are speaking directly to them across the frames, and distances of broadcast (a relation that some broadcasts work to encourage. Peters 2010).

Literary critics and historians who focus on Russia have sometimes treated mastery of performance frames as a mark of civilization. Some have famously argued that awareness of (and reflection upon) theatrical frames suffused the elite in ways that affected events and distributions of power, shaping imperial hierarchies and revolutionary tactics. Thus it came about, some argue, that “theatrical” language and deportment saturated Russian imperial and Soviet daily life. They go so far to claim that theatrical play frames afford they very sort of estrangement that drives modern change: “it is precisely because the life of theater differs from everyday existence that the view of life as spectacle gave man new possibilities for behavior” (Lotman 1985, 56; see also Clark 1995).

Such logic, however, is all too often turned against nonelites. During my fieldwork with Roma in Russia in the 1990s, I often heard people claim that certain social types—Gypsies, villagers, uneducated people, children, the insane—“cannot tell the difference between life and art.” My fieldwork demonstrated quite the opposite, bringing me into conversation with many Roma who reflect upon the meanings and uses of stage frames in society. In fact, the biggest case of frame confusion I witnessed was when a non-Romani audience member at the Moscow Romani Theater interrupted a play by crawling up onto the stage to converse with the actors (Lemon 2000a). To abstract moments of frame trouble, as if they manifest the semiotic naivety of a group of people, can intensify racial and other social distinctions. In the case of Russian Roma, the politics of framing art from life generated divisions between Roma and other Soviets as well as divisions among Roma.

Competing definitions of situation arise not only from individual perspectives, but also across institutions. The metaphor of “the frame” has spun out productive debates across elite cultures, in theatrical productions, in art studios, and in scientific labs where divisions of labor run through the ways frames and structures organize attention, whether to challenge reality on a canvas or to anchor it in a lab. These institutions compete to divide people—via education, via specializations of expertise—into those possessing and those lacking the right sorts of modern reflexivity to make theatrical or scientific discoveries. At one extreme of that project lies the genius, and at the other, the idiot bumpkin or even the criminal. Still, as thinkers since W.E.B. DuBois have stressed again and again, the nonelites, the servant classes, the colonized, and the racialized already inhabit conditions that require them to see multiple perspectives and frames all at once.

Meanwhile, the trope of the theatrical frame has come to echo and infuse the boundaries within and around institutions beyond those claimed for art and science, such as the trial, the court, and the prison. Likewise, the very practice of theatrical framing has historically become anchored to specific divisions of communicative labor that maintain and justify walls much sturdier than those that bracket the spaces of the stage.

ANTITHEATRICALITY AND ANTIREALISM

Efforts to purify frames for activity; to label communicative and physical actions within them; and to regiment and restrict ways of speaking, moving, gesturing, listening, heckling, and so forth merge with a European phenomenon that has been called “antitheatricality.” Cultural historian Jonas Barish (1981, 118) outlines several other motives for antitheatricality in Europe: disdain for mere mimicry, concern about immoral imitation of sinful acts, fear of hypnosis or magic that might influence the audience, and unease about trickster or hybrid play with categories (e.g., when men dress as women). Specific institutions shaped distinct antitheatricalities; the stage competed with the church to capture imagination, to depict worlds beyond the here and now. As far as the church was concerned, good must not mingle with evil even in play; the commandments must be kept no matter the genre, lest sins be induced by imitation.

Plato’s earlier antitheatricality saw danger to the polis in illusions that might influence the crowd. Hannah Arendt expressed parallel unease about mimesis. She saw danger in staging historical events as dramatic tragedy, for this not only reifies deeds, carving them out from fields of social interaction, but it also motivates excess political risk and violence, prodding individuals to inhabit the costume of heroic character, valuing the “immortal deed” over measured reasoning toward common good. “Tragedy is the amber, not the fly” (Arendt 1958, 188; see also Halpern 2011). Tolstoy wrote scathingly of Shakespeare that “having absorbed the immoral view of life that pervades all of Shakespeare’s writings, he [the spectator] loses the capacity of distinguishing between good and evil” (1906, 123). Mikhail Zoshchenko’s early Soviet-era stories also betray suspicion of theatricality as a bad influence: street traffic siphons bystanders into unwitting performances, and the decorum that theaters were to instill breaks down into humiliating chaos when plays become too real (Kaminer 2006). The protagonist of Zoshchenko’s story “The Actor” agrees to substitute for a drunken player in a traveling troupe. When his character is robbed, real hands snatch his real wallet: “Help! Citizens, they are really robbing me!” But the audience does nothing except simultaneously call out his real name and offer advice to his character. Zoshchenko saw folly in the early Soviet project to deploy theater to civilize, refusing to see it as a space of refinement that, once workers were allowed to occupy it, would “raise their cultural level.”

Antitheatricality is not universal, but historical, and not everyone who comes into contact with it is convinced by it. Barish elaborates on alternatives that thrived alongside European antitheatricality, activating conceptions of the divine not as original state or pure entity, but as emanation, as endless creative metamorphosis. To act on stage, then, was not to refuse God, but to partake in creative energy and to multiply possibilities. Writing their roles, humans made theater not in mimicry, but in protean potentiality, emulating the creator. In this view, the proscenium, as material form and as trope, changes value, becomes contingent, optional. Rancière (2011) differently celebrates how theater can disturb taken-for-granted distributions of agency. Workers gather in the square for the show; neither at work nor in domestic isolation, they become visible to each other in this “redistribution of the sensible”: here we are, together. It is here where people—even in audiences segregated by ticket price, race, or gender—apprehend possibilities for collective agency. In the decades before the 1917 Revolution in Russia, some railed against the ways theatrical auditoriums separated audiences from actors and split classes into sections.1 The avant-garde wanted to blur distinctions in the ways that Tolstoy and Zoshchenko feared; they wanted spectators to challenge words uttered onstage and to ponder actions suggested in the theater.² Directors like Evreinov and Meyerhold denounced theatrical realism trapped behind “the fourth wall” of meticulously decorated parlors, stage conventions dovetailing all too smoothly with domestic scales and patriarchal orders, inviting the audience to settle in as accidental voyeurs, “at the keyhole,” as Meyerhold put it, captive to the frame illusion, inclined afterward to discuss the play no more deeply than to debate how well or poorly the crew had emulated the sound of rain.

It is common to recount demolitions of the fourth wall as creative subversions (of the state, of the church, of taboo) and as if they were limited to short periods. Soviet attacks in the 1930s against theatrical antirealism were, however, neither absolute nor everlasting; even when main stages avoided too much antirealist technique, directors and their protégés did not forget them or stop teaching them after that period. American theater scholar Norris Houghton, in Moscow during the mid-1930s, observed rehearsals experimenting with nonrealist, frame-breaking staging (1936). During the postwar 1940s and early 1950s, as directors’ and actors’ biographies testify, even large state theatrical institutes such as GITIS and MKhAT protected spaces, even “in the hallways,” where people could experiment with framing conventions, even blending audiences with actors. During the height of Stalinism, from 1937 to 1953, people who publicly quoted only Stanislavsky nonetheless staged work that drew from the nonrealist methods of Vakhtangov, Tairov, and Meyerhold. Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin in 1956 gave the green light to publicly rehabilitate people such as Meyerhold. Houghton, by his second trip to Moscow, found that even large state theaters’ main stages had been breaking the proscenium frame for some time, such as when the Moscow Satiricon theater staged Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug in 1955 (Houghton 1962). In 1959 Nikolai Okhlopkov, actor, director, former student of Meyerhold and the artistic director of the Mayakovsky Theater, wrote: “The new world is too new and grandiose, too romantic and poetic to be shown within the frame of the traditional, [everyday-life play] and old theatrical techniques” (1959,60). In short, experimentation with framing conventions never fell out of professional practice or training in Soviet Russia. People in these circles work hard to claim and to mark gaps between genres of the ordinary and those of the poetic (Briggs and Bauman 1992). They do so while also building structures and institutions to obviate that work—and to channel, align, and justify certain kinds of social rifts, certain channels for communicative contact and not others.

FRAME TROUBLE

The theatrical frame is a metaphor for diffuse signs and techniques define and bind communications, and it is also a historical product, crafted for organizing sociality. Its tropes have been built into many diverse architectural schemes, structures that suggest conditions for encounter. As frames are exerted by gestural, linguistic, and more durably material means, metaphor becomes social fact; divisions among interaction frames cut paths for more durable divisions of labor. The theatrical frame suits certain communicative arrangements better than others. And some frame types bear breakdowns or leaks better than others, even folding disruptions, overlaps, and frame troubles, in Goffman’s terms, back into a dominant scheme.3 In the Athens of Plato’s Laws, the tropes and technical structures for dramatic and legal spectacle overlapped quite easily, sometimes embedding one into the other. As literary scholar Julie Cassiday (2000) has described them, early Soviet courts, stage, and screen similarly leaked into each other shifting direction of influence over time.: in one decade people’s courts agitated for performance of self-criticism (Wood 2005), and avant-garde theaters animated viewers like Greek choruses, urging spectators to actively enter the participation frame to argue law, while in the next decade directors shuttled audiences back into passive viewership.

Erving Goffman, in his later work on frames, footing, and participation frameworks (1974, 1981) gestured to hierarchy as a key factor in defining frames and their acceptable levels of permeability.⁴ He opened the essay “Footing” with President Richard Nixon just after a bill signing (1981, 124). Nixon, putting down the pen, shifts tone, addressee, and topic all at once, by turning to journalist Helen Thomas to comment on her pantsuit (he finds it insufficiently feminine). He asks her to pirouette. She does. All laugh. Moving from official and serious to informal and playful topics, mimicking worlds beyond the moment, ballet and fashion, Nixon tries to change character, from head of state to good old boy (roles that, as we know, all too regularly align).5 That is, he shifts his footing; he shifts his relationship, his attitude, his stance both to words uttered and those addressed. Because of his status, he succeeds also in shifting relations among others in the room, making some into overhearers of the play with Helen. Note that the shift to “play” was, all the same, a move that demonstrated authority; we wonder what would have happened had Helen Thomas refused to twirl.

Confusion or conflict over “what is going on” does not always challenge social hierarchies. People both collude and struggle to define “what is happening here.” Many of us learn to interact competently with reference to a ruling consensus, even while rejecting the dominant situational definition, inhabiting a different perspective on it. Keep waiting those tables; complain when your shift is over. If some wrestle to change frames, others are too caught up in surviving, needing to figure out how to move within situations defined by those more powerful, by structures more durable, by reigning meta-pragmatic expectations.

These political conditions shape frames. At the same time, insofar as frames can differentiate participation structures, they constrain possibilities for contact. Some frames activate clear channels among some persons while cutting off others; in court, the lawyers may speak to the judge in turn, others not at all. At school, children are not to pass notes in class, and are instead to raise a hand to address everyone at once. Phatic infractions are punished. The politics of framing is thus always politics of the phatic. In some historical and social conditions, these politics are explicitly laid out; in others, they remain hardly visible or become “not worth speaking about.”

FRAME IN FRAME

Battle of the Psychics is a spectacle that layers numerous frames that define situations and shows occasional collisions among the frameworks that distribute communicative roles. As it does so, it offers up the (no longer avant-garde) experience of peeking behind the curtains. Before the main action of a psychic test, television viewers watch the camera crew set up the shots, arrange props, and tell contestants where to stand; the magician skeptics hold envelopes to the light to make sure they are opaque, and the master of ceremonies dons a blindfold to check it for holes. In one episode, the crew members hang photos on a clothesline. Contestants are expected to approach from the back of the photos, then are asked to describe the images on the other side. The stage magicians check over the crew’s work, and one spies the camera that will be facing the contestants: “What if the pictures are reflected in the camera lens?” He checks; that camera records his face looking through its lens: “No reflections, everything is OK.” We, the television viewers, never see a close-up of that camera lens to check for any reflections on it; we are, of course, to believe the magician, we are only as if behind the scenes. This is “reality television,” after all. We see some of the people who organize some of the relevant camera frames, not those who handle transport, for example, or the set managers who call for silence, or the editors as they cut (Battle of Psychics does not go the distance plotted out by Dzhiga Vertov in Kinoglaz, a film that made a subject of its own material construction).

FIGURE 8.1.    Divisions of sensory labor, framed within frames on the set of Battle of the Psychics. A publicity photo: one professional magician-cynic watches his brothers watch a psychic trying to sense without the usual senses, without eyes or ears.

Many episodes offer footage of magicians watching their brothers on closed-circuit monitors, in adjoining rooms, sometimes joined by civilians acting as hostile skeptics or the wondering curious. In an episode staged at the grave of Nikolai Gogol, a literary expert and a graveyard caretaker watch, commenting: “No, no, that never happened”; “Yes, yes, Gogol had long hair.” Sometimes a whole neighborhood or passersby gather to watch those who watch the closed-circuit screen, which we watch on another screen. Episode finales invite viewers to watch the experts watch themselves and each other observing tests for extrasensation.

At one end of the spectrum, at the outer edge of the nesting frames being assembled, the crew trains cameras on people who watch still more people watching people being filmed. At the other end, the crew captures seemingly raw events that appear to disrupt interaction frames. Frame breaks are linked to contestants’ flights of temper and tears, their refusals to participate, storming off the set, and their criticisms of the conditions of a test (all common fare in reality shows anywhere). Frame break becomes plot point or moment of character revelation (characters who accept the constraints on allowable contacts, channels, and media in respect to the camera are eliminated more slowly). Editors play a large role here, for example, retaining the shot of an irritable crew member on a crowded rural road directing others to “get out of traffic!” in order to draw out the sense that the production reaches all the way to raw reality, that its frames work in transparent ways. To privilege moments conventionally left “off-camera” is, of course, a documentary strategy that has fallen in and out of favor since Vertov.

In fact, those visibilities oscillate, as in a magic show—now you see the frame, now you don’t—similarly alternating between cultivating wonder and sowing doubt.6 In close-ups and in voice-overs, even the master of ceremonies alternates moods, skeptically sneering one moment, the next offering to believe anything if proof warrants it. Even the magician-skeptics, “professionals at fooling the public,” as the narrator often reminds viewers, sometimes confess to goose bumps when capable psychics succeed. As the editors separate and combine shots, they also nest and switch perspectives on these attitudes; for example, they intercut incredulous facial expressions and gestures with skeptical ones. A magician raises an eyebrow, a camera captures that gesture, and the editor places it just after some failed contact with the informational ether or with the spirits. It becomes an unspoken reaction to the failure: a flicker of expressions unseen by contestants but caught by viewers, as if aimed for them, and thus inviting them to join the hip insiders backstage (the magician brothers are indeed young and fashionable). As the stage aside did for commedia dell’arte, Meyerhold’s plays, winks, and eyebrow flickers are crafted to point inside and outside theatrical frames all at once.

This works so well because once avant-garde documentary frame-breaking techniques became familiar to audiences, perhaps especially in formerly Soviet states, long before Battle went on air. We have already seen that ruptures do not guarantee revolutionary affects. Estrangements, including those prompted by frame breaking, can afford possibilities to switch between figure and ground, between skeptical and open modes of watching. Recall again Olender’s documentary on psychics, which began and ended with shots of the filmmakers watching footage together on a small TV screen. They smoke and drink tea as they rewind video interviews and point to gestures; the camera moves across their faces and over the walls of their shared editing workspace decorated with photos of celebrities. A cat tiptoes across the machinery. They narrator’s tone is gentle, contemplative; there are no angry skeptics here, only curious agnostics. But when and where does framing become vulnerable to real challenge?

POWER TO PUNCTURE FRAME

At GITIS, learning to make and to juggle circles of attention within (and across) stage frames happens inseparably from learning divisions of communicative and metacommunicative labor—and learning hierarchy.7 Only instructors break and enter performance frames, shake others’ footings at will. It is their choice to watch a scene to the end and then conduct a Socratic interrogation or deliver a few critical notes. It is also teachers’ prerogative to enter students’ “given conditions” for a frame: “Where are you going, sir, are you lost?” After speaking with the character, the teacher can shift back to a pedagogical footing to address the student, commenting on the character as well as on the actor’s relation to the character. Two instructors thus engaged a male student and afterward chided: “When we talked to him … your character rambled. There is no kernel [in him]—just aggression, as abstract behavior. Once the aggression melted away, there was no more character…. He’s playing at James Bond, but where is the kernel? Why is he displeased?” (Fieldnotes, November 2002).

Later on, this student told me that he had taken Al Pacino in Taxi Driver, not Bond, as his model, but, he said, it would have made no difference to have said so; the instructors’ control of frame shifting not only drove the terms of the critique, but also blocked an explanation that drew from more distant framings.

Teachers were always at liberty to break or to maintain more than one frame at a time. For example, one evening toward the end of the first year, students had spread across their two studio rooms and corridor to work on character sketches based in observations of people on public transit. A few asked me to film them so that they could critique themselves. One laid flat a cardboard box to play a beggar, tucking his left foot under his thigh to look like a war veteran amputee. An instructor approached the student, cursed him, and reached for the cane at the student’s feet. Not getting a rise, he began to kick the student’s legs and buttocks like a street fascist, while shouting phrases like a theater instructor: “Net glaz! Gde glaz!?” (“No eyes! Where are the eyes!?”). The student flashed into a rage that seemed quite real (it startled me anyway), yanking his cane from the teacher’s hands and, as the teacher walked off, sullenly turning away. Remembering the camera, he turned for a moment and gestured to me to aim it elsewhere. All the same, while showing the sketches to the maestro the next day, the student incorporated that conflict into his work, casting two cohort mates to do the kicking (all within a single story frame this time, not reproducing the previous day’s oscillation and mingling of frames).

FIGURE 8.2.    Corridor life at GITIS. Naps and chess between rehearsals, lessons, and exams—offstage yet never unobserved by each other. Author’s photo, 2003.

Rarely did students take it upon themselves to blend or mix frames, and when they did, teachers called the final frame. During December the youngest directing student triumphed with an assignment to enact a chapter from Stanislavsky. Late one afternoon we were summoned to a studio with the explanation that we needed to arbitrate a transgression. The young director lined up three students in chairs to face the rest of us (the entire cohort of thirty, plus three instructors and a few intern observers, like me). She announced that someone had broken a window the night before, that we needed to figure out who and decide what to do. Her words reframed whispers and tears that we had all stumbled upon in the corners of the corridors all day long; a few classmates exclaimed, “So that’s why those three have been acting strangely!” The three in front began to confess even while others began to flitter skeptically: perhaps the whole day had been staged? It had indeed, as was clarified once a teacher halted us: “Good, good. Stop, we get it.” The directing student admitted that the corridor events had been staged, while several other students continued to share notes on how they had felt disoriented since morning by a “strange tone in the cohort.”

One student, however, stood up, declared with a loud tremor that he wanted nothing to do with such dishonesty, and stormed out. I wondered then whether his action was just another twist in the plan, even though he, a directing student, was not so convincing as an actor. I asked the student whose project this was about it; his reaction had surprised her, too. The student who walked out left GITIS several months later; his outrage about this and other episodes of frame shifting had not helped him. He had once reported to me with amazement his discovery of the Soviet film Uspekh, in which the director manipulates actors offstage in order to affect their behavior onstage. But GITIS requires people to learn to make and to break frames, to layer frames within frames, and to improvise when others initiate a frame. To succeed, to become an actor flexible in any genre a director may choose, one cannot be squeamish about frame leaks or pollutions across the proscenium. The teachers praised this experiment and the impulse to blur lines between “life” and “art”; their only criticism addressed the tells that betrayed the gap (What night custodian would not call the chancellor?).

Afterward, one of the actresses in the piece expressed surprise that the others had recalled so many details of her behavior throughout the day, even all her little attempts to avoid contact, keeping her eyes downcast as if in shame. In answer, the teacher stressed that they all ought to mark “how much you are, after all, always under each others’ nadzor (“observation,” “surveillance”).” Before filing this comment away as a Soviet holdover, consider the following. To be sure, the students, born in the 1980s, were familiar with film depictions of Soviet tribunals (see Lerner and Zbenovich 2013). But they also came to learn the frames and forms for collective discussions of responsibility in schools and workplaces that did not mark them as past or as Soviet. This did not occur to me until I asked one of the teachers about possible continuity with Soviet practice; he replied tersely, brushing off the qualifier of Soviet, instead pointing to whatever conditions he imagined would motivate me to pose such a question in the first place, as if there were something exotic about the practice: “Well you probably do not have this kind of thing in America—you just spread malicious rumors, right?”

DOOR FRAMES: DISRUPTING INTUITION

In places and times in which situation and hierarchy are not clear, it can also be less clear who should initiate a frame or what to do if one is undermined. Consider a case in which two situation paradigms seemed to collide: a preliminary ethnographic interview with psychic client intake session. In the very first season of Battle of the Psychics, in 2007, Mrs. A achieved fame as a strong contender, and she continues to appear on television in Russia and in Europe. I visited her office near the Taganka metro station, an old Moscow neighborhood south of the Kremlin, in a tall, solidly square red stone building across from an Orthodox church compound. The main vestibule is fronted by a pair of heavy, carved wooden doors; as I pushed against the wrong edge of one door in vain, two women pressed behind. One said, “Go on through, young lady,” then softening the tone, added: “Are you here to see Ms. A.?” To my affirmation she replied, “I know, I sensed your presence.” Given our appointment time, I, too, had reasoned the same—to point out that logic, however, would have been to call out her bid to define the encounter. I am not the only person for whom such acts seem impolite or awkward; psychics the world over reinforce this when they complain that hostile skeptics “disrupt the energy.” We are not machines, they say, but organic psychophysical instruments, delicately tuned. A bad audience, they claim, can ruin even a trained musician’s performance—even just one person sucking a lemon in the front row. Professional skeptics like James Randi contend that a good way to throw off a fake psychic is merely to refuse his or her framing: do not reply to questions; restrict all reaction and uptake. Conversely, when interlocutors go along with bids to set a footing for a séance or make a frame for a reading, mere conversational politeness colludes to make psychic encounters succeed, even convince psychics of their own powers (Lamont 2013, 214; see also Wooffitt 2006). Given these felicitous conditions, framing itself becomes another technology for intuition, just as disrupting frames can subvert intuition—or at least some claims to intuition.

We rode a small elevator up ten floors to a suite of four rooms. Doubled metal doors gave way into a wide vestibule that opened into a large, sunny room displaying a few dozen icons resting on shelves and gilded easels, furnished with overstuffed, camel leather chairs. A corridor led left past another large room, empty save for a mural of a waterfall covering the entire back wall and two facing barrel chairs. One Orthodox-themed room, one nature-themed room: variations to match subtypes of intuition to diverse clients (a decorating principle familiar to me from New Age bookshops in the United States). A room at the end of the hall offered a much smaller, cozier, more secular option, bearing signs of Russian hospitality: a table set for tea, cookies in shiny cellophane, and a table under the window laden with matrjoshki (nesting dolls), small icons, and postcards. Beyond this room, in a busy secretarial space, telephones were ringing on desks. Mrs. A’s cell phone, too, interrupted her from sitting down opposite me. Assistants came and went, asking about withdrawals of money, visa forms, photos, tickets—Mrs. A was preparing to travel to Colorado.

After about fifteen minutes, the rush subsided, the assistants went home, it being after five o’clock, and Mrs. A put her phone aside: “Tell me please, about your research.” I was not in Moscow to test her powers, I said, but was hoping rather to conduct oral histories, to connect psychics’ life stories with events and social contexts. “Yes, yes, yes. I understand. And I like ethnography. I am writing a book about Atlantis. Go ahead.” Despite the sense of agreement at the point that “what is going on here” was something like a preliminary discussion, our conversation never settled into the conventions of “interview,” but kept jostling with “psychic test” and “client reading.” She complained first that Battle of the Psychics, then in its eighth season, was no longer what it had been, but had become an advertisement for psychics who had become celebrities, with whom she contrasted herself: “I don’t have a stream of clients, like X does.” She warned me against several such colleagues, who, she said, put too much effort into projecting glamour, perhaps even pretending to powers, “of course, the crew gave hints to all of us, here and there, but some went out of their way to cheat.”

Soon Mrs. A began to shift topics, between speaking about her life and demonstrating that she could see into mine. As for me, I switched between requesting elaboration and trying to not respond, for example, when, after talking about her own husband, she looked behind my shoulder and explained that she was trying to see mine: “Your husband is light-haired?” I felt myself start to smile at this cold reading, for I had caught a mistake. Before I could tamp down the fleeting facial expression, she corrected, “Well, going silver, then?” Yes, I acceded. “He can be stubborn, in the middle of an argument?” I shrugged, struggling to balance minimal response (to a statement true of anyone) with a friendly demeanor—in a situation in which even cool neutrality has a history of being glossed as the withdrawn hostility of a skeptic. “He can’t seem to save enough money?” I shrugged again. “Your back hurts?” Here I could not stifle a response: “No, not really.” Such questions can seem specific because they gesture at common possibilities while inviting interlocutors to fill in—even in the imagination, without speaking aloud. To deflect such invitations felt rude, though she seemed to take no offense, and I tried to soften the deflections by reasserting interest in her life “as a person, not only a psychic.”8

After about an hour, I announced that I was late to meet a friend who had recently graduated from GITIS. She walked me down the corridor, back to the double iron doors, embraced me with a kiss on each cheek, and reached for the knob—which did not turn. We had lingered past working hours, and one of her assistants had locked us in. She began to telephone staff, one by one, her voice rising as she paced the hall: “A person is late for television!” I fiddled with the iron skeleton key sitting in the lock, trying to help. More calls turned up the cell number of the building concierge sitting downstairs. The concierge took a few minutes more, and we stood uncomfortably, voices now lower, making calm conversation. As she was traveling soon to Colorado, she wondered how Protestants feel about icons (Would they make good gifts, would they offend people?). When the concierge finally rattled the doorknob, Mrs. A communicated through the metal: “We are locked in—and she is an American!” The outer bars scraped, pulled back, but the inner door still would not open; I must have relocked it when fiddling with the key. After another minute of fumbling, we finally passed through, and Mrs. A showered the concierge with grateful kisses all the way down ten floors.

The event embarrassed us both in the moment. That night, back home with my friends, we and the neighbors found it hilarious, as if she, in dealing with ordinary doors, had failed actual tests, as if all of her life were framed as psychic demonstration: “She didn’t know the phone numbers!” “You had double-locked the door, she didn’t see that.” An ordinary mix-up for anyone else, but for her, the authenticity of her powers, her potential international reputation, and more were at stake in defining “what is going on here.” A genuinely intuitive subject is expected not only to answer well, but also to foresee both the questions and the conditions for questioning.

THE PSYCHIC ON TELEVISION

As the preceding example probably indicates, the “interview with a psychic” is a tricky speech genre, and not just for me. In order to broaden the corpus to demonstrate this, I take this ethnographer out of the picture and offer now by contrast an interview staged not for me, but for television, on one of many interview and panel discussions programs with psychic celebrities that have been broadcast over the last decade in Russia. Shkola Zloslovia (School for scandal) was a Moscow talk show (2004–2015) that invited celebrities, writers, directors, and politicians to converse with two prominent hosts, filmmaker Avdotija Smirnova and author Tatjana Tolstaja, promising to reveal unexpected aspects of famous personalities, to peek behind their public masks. A 2004 episode featured Allan Chumak, the psychic who earned his fame on television during late glasnost’ by charging waters and creams with healing energy, through the screen. Chumak had been barred from the airwaves for a time—or rather, as he likes to stress, he was forbidden to appear silently on television—a sanction that, he avers, only credentialed his potency. For some years he was limited to live stage appearances, pamphlets, and books. He returned to television during the first decade of the twenty-first century as a guest on shows where he passionately debated, with scientists and others, the reality of energy fields and of the shiny webs of information that he claimed to sense and to harness.

The show often began as if catching the two hosts already deep in conversation, as if the camera had been turned on midsentence. Editing proceeded to cut often between interview space and backstage room, before and after. Again, experiments with frames, once avant-garde, had passed through several cycles of retreat and resurgence and did not shock post-Soviet viewers, but this episode cycled a bit more than others, shifting among interactions filmed before, during, and after Chumak’s interview, which was staged in front of a small studio audience. The broadcast announcement, moreover, claimed that the episode’s guest had long stirred “wildly disparate reactions”—from hope for healing to rage at charlatanry—and credited the hosts for attempting “to model the situation of conflicting interests in and attitudes toward this phenomenon.” As producers and editors shifted among performance frames, they also moved across skeptical, open, and faithful perspectives on the interview. Such oscillations have structured the rhythms of magic shows for so long that the decision to move them into backstage discussion about how to encounter a magician seems almost overdetermined.9 What most interests me, however, is how, during the encounter, its participants folded struggles over perspectives and frames into the drama of the interview.

Before meeting Chumak, the two hosts sit at a wooden table set for tea in a cozy paneled room. Tolstaja smokes, listening to Smirnova denounce the “mad idea” of inviting this guest. Tolstaja twitches a hand defensively, but calmly counters, “You hold a stupidly rational point of view.” The camera pulls back to capture assistants as they apply makeup to Smirnova. As her face is dusted, she objects; the issue is not rationality, but the awkwardness of the impending situation. She faces making a direct, public challenge: “So, how are we going to even talk? Well, can I just tell this person, straight to his face, ‘I don’t believe a single word you say’?” She names this a struggle over how to communicate, as both investigative interviewer and generous host, with a psychic on TV.

Tolstaja advises Smirnova to be frank about her doubts, but then also assails her for mistrusting “things YOU cannot see—do you disbelieve in radio waves, too?” Onstage, the interview itself unfolds on a glass-trimmed platform where Chumak faces his inquisitors in front of an audience of about twenty adults. Smirnova opens by asking him to explain: How is it that he senses what others cannot? He replies by directing everyone present to hold up their hands, palms facing him, as he closes his eyes and manipulates the air with three fingers of a hand: “Do we have contact? Who feels something?” A portion of the audience raise their hands in response to his words: “Information”? “Energy?” Repeating the phrases he has uttered on 1980s television and on provincial Russian stages, he explains why only some can immediately receive the sensations of energetic information, likening the effort to learn to “straining to listen to a bad telephone connection.”

His response to the uneven success in the studio audience resembles GITIS teachers interpreting their students’ initial failures, stressing the need to work on attention. It also evokes common excuses for failed telepathic feats in the lab. Decades previously, in California, Stanford Research Institute scientists took the failures of Uri Geller merely as demonstrating the imperfections expected of any biological phenomenon (Lamont 2013, 198). The trained speaker facing a hostile crowd is also an organism whose talent can fail under conditions of bad chemistry. With time and effort, then, anyone can learn to sense, Chumak continues, the many channels of living energies. That is how he heals: he makes sensate contact with others’ aura patterns, the patterns “imprint” their “information” on him, and then he is able to reorganize others’ fields as he would those of his own energies.

He claims to make such contact even across recorded media, across space-time gaps—be it two hours’ delay between studio recording and broadcast or ten years’ lag for watching one of his videos, even after his hypothetical death. He continues, describing texts and glasses of water alike as living bodies of interactive, motile information. The metaphors do not satisfy the hosts. At several points over the hour-long episode, the editor cuts to the cozy greenroom, where a screen replays the studio conversation behind the hostesses. They debrief, debating the proper ontological grounds for evaluating the staged interaction—and its apparent effects on them now. The camera hovers at the ceiling for a panoptic view: Smirnova is disturbed by a lack of explanation coherent to her, doubly disturbed because Chumak had apparently cleared up her headache from across the table: “What is this, self-hypnosis?” Tolstaya accuses her partner of failing to cultivate the right balance of agnostic realism: “You cannot verify a dream, can you? Would you dismiss dreams, too? Do they not also exist?” Such rigid distinctions make us more vulnerable to phony psychics, argues Tolstaya. In reply, Smirnova rips the microphone off her back, flinging it on a chair: “There is no more talking to you.” End episode.

The episode brilliantly revisits debates of the Soviet 1960s and 1980s, animating the dual figures of the agnostic and the enchanted, the poet and the scientist whom we met in earlier chapters, but now places them in conflict, rather than merging them into what was a uniquely Soviet model for the curious subject.

SURREAL PERSPECTIVES

If many psychics trace the emergence of their powers by narrating themselves as figures who, like Messing, pass through a nexus of authority, Chumak had himself once played that authority, the skeptic, the verifier of credentials. At the end of the studio interview, Smirnova had baited Chumak: “Are you a sorcerer then?” He smiles, “I work as a sorcerer.” Earlier in the interview, he had described his shift in work, and in professional expertise, as having begun while he was investigating alleged charlatan healers for the television station. When he began to see and feel shiny energy trails, mandalas of information patterns, “that was when the journalist died” (no one asked him on air whether lysergic acid had been involved).

Mrs. A had played similar positions in her own story—she, too, switched figure and ground, moved from observing authority to being observed. She had left Battle of the Psychics midseason, after winning several challenges—it was too demanding, she announced, draining her health; the psychic work exhausted her. Indeed, the filming required late night shoots, hours of waiting for setup or for other psychics to take their tests. Her reasoning echoed accounts of psychic toil elsewhere, of the physical toll that extrasensory labor takes. Later she revealed to reporters that she had received at that time a false diagnosis of tuberculosis. But all this was nothing compared to her backstory at the time (since faded out from her web pages). During Mrs. A’s moments onscreen, a male narrator described her as a psychic whose powers had blossomed “after a series of betrayals and violent experiences, including a period in jail.”

Nexus of authority indeed. She detailed the events to me in her office. She had come of age in the Soviet 1970s. Her first husband had been Chechen; they met while she was serving during the last years of the Soviet Union as a border guard where the USSR met Afghanistan. It was that first husband’s betrayal, she said, that landed her in trouble (“the matter rose to a national search”), and she spent one and one-half years in jail. There, she said, “for the first months, the guards look you over, as if testing: ‘She may seem like a good person, but eventually, her real character will emerge.’ ” She learned this because one of the guards told her so, saying that he could see that hers was a good soul and that he wanted to help her. Like Messing’s train conductor.

Shifting tone, she then asked me, “Have you read the book The Master and Margarita?” I have indeed, said I (so have, famously, Mick Jagger and Patti Smith, while perhaps most of my former classmates have not, and I also know former Soviets who fear to read the book). I listened, intrigued that she would reach for this textual reference during her biographical remarks. I expected her, a celebrity psychic, to develop an identification with the character Woland, the foreign sorcerer (who some say was based on Wolf Messing). But she had another character in mind. Dropping her eyes, she said: “That prison guard felt sorry for me in those surroundings, and told me to imagine myself as Margarita at the ball, and to imagine everyone who comes before me as one of the characters filing past.” At novel’s end Margarita saves the writer who is her lover, The Master, by making a pact with Woland to hold court as queen of his ball, sitting naked on the dais to greet his minions, a receiving line of witches and monsters (a ball, some say, written out in imitation of the famous balls staged in the 1930s at the American embassy). As they pass, they see her bare skin, but Margarita, said Mrs. A, sees through each of them, as if to intuit their deeds, their natures. She only seems to be the one exposed, while in fact everyone is.

Taking up this perspective marked a moment when, Mrs. A says, her own extrasensory and intuitive powers began to unfurl (later, she would refine and purify those talents, adding clairvoyant abilities, learning from church elders in Moscow’s monasteries). In prison, Mrs. A lived in her cell and from Margarita’s throne at the same time. Seeing prison through this textual matrix—passed on by a prison guard—Mrs. A shifted her own framing, if not that of others, to experience herself simultaneously as ground and figure, object then subject and back again, both seeing and seen. She did not reverse the state’s panoptic vantage so much as become a surreal consciousness, taking on something like DuBois’s double consciousness, seeing others see her. But why should she report this as a magical moment, rather than a political one? Material technologies for audio surveillance might have offered a working metaphor; a good set of earphones can work as a microphone if you switch the output contact to an input. Perhaps when senses emulate technical media for state surveillance, to speak of them in terms of paranormal intuition instead is to distance from profane powers. At any rate, several years later Mrs. A had given up the story in public, no longer mentioning either her previous profession as border guard or the advice from the prison guard. Instead, biographical publications and introductions before television appearances began to credit her clairvoyant powers to inheritance from a grandmother, to list multiple degrees in folk healing and psychology, and to cite celebrity clients. She was moving up.

CHANNELS IN SHADOW

The ways prisoners see others or speak of sensing the world beyond prison walls may seem of little consequence from outside or from the social heights. In this story, it is precisely sympathy that breaches the walls; it is as if the mixing of guards’ authority with affection, hierarchy with intimacy, had sparked her second sight.10 These encounters build narrative frames that transect other interactional frames, even as they run inside channels built by empires and by superpower states. As thinkers such as Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Foucault, and Agamben have suggested, the infrastructures and logics of incarceration transpose pieces of other borders, techniques for keeping gates, and means of activating boundaries. The prison wall and the proscenium alike share principles with checkpoint and border, which act not only to frame illusion or reality, but also to constrain movement and to funnel populations, to move them out or up, or to hold them in place.

Contacts between guards and guarded, watchers and watched have been enacted and reframed in stories and performances many times over, in many places and times. A decent number are set in Russia and in the United States—no coincidence, as both superpowers together are the twentieth- and twenty-first-century masters of mass incarceration. Consider next an example of the contested processes for framing one enactment of such contacts, a film production that located Russia as the site and source of unfreedom, but was produced jointly with North Americans.

In the early 1990s, while waiting for funding to begin a second year of fieldwork, I was asked to help as a translator and an extra actress on a film set inside a women’s penal colony near Perm’. The film featured an urban intellectual imprisoned for killing her husband (a familiar tale: the naïve among the bandits). The Russian director had negotiated with colony officials to allow filming on the grounds, to absorb the colony’s authenticity and assure also the free labor of inmate extras. The colony lay in the Urals foothills south of Perm’, a region of many prisons, labor camps, and closed factories. Our cast and crew lived in a hotel nearby, just outside the township of Kungur, which boasted five prisons, including one in the town center, a high-security men’s prison housed in a former monastery, girdled by prefab cement slabs topped with curling electric wire; beautiful still, that landmark is not included in the Kungur souvenir postcard set. Minutes away by car, among rolling hills, is a men’s labor camp, and across the road, the women’s. The colony housed retsidivisty (repeat offenders) who were sentenced for Soviet-era crimes such as speculation (including small trade) as well as for theft and murder, and was categorized as a “medium regime” prison, as opposed to “ordinary” or “strict regime.”

A North American actress had written the script and was coproducing it with the Russian director. She and two more North American actresses were to play the key roles. They would speak their lines in English, later to be dubbed into Russian. Secondary roles and extras were drawn from the inmates, and so in the weeks leading up to shooting, my job was to translate among the several English-speaking actresses and the Russian-speaking crew, director, prison staff, and prisoners. The director arranged for us to spend time inside, to eat in the dining hall to learn how inmates spoon soup, pulling out the bay leaves and fish entrails, to try a hand at the factory machines, to learn to make chifir’ (extra strong undiluted tea), to see the tools for drawing tattoos or bleaching hair.

And so, when at least a decade later Mrs. A spoke to me about her prison time, I did not imagine American-style jails, but this camp with wooden barracks spread across a lightly wooded field, birds roosting in the cafeteria and in the factory. There guards had spent all their time with the prisoners, in the same spaces, not talking through bars or remaining in the admin building. One Sunday, for example, guards and prisoners all spoke about looking forward to watching a Mexican soap opera, The Rich Also Cry, which was massively popular that year. All the Roma, all the Russians, all the other post-Soviets I knew in Moscow, in Tver’, in Perm’, all knew the series, and only a few would not admit to watching it. In a room used for education, papered over with posters on responsibility, the television was set high in a corner; we could all see well without staggering chairs. Some women knitted as we sat quietly, settling in, adjusting the sound; one guard scolded us for silence, but need not have. The episode culminated this way: the heroine stood at the foot of a staircase before three suitors, the camera scanning quick takes back and forth across all their faces. Everyone, guards and inmates alike, roared: “Such a problem!!!” Prisoners and guards laughed and exchanged gazes. These sorts of little everyday crossings, contacts made across and through the structures of prison discipline, were never collected, however, for staging in the film, and where they turned up in accidental footage, they were not used. Only scripted crossings for love and for salvation (a guard helps the heroine he has impregnated to escape) were staged.

Several guards spoke to me of the trouble they had trying to think of themselves as alien to the prisoners. Some joked that the little moves of improving environment (like ordering books for the library or receiving care packages) prove that the inmates “really run this prison.” Such joking marks the sense, I speculate, that they were all somehow deviating from the strict lines that power ought to draw. Working communicative contacts—never mind empathy and sympathy among guards and inmates—were taken as signs of potential breakdown of the system. They spoke, as did many post-Soviets, of humanity always trying to squeeze through limits and rules about contact. One guard whom we shadowed for two days clearly liked many inmates: “I try to hide that,” she sighed, when we finally asked her directly about this. She recalled the wrenching difficulty of the first months on the job; she, too, had had trouble with the rules, the stones in the kasha, the soup floating with fish guts, the bad factory ventilation, the raw coughing all night in the dorms.

But what had really unhinged her, she said, was reading the reports describing the women’s offenses, then trying to reconcile those texts with the people she knew; indeed, whenever I had to translate an actress’s question about what a particular woman was in for, her face would redden. The actresses stopped asking, finally, after this guard took us to the storeroom where recently arrived inmates were issued prison blues (and the cast members were fitted for costumes): skirt, tights, shirt, jacket, slippers, and boots. In “ordinary regime” prison colonies, women wear whatever clothes they have, but here uniforms were mandatory, though almost everyone violated code somehow, hiking up skirts to evade modesty rules, wearing them over track pants to exceed those same rules. The storeroom floor had just been painted with thick, brown paint, so after climbing thin, knobbed metal stairs to reach its door (the height was a security measure), we had to edge sideways across wooden planks to avoid stepping on wet paint and upsetting women on their way out, arms loaded with textiles. The inmate in charge sat us down on benches, offered us tea and to show us her wedding album, which she kept with her always. We leafed through snapshots of her family, her wedding, and her husband, a heavy person who wore only black turtlenecks covering her chin. They had met through a personal ad in a local paper circulated among prisons: “I am looking for a wife. No nasty habits/vices.” They had met just that year, married inside the prison walls, and then honeymooned for three days and nights in the house for family or conjugal visits (allowed once every four months). The rest of the year, several evenings each week, he stands across the road, in sight of barracks windows, to wave and blow kisses. Many men and women do this, standing in a row to signal to girlfriends inside. She spoke at length about their last such meeting while stroking the brown, leather cover of her album. Once back outside, the guard with us turned red again as we pressed her to reveal the woman’s offense. It was clear that the criminal record, while gruesome, cruel, and sad, did not deter our guard from having affection for the woman.

SCRIPTS AND WALLS

The prison records seemed (at least to the actresses and I, during this period) less disruptive than the text of the script, over which several actresses argued with the director (through me), vociferously disputing discrepancies between the script and the ways we saw inmates working, eating, and trying to relax, the ways they described their lives.

About a week into our actor-ethnographic research, we were invited to spend the night in a barracks. Sitting on cots on the second floor, we were treated to extra blankets and a dish of potatoes with dill and butter and passed a guitar around for a few rounds. The highest ranking inmates had displaced themselves from their own beds; they would bunk with the guard, in the adjoining room. The actress began to ask, for me to translate: “In the script, women fight because they are jealous over a girlfriend … if your friend drank tea with someone else, would you be jealous?” The women acknowledged fighting: certainly, they said, but over completely other issues, over exchanges—tea or tobacco for instance—or the loss of a toothbrush, or someone sitting on your bunk uninvited. But romance? Hardly. We pressed: “In the script, the women are all thinking about sex …” The women in the room interrupted, laughing to tears: “Oh, who has time for that! We are too tired for that!” I had little occasion to doubt or time to wonder whether they were deflecting, because snoring began as soon as the main lights went out, one bulb weakly glowing from the ceiling all night long.

In the script, a character was supposed to stand, naked, before male officers, so we asked a few inmates how often such a thing happened. “Well … seriously, only a doctor would ever see you naked.” Upon taking this objection to the director, he deflected, casting all prisoners as always and only dishonest: “Everyone in there is lying, you can’t be so naive.” Yet in his very next sentence the director shifted rhetorical tactics, now lauding metaphor as transcendent truth that justified the figure of the bare woman—this one lacking the power of Margarita at the ball or even the mildest forces generated by contact, like that between Mrs. A and her sympathetic guard (or Messing and his conductor):

DIRECTOR:	My movie isn’t about this jail, here and now, it’s about a jail that was and could be. It isn’t a reality, it is a metaphor, a metaphor of an entire society, of a prison within a prison, of how twisted all of us are inside. I show a woman naked before the male officers because that is fascism—it is a powerful symbol.
ACTRESS/TRANSLATOR:	Then why did you even send us in there, if you don’t care what we see, or whether that differs from the script?
DIRECTOR:	You need to understand us—us all—better…. Maybe today there are no guns, no dogs, no electricity in the wires, but the fear remaining inside these women, fear instilled by the twisted systematicity of Stalin’s time, remains everywhere, inside us, too. (Fieldnotes, Kungur, 1992)

Here the director moves away from cinema verité, for example, toward a surreal docudrama aesthetic—having the institutional and financial support to film inside the actual material conditions of a prison, gaining access to forms that afford the artist oscillations of frames, frames switching expected figures and grounds, generating surreal realism for the metaphors of open space and naked vulnerability, freedom and capture both visible through the barbed wire. Compared to the solid concrete bordering the monastery prison in town, the boundaries of the women’s colony seemed translucent. Just one small structure housed the checkpoint and gates, briefly punctuating wire fencing and trenches. Women gardened right at their edges. Inside the grounds several rows of two-story, red brick barracks were more visibly separated by walls concealing the dining hall and factories, the areas of work and rest less visible to each other than the birches beyond. These seemingly transparent borders, the director told us, had inspired him to choose this prison place: “Freedom is visible from inside—you can see the trees on the horizon—and that makes it more unbearable.”

Chekhov, in his travel diary describing the porosity of exile towns and penal settlements across Siberia, depicts open spaces for incarceration: villages run by the sentenced, exiles and their progeny uncounted by the census, claiming surnames like “Don’t know” or “Just got here.” Discipline did not work there through panoptic visibility or rationalizing systems.11 Much had tightened since Chekhov’s journey, but not, after all, every wall in every jail. All the same, in framing film shots, together with the crew we created that metaphor of illusory expanse while also erasing everyday, social, tacit knowledge of encounters with authorities who did not, in fact, block up all the holes.

As for our role, as Americans and Canadians, in the process, all our questions, our attempts to extract the real truth from prisoners, were also shaped by Cold War contacts and channels—and blocks on them—that, in the circular fashion of so many ideological claims to superiority, shaped Cold War claims to intuition about contact. We used techniques like those I would later witness at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. First we armed ourselves by close reading of a script, then we sought discrepancies in the world (not a dishonorable endeavor, in itself; I might do it again). Next, facing the director with contradictions, we demanded replies (I do not regret those acts, either). The trouble was that we imagined only two sides, a locked dyad in which one saw clearly and the other did not. At the same time, however, like so many Americans in Russia during the 1990s, we sought signs of transparency and opacity in this newly post-socialist world as if we were not part of the equation, were not part of what was being seen—as if America had not played a part all along during the last century of building Soviet prisons and then representing them. Throughout the shoot, what seemed to be the director’s sole effort and individual agency to frame interactions did not, in fact, begin or end with him, or even at Russian borders. Our conflicts left us feeling as though it did—but our emotions in those moments did not reflect the social realities, to which our own familiar worlds had also contributed (including the structures that afforded us time for this project). Colluding in this, we too summoned the prison as proscenium from which to project mythic oppositions of lie to truth, walls to expanse, free to unfree.

WHO FRAMES?

Looking at the people actually on set, we might also break down our differing capacities to frame. The early twenty-first century saw the rise of reality shows in Russia (Big Brother, House-2, Battle of the Psychics) even while new forms of documentary (e.g., verbatim theater; see teatr.doc) drew acclaim (see Beumers and Lipovetsy 2010; Weygandt 2015). Back in 1992, however, though familiar with documentary film, the inmates found unnerving the task of playing oneself in the place one lives. If they had not been anxious about the role of the camera from the start, the director gave them reasons to become so. Very early in the shooting schedule, before filming in the barracks had begun, the director staged a mass scene, a roll call. He wanted to capture inmates’ reactions to an announcement that forty-eight requests for amnesty would be sent to Moscow. The women watched the camera and saw male actors dressed as soldiers watching them; they knew that a movie was afoot, but were still not sure whether to interpret this announcement as information or as part of the fiction. People may have hoped the two were connected, as rumors combining both options circulated: perhaps the director might later really convince prison officials to send individual requests to Moscow, and getting cast in the film would help to that end. The day before shooting began, two inmates who had just been cast told me, as we sat on their barracks steps late in the afternoon after their factory shift, watching the film crew pass through checkpoints just inside the wire fencing, that they hoped cooperating on the film would bring them amnesty.

The director planned to film inside actual living quarters, and on the first day of shooting brought the crew into a barracks, while the women were all at work, to test angles for natural light between the bunks. The crew made changes: they moved a philodendron and a begonia from two window sills, slid photos out of sight or into bedside drawers, and replaced bunk tags with paper bearing the names of film characters. At the end of the workday, the inhabitants started slowly filing back home. Initially curious, they began to mumble as they discovered changes to their space. Upon finding an unfamiliar name tag pinned to her bunk, one woman, picking at the paper, muttered quiet obscenities: “Mudaki—nara moja” (“Pricks—this is my crib”). The director had placed me on a bunk so that his cinematographer could calibrate a light meter, and another inmate, seeing me there, also began to swear. The director called a retreat, telling us that he “sensed some tension,” and the next day the crew set up a simulated dormitory in an unused barracks—more stark than the other, with no paint on the walls, flowers, belongings, or family pictures. In this new territory, prisoners working as extras continued to object to violations of prison conventions for respect, but with even less effect. One scene required an extra to sit down on another’s bed and ask for her palm to be read. The girl hesitated, while other extras commented, “She can’t just sit there uninvited—it’s like someone’s house, a bed is.” Every once in a while the director would heed them—the women shot him constant advice, shouting out details, asking questions: “They should join in on the last two lines of every couplet.” “I would never sit like that.” “Can I wear my jacket like this?” In a scene documenting morning awakening, they declared the action slow and static; there is no time for combing a girlfriend’s hair, singing, or sewing on buttons—what matters is getting in line for water or for a turn to sit on the board running across the communal latrine trench. He complained that they drove him out of his head. When he did not listen to them, they spoke anyway, to me, to each other, to the crew.

On set, even if not on camera, the labors of the crew and actors wove through competing perspectives. This work asked us all to shift frequently between calls to regard and then to disregard the inmates’ perspectives. Even had debates about what to include not been ongoing, even if prisoners, directors, actresses, and crew had not constantly asserted differing sensibilities about “what is going on,” it would have been difficult for everyone to converge even on the significance of making this performance frame. For the crew and directors, the camera pointed “in,” to penetrate a hitherto unseen world, and therefore shooting actresses framed by real bunks in a real barracks imbued their figures with authenticity. Inmates’ complaints about the authenticity of a shot participated in creating such figures. All the same, for them the camera invaded; it cut up their spaces or cut them out of their own spaces, distorting social and sensory relations—but in doing so, the camera, they hoped, pointed “out,” beyond the walls. Rumors of amnesty had come and gone more than once during their internment, but maybe all this acting would lead to the real thing. The production raised the stakes of performance, amplified desires to perform not merely for contact, for fame, or for insight, but also for freedom.

The filming promised to open channels—but it also put sharp hooks into the prison economy, exploiting and disrupting rhythms of work and rest, interrupting old partnerships and channeling new sympathies (with co-extras, with us). The professional actresses were charged with selecting prisoners for small speaking roles, told to tell the women that for “a chance to be in film” they would also have access to unlimited tea and tobacco. In one barrack room a table bore a samovar and bags of loose tea, while crew members gave out cigarettes throughout the day, two at a time (one for now, one behind the ear). Chifir’ and cigarettes were prison currencies, media both for exchange and sociability, both consumption commodity and cash, indispensable to relations of sentiment and of hierarchy, providing communal and solitary pleasure alike.

Women earned credits to purchase tobacco or tea by working in the boot factory. The most difficult and dangerous job was running the machine that drives nails through heavy black leather boot soles, but it was also a desirable job, one secured by taking less pay but worth it because the machine became hot enough to boil water, so one could brew others’ tea for a small fee or favor. This was against the rules but was difficult to monitor because of the way that machine’s intricate metal manifold curved around the worker.

Credits came out of wages, calculated according to how well the entire factory filled quota. The casting process and then filming interrupted the factory pace and sparked bad feelings beyond envy of those who earned roles. Sometimes extras were kept up all night shooting, so they missed shifts or slowed down the line, which threatened the quota and meant fewer credits for everyone. After a few days of shooting, one of the extras did not show up because another woman had bitten her arm, shouting, “So you think you are an artistka (an actress)!” A prison officer, wary of increasing conflict, put an extra guard outside the barracks.

The director and crew referred to incidents like this one to prove that the inmates were somehow naive, that they lacked the capacities and skills to perceive boundaries between life and art. In fact, they understood many principles of theatrical framing very well, and they were also quite savvy about recognizing forces that pressed them to define reality otherwise than they would have. They had long become aware, at a high price, that no single perspective could make sense of the conditions of their punishment—no matter which authority tries to center a single perspective. For prisoners, it was no mystery that the crew was bound to divisions of labor that centered the camera lens to frame a story, like a radius from a point that draws a circle around itself. Meanwhile, the crew members were not unaware that the prisoners saw the story and camera together to point outward, to extend as a ray to some concrete exit, but they spoke of that interpretation of the framing process as delusion, itself a sign of moral corruption.

Again, knowledge about the work of stage framing is not so very mysterious in Russia; school and amateur theatricals made the sociotechnical organizations of space-time in rehearsal and performance, as collective process, familiar to many. A number of prisoners were proficient in stagecraft; indeed, we first met prisoners after watching a poetry recitation and a Queen cover band in the camp’s theater, which occupied its own small building. Moreover, on a film set even professional actors become disoriented about which frames are in play. Onstage, the divisions of space and labor are more constant: the crew tiptoes along catwalks, up in the light booth, running pulleys, out of the way if their aims are not avant-garde. Even avant-garde play with frames usually puts actors in more informed positions about what is to unfold next in real time than does ordinary film acting. In film, actors always share space with the crew; the cameraman, key grip, and sound crew are constantly close by, even touching actors, switching places with them for new angles. They do not share space in order to make a statement about framing, as does avant-garde theatrical staging; rather, such arrangements have become socio-material necessity for film genres. On- and off-camera spaces are fluid, and this fluidity is decreed from the top down, creating conditions in which people constantly alert each other: Ukhodi, ty v kadr popala (“Move it, you’ve fallen into the shot-frame”).

Time, when filming, is cut differently than onstage, especially as some shots are as short as a few seconds. Narrative time does not correspond with interactional time or real time; if stage actors are given the entire script, which they eventually run through in order, film actors may receive only sections containing their own scenes, and they experience filming them in no narrative order, not knowing how the story ends or even how their scenes fit with others until the premiere.12 Film work schedules by the economics and logistics of set building and location access, the vicissitudes of lighting (sunset scenes are shot all at once), and the calendars of the highest ranking or most popular participants.

PRISON AS PROSCENIUM

“It is a powerful symbol,” said the director, summoning a “greater reality” in which this camp was but “a prison within a prison.” The power of the symbol, however, could only be evoked tautologically, by circling layers of authority to focus each point in the shooting—expertise about running the set or the expertise that selected the talented from among the criminal.

The director, however, took steps to achieve the metaphor with juxtaposition of images alone, as if contrasting spatial perspectives or sensual qualities told the whole story, a conceptual vision of freedom as empty space, rather than, say, a vision grounded in any actual deeds, such as when several prisoners interrupted filming to go have a smoke or left dinner early in order to feed a kitten. “Freedom” was not, for the director, a matter of action or redress across already populated social fields, but a simple reduction, an erasure of certain people and their messy problems to allow a clean contrast of confined versus expansive space, naked femininity versus uniformed masculinity, trees versus barbed wire. He invested his efforts in organizing an extreme version of intertextual enchantment from stores of familiar imagery and text. The cliché “Russia as prison” stood ready to overshadow the lives of any particular women actually serving time, to strike the right chords with the right audiences, perhaps especially foreign audiences. Many have claimed, for example, that Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker symbolized the gulag; despite Tarkovsky’s pronouncements to the contrary, many have read it to indict the entire socialist world (and modern industry) as a condition of perpetual incarceration. In that film, too, boundaries are invisible, and fences pop up across deceptive illusions of open expanse.

A decade later, collectives such as teatr.doc formed in Russia that counter techniques of montage and metaphor, substituting interview transcripts for scripts; these and other perspectives complicate once stable accounts of Russia as prison, Russian culture as riven through by prison cultures and conditions. Cultural historian Katerina Clark, for example, rightly bemoans the frequent link made between Russian acting and surveillance, likening actor and sleuth as master observers of human behavior: “Indeed, it is something of a clichéd observation that Stanislavsky’s school had some affinity with the NKVD” (Clark 2011, 232).13 Forms of this cliché are repeated often, with greater and lesser grounds for belief, both in Russia and elsewhere. Norris Houghton, recounting his second tour of Soviet theaters, in 1960, quotes from a meeting with the artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater, who described a letter in which: “A stage-struck detective … wrote to Kedrov after reading an article by Stanislavsky’s disciple describing an argument over aesthetics: ‘You are right and the others are wrong. We have learned from police experience that a man’s acts—his physical behavior—reveal his true nature. How he looks, what he says can deceive; what he does determines it’ ” (Houghton 1962, 65). Decades later, GITIS instructors also recalled agents coming to study the secrets of perception and the technologies for intuition, to learn from experts on communicative behavior, following the first steps in the acting courses, such as visiting the zoo to observe gentle herbivores and cruel predators, picking up tricks to use during interrogation: “Those agents went and sat in the cathouse and learned to do their work by watching the eyes of lions.” Claims that KGB agents valued actor training work like credentials, of course, scaling up importance and utility through contiguity with state power.

To link theatrical practice to those state institutions that define criminality is to join not just any cultural spaces, but two that have become emblems of Russianness and then of Sovietness for the rest of the world: the Russian ballet, the circus, and the stage on the one hand, and on the other, imperial exile to Siberia and Communist labor camps. What actually joins these spaces, however, are not threads autochthonous or unique to Russian soil, but broader ones, that if not fully global, are certainly transimperial.

Many raised in Russia are weary of the pounding repetition both of prison tropes and tropes of theatricality. They know their world to be more differentiated, and also more connected, than such tropes allow. These specific clichés were a sore point for theater workers and students at GITIS. During the fourth year of the cohort I followed, several of us were taking a break in the courtyard under the warm September sun with their young dance instructor (later to become an extremely accomplished choreographer), who had been doing tricks all day with a steel, U.S. military lighter.14 He showed us the English engraving: “Salamander Division,” then switched between English and Russian to narrate a scenario tracing the path of the lighter to his pocket: a Russian soldier and an American soldier meet up as IFOR peacekeepers in Bosnia. The Russian soldier has little currency or much else on hand, so he says: “I trade you … this stone.” The choreographer laughed, dropping a rock. That story led him to recount other international encounters, such as an opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C., to perform at the Kennedy Center. He had refused, Ne khotel pozoritsja (“I didn’t want to shame myself”): the American choreographer who had invited him had visited Russia to stage a dance about the prisons, like everyone else. He continued in English, “It was so stupid! She shows like Russia is always in chains. Russia the gulag. Like we only suffer. I tried to explain that this is wrong. Yes, [there was] propaganda, but we were also happy, too. She tells us the first day, ‘I have read eleven books about gulag!’ So we all make faces!” (Fieldnotes, September 6, 2005).

His words countered those of our Urals film director (which, I should stress, aligned with those of the North Americans who wrote the script with his consultation). Both contrasted yet again with words of the inmates whom I met, as they reflected on being observed and filmed by Russians and North Americans. In the mid-1990s, almost everyone else I met in Russia wanted to compare and contrast laws, vocabularies, breakfast foods, and prices in Russia and America. The ways that prisoners spoke to us, however, did not orient to Cold War difference; that was hardly the framing that mattered most, as the days piled up. The prisoners never named a desire that we “understand Russia”; they were more interested in contacts, in acts of sharing a cigarette, in describing the bay leaf in the prison soup as “a letter,” in showing us the spots to stand to wave at kin standing on the outside.

On our first walk through the factory complex, one North American actress and I passed through a building set apart from the poorly ventilated, noisy factory where women assembled boots. Here it was airy, pleasant, sunlight hitting the tables for sewing boot linings. Two women on a stairwell were painting the walls. We stopped to ask about the choice of color, a muted aqua that is a familiar color throughout Russia (maligned by some as institutional and ugly; I find it interesting and soothing). They laughed, snorting, and I braced for the counter question (which colors do Americans paint their prisons) but instead, one of the women exclaimed with bubbly mirth: “They don’t know why this color, either!” We had been laughed at before, foreigners who did not know how to enjoy chifir’, but this felt like an invitation to laugh along. Or was that a misleading intuition? Did they laugh upon discovering our shared ignorance, marking a similar enough distance from the powers who make ridiculous decisions? Or were we funny just like the authoritative fools who choose paint colors without understanding why? Paint everything aqua! Shared bewilderment can certainly align people across many kinds of fence. But did we really share an angle, a frame? We were so caught up in preparing to film their lives for different circles, aiming cameras along other rays for attention, that that we surely scrambled local channels with our chosen technologies for intuition.