Early Russian Cinema: Some Observations
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 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 Pathé camera for him from Paris.
When he took up ‘moving photography’, Drankov had to confront some unfamiliar problems. The first was that of changing light.
When at last everyone had stopped arguing and agreed to ‘rush’ the scenes in front of the camera, it turned out that we had to move the trees. Since nine o’clock, when the trees had been erected round the fountain, the sun had moved and the shrubs were beginning to produce shadows that we didn’t want. This meant that we had to change the whole mise-en-scène and that meant changing the set as well. Once again we began to argue: what should we change? The mise-en-scène or the set? Then the workmen came and began ‘re-making the scenery’.18
Drankov resolved this problem, just as Thomas Alva Edison had had to fifteen years earlier. But, whereas Edison had built a ‘Black Maria’—a studio on a turntable base—Drankov’s sets had to be moved each time the sun changed its position:
We had to move the sets all the time to follow the movement of the sun. The camera, which Drankov was in charge of, moved with the sets.19
The second problem involved framing. In his photographic studio Drankov kept a reflex camera that he had brought from London in 1905. The owner of a camera like that naturally had no problem with framing. But the Pathé camera was another matter. It needed a certain amount of experience to capture within the frame, without a viewfinder, the precise scene that you wanted. The height and width of the sets did not allow Drankov to get far enough away. Orlov recalls:
Drankov was disturbed more than anything else by the absence of a ceiling in the set for the Granite Palace. As he could not work out how to film a long shot of the Granite Palace from a distance, nothing came of it. Generally speaking, the whole picture had to be filmed only in medium shot. Even the boyars’ procession could not be shot full-length.20
A year later, when Drankov was filming Stenka Razin, he remembered this lesson from Boris Godunov and declined to use sets at all. Stenka Razin was filmed in long and very long shot but even this was not accomplished without some errors in framing. In the ‘forest revelry’ scene the main characters, Stenka and the princess, are, according to tradition, placed to the left of the mass and slightly in front, but Drankov ‘cut them off’ almost completely on the left side of the frame. At the right side, however, a man in a bowler hat—probably Vasili Goncharov, the film’s scriptwriter—jumps out of the right-hand frame for a moment and, gesticulating, shouts something to the actors.
The story of Boris Godunov came to an inglorious end. The lead actor, E.A.Alashevsky, who played Boris, categorically refused to be filmed. Boris Godunov was released without Boris Godunov. At one time the film was shown under the title Scenes from Boyar Life [Stseny iz boyarskoi zhizni] and later, from 1909 onwards, as The False Dmitri [Dmitrii samoz vanets]. Later still the scene by the fountain was shown as a film recitation (see below, pp. 19–24). The film has not survived to the present day.
The example of the first Russian film is a good illustration of the dynamics of Russian culture. Russian culture was dynamic in the ‘vertical’ sense. When he staged Boris Godunov at the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky tried to get away from the canons of high tragedy. The twenty-two scenes in the production were supposed to produce the impression of the ‘cinematograph’. Russian cinema, in contrast, imitated elevated models. Even though he did not know how to ‘frame a shot’, Drankov was already encroaching on Boris Godunov. When in the spring of 1908 at the international cinematographic exhibition in Hamburg the representative of a French firm heard about this, he exclaimed in astonishment, ‘Fancy the Russians starting with that!’21 In constructing the edifice of their own cinema, the Russians, as usual, had begun with the roof.
The Speed of the Action
The most paradoxical of the many strange features of Russian cinema in the 1910s is the immobility of its figures. The static Russian mise-en-scène, which to the uninitiated might appear to be a sign of hopeless direction, in actual fact bore all the characteristics of a conscious aesthetic programme. At the centre of this programme lay the polemical formula ‘film story, not film drama’ which was the motto of Russian film style during the First World War.
There is preserved in Fyodor Otsep’s archive the outline of a book that he was planning to write in 1913–14. He intended to have a chapter in the book on The Three Schools of Cinematography: 1. Movements: the American School; 2. Forms: the European School; 3. The Psychological: the Russian School’.22 The ‘psychologism’ of the Russian style was defined as a denial of the external signs of ‘cinema specificity’ [kinematografichnost’]: the dynamics of action and the dramatic quality of events. Later, in 1916, the champions of Russian style began to call American and French cinema ‘film drama’, a genre that in their view was superficial. ‘Film drama’ was contrasted with ‘film story’, the preferred genre of Russian cinema:
The film story breaks decisively with all the established views on the essence of the cinematographic picture: it repudiates movement.23
But it was not only the Russian films made as ‘film stories’ that were judged from the standpoint of this paradoxical aesthetic doctrine. In 1916 we find a typical critical formulation in a review of the film His Eyes [Ego glaza], which was consistent with the Russian style:
The scenes that are devoid of traditional cinematic movement produce a great impression.24
Sometimes even foreign films, which had apparently fallen behind Russian cinema, were treated in the same way. Hence the condescending review in Proektor in 1916 devoted to the American film which was released in Russia as The Slave of Profit [Raba nazhivy]:
As far as the whole pace of the action is concerned, neither the director nor the cast have managed to capture that slow tempo that is so common in the Russian feature-film play. The actors are still too fidgety, as the Americans are wont to be; their acting still derives largely from the superficial, from objects and facts rather than from experiences and emotions.25
What in practice were the ideas behind the ‘Russian style’? Genetically speaking, the aesthetics of immobility can be traced back to two sources: the psychological pauses of the Moscow Art Theatre and the acting style of Danish and Italian cinema. When they met in Russian cinema these sources transformed one another: the operatic posturing of the Italian diva acquired psychological motivation, while the acoustic and intonational pauses of the Moscow Art Theatre—the so-called ‘Chekhov’ style, which was far from presupposing a slow tempo on stage—found its plastic equivalent on the screen. That gave rise to the minimalist technique of the Russian film actor, which was dictated inter alia by the style of film direction. As one of the manifestos of the ‘Russian style’ stated:
In the world of the screen, where everything is counted in metres, the actor’s struggle for the freedom to act has led to a battle for long (in terms of metres) scenes or, more accurately, for ‘full’ scenes, to use Olga Gzovskaya’s marvellous expression. A ‘full’ scene is one in which the actor is given the opportunity to depict in stage terms a specific spiritual experience, no matter how many metres it takes. The ‘full’ scene involves a complete rejection of the usual hurried tempo of the film drama. Instead of a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of images, it aspires to rivet the attention of the audience on to a single image…. This may sound like a paradox for the art of cinema (which derives its name from the Greek word for ‘movement’) but the involvement of our best actors in cinema will lead to the slowest possible tempo…. Each and every one of our best film actors has his or her own style of mime: Mosjoukine has his steely hypnotised look; Gzovskaya has a gentle, endlessly varying lyrical ‘face’; Maximov has his nervous tension and Polonsky his refined grace. But with all of them, given their unusual economy of gesture, their entire acting process is subjugated to a rhythm that rises and falls particularly slowly…. It is true that this kind of portrayal is conventional, but convention is the sign of any true art.26
Figure 1 Contemporary poster for Drankov’s Stenka Razin [ 1908].
The best directors were, to a greater or lesser extent, followers of the Russian style: Chardynin, Bauer, Viskovsky, Protazanov. One of the ideologists of the style, Vladimir Gardin, called the school the ‘brakingschool’ and he had a clear claim to be its leader. Subsequently Gardin recalled:
Protazanov developed and defined this school more by intuition than calculation. My peremptory shouts while we were filming The Keys to Happiness [Klyuchi schast’ya, 1913]—’Pause!’ ‘The eyes!’—did not go unnoticed. He took up this method and developed it in his own direction. On more than one occasion while he was shooting, Yakov Alexandrovich would lift his conductor’s baton and utter the magic word ‘Pause!’, sometimes holding his hand up for a long time and not letting it drop.27
Vladimir Gaidarov has given more details of Protazanov’s method in his reminiscences about Jenny the Maid:
There we were, face to face, and…pause, pause, pause…Jenny lowers her eyes…pause…she gets up quickly, turns and goes to leave…. Georges calls to her…. She lingers in the doorway without turning round…pause, pause…and then she turns and says, ‘I must get your medicine. It’s time for you to take it!’ Pause…she turns and leaves…Georges is left alone. He looks after her… again pause, pause, pause…. Then we see his elbow resting on the arm of the chair, his head bowed towards his hand, and Georges thinking to himself, What a strange girl she is!’ Pause, pause…and…iris.28
Lenny Borger, who has studied the problem of shooting speed in silent cinema, told me, after watching the films that Bauer and Protazanov made in 1916, that in his view Russian cameramen shot at a higher speed than was generally accepted, creating on screen a permanent slow-motion effect. It is possible that this was a means of insuring the film against deformation by projectionists, especially those in the provinces who were in the habit of ‘driving the picture’ faster than it had been shot. In 1915 Ivan Mosjoukine [Mozzhukhin], worried about the fate of the slow ‘Russian style’ in the hands of these projectionists, published an open letter in Teatral’naya gazeta calling on audiences who noticed discrepancies in speeds to ‘make their protest known by banging their sticks and stamping their feet, etc.’:
The poor innocent actors jump and jerk about like cardboard clowns and the audience, which is unfamiliar with the secrets of the projection booth, stigmatises them for their lack of talent and experience. I cannot convey the feeling you experience when you watch your own scene transformed at the whim of a mere boy from normal movements into a wild dance. You feel as if you were being slandered in front of everyone and you have no way of proving your innocence.29
The ‘Russian style’ did not, of course, meet with universal approval. Its champions were grouped round the journal Proektor, while its opponents featured in the pages of that more ‘cultured’ journal Teatral’naya gazeta. Bauer’s Silent Witnesses [Nemye svideteli, 1914], the paper remarked ironically, moved at about three miles an hour,30 while his Boris and Gleb [Boris i Gleb, 1915] was spoilt by the rhythm it had almost found:
The whole film is imbued with an irritating and unnecessary slowness. Unnecessary because the psychological climax emerges on screen in opposition to the drama, not through delays and pauses but, on the contrary, through accelerations…. The long drawn-out ‘psychological’ scenes allow the audience to start guessing and they have no difficulty in working out the subsequent course of events and the final denouement.31
Despite the paradoxical postulates of the ‘Russian style’, all this contributed to the fact that in the five years from 1914 to 1919, culminating in 1916, the films that were released in Russia were substantially different from the mainstream international production of the period. It was the ballet critic André Levinson who rather tellingly characterised this aesthetic system, writing in the Russian émigré paper Poslednie novosti in Paris in 1925 (by which time the system had already ceased to exist). Levinson recalled that pre-Revolutionary cinema
created a style that was completely divorced from European and American experiments but enthusiastically supported by our own audiences. The scripts were full of static poetic moods, of melancholy and of the exultation or eroticism of a gypsy romance. There was no external action whatsoever. There was just enough movement to link the long drawn-out pauses, which were weighed down with languorous day-dreaming. The dramaturgy of Chekhov, which had had its day on stage, triumphed on the screen. The action of these intimate emotions was not played out against the expanse of the steppes or the steep slopes of the Caucasus, even though the steppes were as worthy as the pampas and the Caucasus as majestic as the Rocky Mountains! Russian characters dreamed ‘by the hearth’. At that time the sentimental heroes of the American Vitagraph film were doing the same, abandoned by their brides, making out figures from the past through a light haze of smoke. Vera Kholodnaya and Polonsky came back from the ball in a car, facing the audience in close-up, each immersed in their own private pain; they did not look at one another and they never moved. It was in this immobility that their fate was decided. This was the drama. Nobody chased after their car. It did not gather speed. Nothing beyond its windows existed. It did not roll down a slope because the denouement did not need chance as its accomplice. However, in those years Tom Mix was already jumping from a bridge on to the roof of an express train. The ‘adventure’ script had triumphed. But the Russian product was preoccupied with feeling, with the vibration of the atmosphere surrounding motionless figures. The relationship between patches of black and white, the concepts of chiaroscuro were more expressive than an occasional gesture by the characters…. Sometimes the banality of the attitudes and ideas was striking, but only to the Russian eye. To a Western audience this banality was something inscrutably and irrationally exotic. It is for this reason, rather than technical backwardness, that the style remained a localised phenomenon—and soon afterwards war broke out.32
From the antithesis ‘film drama’/‘film story’ the ideologues of the ‘Russian style’ derived yet another postulate: the regimen for the perception of film was rethought from scratch. ‘The time has gone when we just looked at the screen: the time has come to read it.’33 Films like Tanya Skvortsova the Student [Kursistka Tanya Skvortsova] and His Eyes (both 1916) openly imitated a book. In Tanya Skvortsova the reels were called ‘chapters’ rather than ‘acts’. His Eyes began and ended with a shot of a girl leafing through the novel by Fyodorov on which the film was based; the pages of the novel also appeared during the course of the action and in the opening scene, the ‘players’ introduction’, the characters were made to look like illustrations brought to life. When Fyodor Sologub suggested a screen version of Lady Liza [Baryshnya Liza] to Alexander Sanin in 1918 he absolutely insisted that the source for the screen version shruld be the short story rather than the play:
I do not so much want pictures from real life, but rather as if you were turning the pages of an old, slightly naive, forgotten and touching book. What we want somehow is to look as though we are showing the pages of a book: the engravings, the vignettes, the head-pieces—all, of course, with great tact.34
Matters were not confined to the ornamental side. A serious reform of narrative syntax was announced. Equality between image and intertitle was proposed:
The film story consists of two equally important elements: mimic scenes performed by artistes and literary excerpts; in other words, of picture proper and intertitles…. In a screen reading the ‘pages’ of words alternate with the ‘pages’ of images: both have an equal right to life.35
At first sight paradoxical, this did in fact correspond to the literary essence [literaturnost’] of Russian cultural consciousness. The Russian audience in the 1910s was glad to read the titles and even became anxious when a title did not appear for a long time. There is a curious case relating to the film based on a script by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das fremde Mädchen [The Strange Girl, 1913], which was shown in Russia under the title A Mysterious Woman [Nevedomaya zhenshchina]. The film was made as a mime and it was first distributed in the original version without titles. But this proved too disturbing, as one reviewer noted:
This film—half fantasy, half real—did not have a single title throughout its entire length (about 1,000 metres), while the action developed so intelligibly, so freely that the fear arose almost instinctively that suddenly a title would appear and the effect would be ruined…. But later it was featured in one of the smaller cinemas with a large number of common-place titles: obviously this was essential to the success of the film with the cinema-going public.36
In 1914 Alexander Voznesensky (who, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was a follower of the aesthetics of ‘silence’ enunciated in the famous article by Maurice Maeterlinck) decided to have another go and wrote Tears [Slezy], the first Russian script without words. The film was made later that year, but at the preliminary screening it was rejected by the author himself. Later Voznesensky explained:
The shots with all their plot diversions were tiring to the eyes. Some kind of intervals were necessary. Then it became clear that in silent cinema the title does not play a purely explanatory role: rather it plays the role of a visual entr’acte. I suggested making a few literary inserts which would have no direct relation to the action but would provide a lyrical accompaniment to it and supplement it psychologically. This turned out to be what was needed: there were no explanations, but the visual entr’actes were preserved.37
A similar view prevailed among many who wrote about cinema in the 1910s: while titles were not really necessary, if you did not have them the loss would be that much more tangible. Lecturing on cinema in 1918, Vsevolod Meyerhold linked this effect to a longing for the word, to the logocentrism of our perception:
Titles should be inserted not merely for clarification…but so that the word, which in art is so enchanting, should begin to resound. The title, which allows one to rest from the picture, should lend enchantment to the sense of the phrase.38
Film Recitation
The logocentrism of Russian culture in the first decade of the twentieth century was not only reflected in the particular attention paid to film titles. The following episode is characteristic. In 1910 Russian papers reported the meeting in Yasnaya Polyana between two celebrities, Leonid Andreyev and Lev Tolstoy. Andreyev, who had just come back from a trip abroad, told Tolstoy about the progress of cinema in Western Europe. Tolstoy was interested and he returned to the subject the following day:
‘You know,’ said Lev Nikolayevich when he met me in the morning, ‘I’ve been thinking about cinema the whole time. Even during the night I woke up and thought about it. I have decided to write something for cinema. There would of course have to be someone to read it out, like there was in Amsterdam, someone to communicate the text. Without a text it would be impossible.’39
By ‘text’ he meant the spoken commentary that, as we know, accompanied the showing of films in many cinemas right up until 1913. However, alongside the habit of film shows with a commentary from a ‘lecturer’ (which is what barkers were called in Russia; their performances were surrounded with the appropriate ‘academic’ paraphernalia: a small lectern or a table with a lamp in f front of the screen), there existed in Russian cinema a peculiar genre, that of the ‘film recitation’ [kinodeklamatsiya] or ‘speaking picture’ [kinogovoryashchaya kartinag].40 This genre emerged in 1909 and enjoyed unfailing success until 1917.
Strictly speaking, the idea of making the characters in a film ‘speak’ through a real-life actor seems to have originated in European cinema. We should recall that, according to the Star-Film catalogue, Méliès created a comic dialogue between the King of England (speaking French but with an accent) and the President of France for his film Le Tunnel sous la Manche, ou le cauchemar franco-anglais [Tunneling under the English Channel, or the Anglo-French Nightmare, France, 1907]. Lumière’s earlier domestic experiment is well known. But, of course, none of these experiments reached Russia. There the ‘film recitation’ genre was conceived independently and the initiative came, not from the entrepreneurs, but from the actors. In the Central Film Museum Archive in Moscow there are two manuscript memoirs by ‘film reciters’: one by Yakov Zhdanov, a provincial actor, and the other by K.Novitskaya, who acted for, and was the first wife of, Pyotr Chardynin. Zhdanov relates in detail how he got the idea for ‘talking pictures’:
At that time I already knew what cinema was because I had seen several ordinary performances in Moscow at the Gryozy [Day-dreams] Cinema on Strastnoi Boulevard. The film show made such a stunning impression on me that, after the sequence with the train, I got up off the bench and went up to the screen so that I could look behind the canvas…. It was only after seeing these first films that I was seized with the obsession that you could add sound to a picture, so that the heroes would speak and crockery and furniture would be smashed realistically. I began to propagate this idea among my colleagues on stage and when at last the ‘cinematograph pictures’ appeared in our town, Ivanovo, we sat continually—even to the detriment of our work—through the performances, watching the pictures and studying the possibilities of making them ‘sound’. We wanted to add sound to the pictures that might have been filmed from our own repertoire, only the more interesting ones that were suited to the conditions of cinema…. The actual technique of adding sound did not worry us and we thought it would all be easy and straightforward. Only time would prove how wrong we were: mastering the art of accompanying speaking pictures turned out to be a difficult matter, requiring a great deal of strenuous work…. I went to see Khanzhonkov but I was not allowed to meet the great man himself. The audience I was granted with his associates, Theodossiadis and Chardynin, made me realise that there was no hope for me there. They both said that I would need permission to be present at the filming and Chardynin added unambiguously that they would scarcely give me permission because cinema was a new art form ‘and it should not be sullied by any kind of nonsense like stories and couplets’.41
If Zhdanov’s account is reliable, Chardynin’s behaviour was quite in character with the cinematic mores of the day: ‘outliving’ Zhdanov, he borrowed his idea. In any case, Novitskaya’s reminiscences also deal with this notion:
When Chardynin was working for Khanzhonkov he had the idea of filming talking pictures. He did a lot of work to that end. From the outset he filmed himself, that is, he appeared in the picture and the cameraman [Boris] Zavelev filmed him. He made two pictures: The Madman [Sumasshedshii], based on verses by Apukhtin, and The Barge Haulers [Burlaki]. He scarcely looked at them. He had very little time to travel from town to town. He decided to involve me, his wife—Novitskaya is my stage name. My first film was The Breath of Death [Dykhanie smerti]. He wrote the verses, it was shot in a very beautiful outdoor setting and it had a greater public success than all the others: Don Juan Punished [Nakazannyi Don-Zhuan], Scenes Like This Are Unfamiliar [Vam takie stseny neznakomy], Dreams, Dreams, Where is Your Fascination [Mechty, mechty, gde vasha prelest’] and Love Beyond the Grave [Lyubov’ za grobom].42
Thus it was due to Chardynin’s efforts that in 1909 the genre of ‘film recitation’—monologues in prose and verse, filmed and with sound added by a single actor—emerged. Meanwhile Zhdanov and his acting friends were still looking for someone who could help them realise a somewhat different project: a film involving several people speaking with different voices. This genre of film show was called ‘speaking pictures’.
Zhdanov turned to Drankov ‘and was pleasantly surprised at the simple reception I received, which was so different from the ceremonies at Khanzhonkov’s’.43 Drankov put his Moscow studio, where some dramatic miniatures based on Chekhov had been filmed, at Zhdanov’s disposal.
Figure 2 ‘Speaking pictures’: the cell scene from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov filmed at the Khanzhonkov studio in 1911, to be widely toured by actors in the following vear.
The filming of ‘speaking pictures’ presented particular difficulties for both the actors and the cameramen. Louis Forestier has recalled how the big scene from a remake of Boris Godunov in 1911 was filmed:
The entire scene had to be filmed in one 320-metre shot but the camera only held 120 metres of negative. When the film was getting to the end we had to shout ‘Stop!’ to the actors. According to our prearranged plan, they had to remain rooted to the spot while I reloaded the camera. At the order ‘Start’ they continued acting until the end of the new reel, then stopped again and stood motionless, and so on until the end of the shot.44
So that they did not deviate from the text the actors had to have a prompter with them during the shooting.
But the most complicated part was the process of adding the sound. Zhdanov recalls:
It was even worse when the picture was ready and Drankov wanted to check up on how we were getting on with the recitation. It was terribly embarrassing. We were unable to say a single word so that it matched the image and simply gabbled something hastily. The same thing happened the second time round. Another few tries produced almost exactly the same result. We were overcome with such confusion and despair that we simply did not know where to hide our faces in shame. But Drankov tried to cheer us up, saying that perhaps after a few days of constant rehearsal we would manage something. But where and how were we to rehearse? We started searching and soon f found a suitable cinema on Yelokhovskaya Street. We came to an agreement with the owner that we would have the building, light, equipment and a projectionist at our disposal and in return we were to appear for him free for as many days as we rehearsed. After four or five days we were so well prepared that we were able to start appearing before an audience.45
Novitskaya recalled yet another problem, which forced the reciters to rehearse all over again in each new town: the synchronisation of the speed of the projection with the rate of delivery of the monologue, because these rehearsals were more for the projectionist than for the actor:
The projectionist might project so fast that it would be difficult to catch the movement of the mouth and projecting slowly also would not work. The film had to be shown at medium-speed.46
‘Film recitals’ and ‘speaking pictures’ were very successful, mainly in the provinces. They gave rise to a number of touring groups: V.Niglov, D. Vaida-Sukhovy, A.Filgaber, S.Kramskoy, the Ukrainian troupe of A. Alexeyenko, the acting duo Nadezhda and Alexander Arbo, and others. In the Jewish Pale of Settlement Smolensky’s ‘singing’ troupe was particularly successful. In 1913 Cine-Phono reported this event in Minsk:
Since 19 September the film reciter and vocalist, A.M.Smolensky, has been appearing at the Modern electric theatre for an extended season. He performs in Yiddish to special films, in which he plays the leading role, illustrating comic and dramatic scenes from Jewish life.47
The film A Mother’s Letter [A Brivele der Mamen, 1912] was shown. In 1940 this event surfaced unexpectedly in a story by M.Daniel, the author of literary sketches of the Jewish past:
In the cinema they are showing the Yiddish picture A Mother’s Letter. A real-life artist has come from Warsaw. He is behind the screen all the time while living people walk across it. He sings but you cannot see him.48
The film reciter’s repertoire was rarely renewed. When the copies they owned had worn out the artistes preferred to film a new version of the same subject: the negative apparently remained at the disposal of the manufacturer. The opposite also happened: a film would pass to new performers. Sometimes the travelling troupes of ‘film reciters’ would buy an ordinary silent film and manage to ‘add sound’ to it. Hence Zhdanov’s troupe appeared with Chardynin’s Dead Souls [Mertvye dushi, 1909], in which, to the reciters’ astonishment, the screen actors apparently spoke Gogol’s actual lines. There were rumours that a gypsy camp had hired the film Gypsy Romances [Tsyganskie romansy, 1914], featuring the celebrated singer M.Vavich, and were organising fake concerts.
In 1913, when Edison’s ‘Kinetophone’ and Gaumont’s ‘Film Parlant’ were being shown in Moscow and Petersburg to the accompaniment of a big advertising campaign, the film reciters, who were in control of the provinces, exploited the general interest in this new invention:
Apart from textual accompaniment to the pictures in our repertoire, we have often, at the request of cinema owners and for a special fee, illustrated other pictures in the programme with sounds and noises, depicting the roar of a fire, dogs barking, cocks crowing, motor car horns, and so on. Many owners, who advertise our performances as some kind of miracle, have asked us to enter behind screens and leave unnoticed by the audience, so as to enhance the ‘miracle’ and the mystery of the effect.49
Some reciters, on the other hand, tried to exploit the effect of their presence. Novitskaya recalls:
The audience was bewildered. What was happening? Was someone speaking or was there some equipment behind the screen? Even though on the hoardings it said that the actress Novitskaya was performing. Then I left Moscow for the provinces and there the confusion was even greater. You can’t imagine it. They often asked the director to bring me out from behind the screen and put me on display. Only then were they convinced that it was an actress, and not a machine, speaking. I received invitations from all four corners of Russia and travelled across almost the entire country. I was in both large and small towns; I was in Kharkov, Kiev, Riga, Odessa. I was in remote places like Kutais. I travelled for almost three years with the pictures. I had my own manager who signed the contracts.50
Stage-Screen Hybrids
We need to mention another unusual genre in Russian cinema: stage-screen hybrids.
As was the case with the first experiments in film recitation, the combination of screen action with action on stage was not a Russian invention. However, as in the other case, Russian cinema went one stage further in the realisation of the project. This happened as a result of the efforts of the eminent theatre actor Pavel Nikolayevich Orlenev.
For the invention of the stage-screen performance we are apparently indebted to Méliès. According to Madeleine Malthête-Méliès it was in about 1905 that Méliès first realised the project that he later reproduced at the request of the organisers of the Méliès Gala anniversary retrospective in 1929:
Lost in the streets of Paris, he looked everywhere for the Salle Pleyel…. On a wall he saw an enormous poster for the Gala bearing a large portrait of himself…. He butted the poster with his head. Suddenly the lights went up in the hall. A screen was raised, revealing in the middle of the stage a frame to which the poster that we have just been was affixed. Suddenly the paper was ripped open by Méliès, appearing in the flesh.51
This stunt reached Russia in 1913: Max Linder repeated it in his own way when he visited Moscow and Petersburg. Here is a fragment of a newspaper report of Linder’s appearance in the Zon Theatre in Petersburg:
The painful moments after the third bell passed slowly and the curtain had still not been raised. The audience hooted, stamped their feet and demanded a start—all apparently to no purpose. Eventually the director informed the audience that Max Linder was late and would probably not be coming. Those who wanted could have their money back. But no one left their seat…. The lights went out unexpectedly and on the screen that had appeared we watched Max Linder’s journey to the Zon Theatre in a racing car along an endless road, then an accident (with no injuries whatsoever), a gallop on horseback, a swim across a river and, finally…a flight in a hot-air balloon, with Max Linder appearing over St Petersburg and above the roof of the Zon Theatre, where he intended to descend from the balloon by guide-rope, crashing through the ceiling straight on to the stage…. The screen suddenly gave way to a stage and there was Max Linder descending on a guide-rope, surrounded by plaster-work, wearing a grey sports coat and a battered and torn version of his famous top hat.52
In the 1920s Eisenstein realised something similar to Max Linder’s stunt when he combined the performance of The Wise Man in the Proletkult Theatre with a screen on which the audience watched things that were happening on the roof of the same theatre. The Dadaistic ending to René Clair’s Entr’acte [France, 1924] also resembled Méliès’s exploit.
But even in the 1910s theatre remembered from time to time the opportunities that cinema had to offer. The first notion was to bring the stage sets alive. In 1911 P.Konradi wrote:
Take a set like a ‘waterfall’ or a ‘river’, which are quite common on the stage. However skilfully the canvas is painted, however ‘realistically’ you make it ‘move’, this kind of spectacle pales, in terms of its vividness and the power of the impression that it makes, in comparison with any cinematographic image of the same river and waterfall. The Maly Theatre was the first of the major Petersburg theatres to appreciate this advantage of cinema and in their production of V.P.Burenin’s play The King of Liberty [Korol’ svobody], they employed ‘living photography’ to depict the waterfall. The experiment was a complete success. On stage there was what looked like a real waterfall, sparkling in a cloud of spray and foam in the beams of a theatrical moon. Equally successful was the use of cinema at the People’s House for a production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In this the underwater world—a superb sequence of the actual marine depths and their various inhabitants—came to life before the audience’s eyes in the window of the ‘Nautilus’.53
In September 1911 the new Mozaika [Mosaic] Theatre opened in St Petersburg. This theatre, founded on the initiative of the well-known actor G.G.Ge, was conceived as a new type of theatre. The aim of the Mozaika was to compete with cinema. The productions were organised on the principle of the variety show, which was unfamiliar to the Russian audience. The newspaper Artist i stsena wrote as early as June 1911:
Every production will include miniature operas, playlets, ballet scenes …and, to crown it all, a few pictures from cinema itself.54
In the Mozaika Theatre the film part of the production was interwoven with the stage part even more closely than in the Petersburg Maly Theatre. Here cinema did not merely perform the role of ‘moving background’. In any event that was the case with the production (which caused a sensation) of Submarine Shipwreck, in which the screen alternated with the stage according to whether the setting for the action was an interior or an exterior. The critic B.Bentovin described the show in this way:
To begin with, cinema shows you this submarine riding the waves in the midst of the other ships in the squadron; then catastrophe strikes: the boat sinks helplessly to the bottom. The next scene, inside the submarine hold, is played by live actors: you can hear them groaning, swearing and praying for salvation. When the sailors are suffocating to death, cinema once more shows the surface of the sea, where the squadron’s ships are making all sorts of attempts to save the dying.55
My account of Drankov’s Boris Godunov has already referred to the role of the ‘cinematograph’ in the reformist plans of the Moscow Art Theatre, although of course the theatre never lowered itself to a mechanical realisation of the idea of stage ‘cinema’, of experiments with stage-screen hybrids. For Stanislavsky the word ‘cinematograph’, when applied to theatre, signified a structural principle: fragmented dramaturgical construction, instantaneous changes of scene, portable sets. Hence the Art Theatre’s love of works that were ill-suited to, or entirely unintended for, the stage: Boris Godunov, or Chekhov’s short stories, which were staged in 1904. Later the ‘cinematograph’ method was used for a stage version of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in 1910.
The novel was broken down into short fragments. These fragments of action were linked to one another by the author’s text, narrated by a special character, the reader’. The reader reminded the audience of the ‘lecturer’ in cinemas, while the actual scenic structure, alternating sections of action with sections of text, recalled the narrative regime of silent cinema: title, shot, title, shot. The critic Emmanuil Beskin, a fierce opponent of the Moscow Art Theatre, published a review in the Moscow newspaper Rannee utro [Early Morning] in which he used this comparison to compromise the theatre:
The greatest page, not just in Russian, but in world literature has been crumpled. Rendered colourless. Bloodless. Mindless.
Transformed into cinema. Into a film show.
Scene after scene. Only instead of titles on the screen: a reader to one side.
– Alyosha leaves the monastery…
And Alyosha enters from the right slips.
– Alyosha tells what has happened to him.
And Alyosha remains silent, while the reader speaks. The reader finishes, and Alyosha walks on….
What is more, Dostoyevsky has been stylised. He is played without sets on the flat grey surface of the backdrop….
A series of five-minute cinematograph pictures.56
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who staged The Brothers Karamazov, wrote to Stanislavsky about this production in October 1910:
Something enormous has happened: there has been a colossal bloodless revolution. During the first performances there were a few who felt, but did not yet realise, that Karamazov marked the end of some vast process that had been maturing for ten years. What was it? It was this. Whereas with Chekhov theatre shifted the limits of convention, with Karamazov those limits are entirely destroyed.57
Developing the underlying concept of the production, he went further:
We staged Karamazov against a single backdrop. This is too dogmatic. We must stage some scenes against a backdrop, others naturalistically with a proscenium arch, a third lot with almost straightforward live scenes, a fourth group like cinema, and a fifth like a ballet.58
As we can see, the principle of the stage ‘cinematograph’ as it evolved came close to the principle of variety as realised a year later on the Russian stage by the Mozaika Theatre of Miniatures. Yet neither Stanislavsky nor Nemirovich-Danchenko would have dreamed of combining theatre and cinema in the way that it was done in Submarine Shipwreck. I repeat: they had in mind not a stage mutant, but an implicit internal structural reorientation of stage action.
At the same time there were those in the Russian theatre world who, having grasped this idea, tried to take it to its logical conclusion. The critic B.Bentovin, who had written such an enthusiastic review of Submarine Shipwreck at the Mozaika, lost no time in suggesting to the Moscow Art Theatre that the same device should be transferred to a ‘serious’ production:
I can imagine how successful this combination would be in an unwieldy play in which the performer has frequently and at length to relate what has happened to him in the interval between two acts. Cinema could show all this in a series of vivid pictures and, instead of a dry and boring story in the play, there would be the bonus, as it were, of more movement…. Of course, the most interesting part of the dialogue should be communicated by live actors, and the narrative part on the cinema screen. How beneficial this would be, for instance, to the staging of Crime and Punishment—cinema could reproduce Raskolnikov’s wanderings before the murder—or to The Brothers Karamazov—cinema could depict the episodes that Mr Zvantsev reports so tediously from the rostrum.59
(In the Moscow Art Theatre production an actor called Zvantsev played the reader.)
The project did not remain a paper one. Pavel Orlenev, a star of the Russian dramatic stage, was attracted to the idea of hybrid performances. In December 1913 the newspaper Teatral’naya gazeta reported with astonishment that Orlenev and his troupe, on a guest visit to the ‘Art Theatre of Miniatures’, were performing
the second and third act of Woe and Misfortune on stage, while the remaining three acts are shown on a screen. Mr Orlenev makes the same compromise in his performance of Crime and Punishment: only the scenes between Sonya Marmeladova and her father are performed on the theatre stage, while the rest are shown to the audience on a screen.60
Orlenev used the same method to play five of his most famous roles, in addition to those already mentioned for 1913, including Ibsen’s Ghosts and Brand and Alexei Tolstoi’s Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, all in 1914. It is easy to understand why Orlenev preferred stage-screen performances to ‘pure’ cinema, from the memoirs of Vladimir Gardin, who produced the film episodes for Orlenev’s Ghosts:
I could never make Pavel Nikolayevich understand that there was no point in speaking the lines in front of the camera: they would have to be replaced by titles. He was disarmingly stubborn.
‘If you deprive me of the words, I am no longer Orlenev,’ he shouted in a touchingly childish manner. ‘My whole life, all my emotions, have been given over to speaking…’
And he spoke…and spoke…. We enjoyed listening to him but we did not film. For us he only became a subject for the camera when his brilliant monologues had ceased. How unrepeatably fine he was then! We had to put a cover over the camera so that he did not see when we were cranking it and to signal imperceptibly to the cameraman when he should start and stop shooting.61
The relationship between Orlenev and cinema is symptomatic of Russian culture as a whole. Orlenev resorted to all sorts of devices so as not to deprive film of words and the sound of speech. He even filmed one scene in Crime and Punishment for so-called ‘gramophone exhibition’: the shooting and sound recording of films was undertaken by the Russian division of Edison Kinetophone. Like the film recitation genre, Orlenev’s stage-screen hybrids were the fruit of the deep-seated logocentrism of the Russian stage. Pantomime did not exist in Russia. Russian audiences, and Russian directors, did not like films without titles. Had cinema been invented in Russia, it would probably not have been ‘Lumière’s cinematograph’ that would have triumphed, but ‘Edison’s Kinetophone’.
What was the reaction to Orlenev’s theatre and cinema shows? Judging by the critics, it was fairly cool. Emmanuil Beskin (who had savaged The Brothers Karamazov at the Moscow Art Theatre) quite neatly called the undertaking a ‘chimera’ and added:
I am sorry for Orlenev, who is sincere in his enthusiasm, but I think this project is doomed to fail: you cannot paste living and dead material together; you cannot join a psycho-organic quiver to the soulless frigidity of the screen. Whatever the technical perfection of such a combination, there will never be a living cohesion between the picture and the transition to the plasticity of real movement.62
Orlenev himself recalled his Odessa tour with Brand, incorporating film, in his memoirs written at the end of the 1920s:
The combination of cinema and stage was not properly prepared and was a failure. But I never trust my first steps in any undertaking and I always go on trying stubbornly to get what I want. After Odessa we toured with the same Brand for about three months. We made good money.63
The newspaper Teatr nevertheless remained dissatisfied:
Orlenev is right to say that the Russian actor is heavy, bad at mime, and not vivid enough in his plastic movements. Even Orlenev is now playing Brand in a strange fashion: half the scenes are played as usual, but the other half appear only on the screen as a cinematographic performance. But the second half, printed on soulless film, is as pale as the first half, the spoken part, is vivid.64
On this basis it came to this conclusion, so common in the pages of the Russian theatre press:
The word is theatre’s soul. Take away the word and you will destroy its soul.65
Were Orlenev’s experiments unique? No: in the 1910s we come across references to Vladimir Maximov’s stage-screen hybrids, for instance, in Lolo-Munshtein’s Dance Among the Swords, to Baliev’s sketches in Die Fledermaus and two or three cases of a similar kind. Leonid Trauberg relates that at the beginning of the 1920s in the FEKS show The Wedding there was someone on stage imitating Chaplin while they showed extracts from Chaplin’s films on the screen. Nevertheless, unlike film recitations, experiments in the field of a symbiosis between stage and screen remained experiments, a peripheral, although not a secondary, offshoot of the history of Russian cinema.
A peripheral offshoot of the mainstream of world cinema history might be the best way to describe all the other features of Russian cinema that I have dealt with in this essay. In fact, on a map of the world Russian endings, the immobility of the figures, the predilection of Russian cinema for titles and film recitations would all appear as an anomaly. But, just as a magnetic anomaly leads the geologist to deposits of ore, so the anomalies of Russian cinema allow us to evaluate deep-rooted layers in the psychology of Russian culture.
