Figure 20Medvedkin’s Happiness [ 1935], influenced by Lloyd, Keaton and Chaplin.
Interview with Alexander Medvedkin
Question: How did you start work in cinema and why?
Medvedkin:1 The story of my start in cinema is somewhat unusual. The positions that I stand for in cinema are upsetting. They differ from those of my colleagues. I’ll tell you in my own words the essence of my position in cinema.
I’ve worked in cinema for nearly sixty years and my positions haven’t changed. I’ve paid very dearly for this, because I’ve had to overcome enormous obstacles and a great deal of misunderstanding, great resistance, and so perhaps the most valuable thing that you will get from me is the knowledge of what I wanted in cinema. What I wanted, and what I still want, from cinema is that it should be a weapon of attack, an offensive weapon in the battle against evil, wherever it originates and however limited our resources for that battle are.
I’ll try and give you a few examples of the limitations and the difficulties that I’ve encountered in my life. Before I became involved in cinema I played an active part in the Civil War. There was something called Budyonny’s cavalry. I was a trooper, a combat commander in battle and a teacher, a political worker, once the war was over. People forget nowadays that around 1921 –2 things were quite different from the way they are now. The country was in ruins, people were exhausted and the male population had been decimated in the Civil War. There was no bread, industry had been laid waste, the transport system wasn’t functioning. On top of that, because of the First World War, a generation of illiterates had grown up. Russia has always been known for the great tragedy of its peasantry. As a peasant country it has always been illiterate. We had recruits who were illiterate and we taught them to read. We made them into human beings. Roughly 70 per cent of our recruits were illiterate. I’m proud of the fact that I played a part in the process of educating this problem generation, so that by the time of the Great Patriotic War [1941–5] the illiterate soldiers who had come to us in complete ignorance had become the backbone of the command. They were in charge of battalions, tanks, brigades. A very large number rose to the rank of colonel, commanding regiments. Many of them had previously passed through our hands…and now I’m getting round to why I started in cinema.
I had my own methods of educating these people. I thought that for a teacher words were very costly. So I declared war immediately on verbosity, repetition and everything that was wasteful. I felt that using words to educate someone like this was very expensive. I felt that there must be a better way to turn a simple illiterate man into a great soldier.
I had my own theatre. I used grotesques, clowning, burlesque. I did all this off my own bat, with no theatre training or experience. But I put this little theatre to work straight away to educate these young people. It was quite unique. We used comedy, circus, lubok, farce. The theatre dealt with all the most important questions. I didn’t consult the commanders and I had some big battles with them because they had no faith in my methods. But I did all sorts of things that later helped me find my way in cinema. There was one key example, one key production.
In a very remote Cossack village a long way from the nearest railway we put up a notice announcing, ‘Today the General Assembly of Horses opens in the club.’ We were really treating the theme of horses in the army for the first time and yet, in the cavalry, the horse is half your strength. You start with your horse and the rider merely sits on it. A General Assembly of Horses. The horses had the floor for the very first time.
For this production I made the horses’ heads and cloaks out of papier mâché, out of old newspapers—a cloak and a head was enough to make a horse. It wasn’t just a comedy, though, and it wasn’t just a play because, before I put it on, I gathered all sorts of evidence about the ways in which these young people maltreated their horses. They weren’t familiar with horses, so we called the horses together. The curtain opened.
On the stage was the Presidium: they were all horses. There was a rostrum. On the rostrum, instead of a carafe of water, there was a bucket full of water and the horses were drinking from it. The speaker was a horse. What was he speaking about? I’d collected some funny satirical examples of the maltreatment of horses. Poor grooming, wrong feeding and watering, bad treatment—in other words, everything that went on in the squadrons and commands, complete with the names of the men who’d done the horses harm. All this was brought out in the play and the whole regiment had a good laugh.
In the audience there were some ‘plants’, as we say—in other words, trained actors who would say, ‘What?’ So then the horse-speaker would begin: There’s that blacksmith Ivanov who killed a horse, wounded the horse while he was shoeing it. He got angry and hit it with a rasp, and he wasn’t even put in detention.’ Then our actor in the audience shouted out, ‘He’s sitting here in the audience.’ Where?…Stand up!’ So he stood up: ‘I won’t do it again. That’s the last time.’ People laughed so much.
Another horse went to the rostrum. His head was tied up as though he had toothache and he complained that his rider had left him out in the cold wind. The rider had gone to see his girlfriend and had left his horse outside in the cold wind all night while he made love. ‘No,’ the commander shouted, ‘I didn’t.’ So it was a very jolly, very impassioned and a very effective method of satire. It worked like a good whip, lashing whatever harm was done to horses, making it unthinkable. They were all afraid that they’d be a target so they had to kiss their horses’ heads— or else they’d be exposed on stage. That’s how it all began, that’s an example.
Often there were no examples to follow, but that was one. We had all sorts of interesting scenes, like a lubok. The Russian lubok was a kind of painting on a panel, like a cartoon in a newspaper. They pasted up the newspapers, made a panel, and painted a man’s face on it. That was a lubok. It had a special text and every two or three days we had a very funny special show that served as an experimental laboratory for me, where I learned to master comedy. That was more or less the inspiration that determined my work in cinema. It had enormous consequences too for the rest of the division and ultimately the whole army.
The experiment was written up in the newspapers. I suddenly rose through the ranks, moving higher and higher, and in the end, two years later, I was summoned to Moscow and that’s where I came into contact with the cinema organisation Gosvoyenkino, the military studio for military films. I had such a wealth of experience in comedy, in what made people laugh, that it was easy for me to start with comedy. So I started working on comedy films. In 1931 I released five experimental comedies that were just as trenchant as that whip of a play. They were comedies that provoked anger, laughter and anger.... They really got up your nose! There was protest and everything else in them. They weren’t comedies just to make people laugh. The times were so very difficult: our first Five Year Plan had only just begun.
There are not many of us left who lived through that first Five Year Plan. But it marked a break, a turning-point, a kind of cataclysm when everything was re-examined, everything was rejected, while here and there new shoots appeared unexpectedly. They were still tender, still unsure of themselves, but they did appear. Yet in cinemas you’d still hear the pianist accompanying pictures with titles like Sadness, Be Silent, Fireside Blues, I Love You and suchlike.
As a warrior, a soldier in a victorious army and a political activist who was used to dealing with the education of Red Army soldiers, I entered cinema in order to attack this kind of film, to defeat it and to arm cinema with the new, rich political genre of satire. That was my starting-point and I must say that at first not everything worked out, but that’s only natural. The tasks that I set myself could scarcely be realised at that time: there was no experience of this kind of film satire either in the Soviet Union or abroad.
So that you will understand what I did, let me explain that I decided to make one-reelers, films with a maximum length of eight or ten minutes. This was forced on me by the fact that you needed a year to make a full-length film on a large-scale theme and I wanted to release one or two films a month. What were these films about? Their themes were prompted by conditions in the country. It was very difficult for us to embark on the construction of socialism because we had no skilled personnel. There were a large number of foreigners who were more interested in hindering us than in helping. We had no experience of construction and our building materials were not always of good quality. We’d lost our specialists during the Civil War and hadn’t yet managed to train new ones.
I’ll tell you the plots of two of my films, so that you’ll understand what I was doing. Some bricklayers are putting up a new building. They’ve already put seven floors up and they’re putting the eighth up there on top somewhere. A shoe factory has already moved in downstairs. All this is done in a grotesque circus-like manner. A fantastic machine churns out shoes, but the shoes are useless because you can’t put them on. Suddenly there’s an enormous crack like lightning through all seven floors. All seven have split open. The shoemaker runs out and shouts, Hey, what are you up to?’ They reply, ‘We’ve got no time. We’re shock-workers. He protests, ‘You mustn’t do that!’ They go on building, but the edifice has been destroyed. Suddenly from somewhere up above an enormous brick sails down until it hits the shoemaker on the head and crumbles to dust. It’s a bad brick. The shoemaker picks up a piece of the brick, rubs it between his fingers and, looking the audience in the eye, says, ‘Is this really a brick?’
And the second plot: a crowd of people with clubs, sticks and stones are running along a street: ‘Stop him!’ Stop him!’ The intertitle: Stop him, he built the house.’ It’s the same bricklayer.
These were very topical subjects. They couldn’t have been more topical. They were received by audiences with great enthusiasm because our first new buildings, and the whole conditions for construction, were not ideal. We didn’t know how to build: we had neither the experience, nor the skilled men, nor the materials. The people were well aware of this. But there were still a lot of enemies in our country. There were remnants of the White Guards, small groups of kulaks and our rabid enemies who used, or could have used, these films to discredit us by saying, ‘What kind of builders are they? They can’t build socialism. They can’t even build a simple house, let alone socialism!’
This serious situation provoked a very pointed and wide-ranging discussion in our cinema organisation, which was called the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography, or ARK.2 We had some very heated discussions there and in the course of them some quite improbable arguments were put forward against my films. People said that the proletariat could do without satire and that it had no need of humour, which was a phenomenon of bourgeois culture. Things were not very pleasant for me at that time because the question arose of stopping my experiments. When things were already bad, and I was no longer allowed to work, Anatoli Vasilevich Lunacharsky got to know about my difficulties.3 He viewed my films and realised that this was an exceptionally valuable experiment that must be allowed to continue at all costs, but at the same time he criticised me very severely for the carelessness of my aim. He said, ‘You knock your own side and others. But you shouldn’t knock your own people. You have to knock the others without touching your own people.’ But how could I knock the others without touching my own side? If I took such sharp and severe criticism seriously, if I got hold of an idiot, dragged him to the screen and said, ‘This is an idiot,’ the enemy would still see it [and be able to make capital out of it]. Or perhaps I shouldn’t concern myself with these idiots at all? Nevertheless, he said, ‘This is a very valuable and necessary lesson. Cinema must employ satire and for this reason we must give Medvedkin every assistance.’ So I made five comedies like that, taking no notice of what my colleagues were doing. When these comedies were released, there was an enormous scandal.
People began to criticise me. They tried to drive me out of cinema but Lunacharsky spoke up for me. He took me under his wing and then I made a special pronouncement that cinema is a weapon. Satire is an offensive weapon, not just something that satisfies the aesthetic requirements and interests of the audience, but a weapon that attacks shortcomings, that lashes like a whip, that lashes everything that interferes with life. So you can see that I advocated using cinema in a way that nobody else used it. I think that cinema can be a very real weapon in the battle for construction, in the battle against our enemies, against the people who get in our way.
It was in this light that I decided that I could make films on the film train. I decided to build up a team from scratch, equip three railway carriages and travel on wheels whenever there was something wrong. This was a kind of special fire brigade to put out problem fires. Wherever there was something amiss, like the plan not being fulfilled, wherever there was bad management, there our train went, gathered information and filmed.4 So much has been written about the train since then but it has all missed the point. It was a kind of public prosecutor’s cinema.
Basically we made newsreels from documentary materials. These were unusual films and the shows were quite extraordinary. We rejected the idea of shooting a newsreel and screening it as information with musical accompaniment: something that would have first a fire, then someone killed, next a flood, then someone who’d hanged himself, and so on. We weren’t interested in that sort of thing. Nor did we require music, which would have been out of place because this cinema was not there to give the audience aesthetic pleasure. We used the technique and genre of newsreel as the occasion to raise the great issue of construction on the screen in a very relevant manner and in various genres.
It was rather like the prosecutor’s speech in a courtroom: it showed what was wrong on screen. It painted a nasty picture, some problem that had not been put right, and this was always accompanied by the title, What are you doing, dear comrades, what are you doing?’ This was followed by a fearless presentation of the problems: a ‘document’, a ‘film document’, a newsreel. It was like a word spoken in the midst of utter silence and the film ended with a contrast with model examples. Somewhere we’d found a good mine, a good kolkhoz, a good factory and we said, ‘Look at them!’ Our subjects, the people we were castigating, always made the excuse that this or that was missing, that there was no bread, that there were no people. Nothing, nothing, nothing! So we told them to look at other places. After that there was a sort of production conference where they all put their cards on the table, examined what was wrong and passed a resolution. We didn’t leave until, with the aid of our films, the tide had turned and everything that was wrong had been eliminated.
That’s how I accumulated my experience of satire: comedy, satire, farce, cabaret, burlesque–everything the screen can use to open the audience’s eyes, to surprise them. I’ve used it all without worrying about appearances. It did a great deal to define my later paths. The film train made seventy-two films in one year: they were shown straight away and were effective.... That means around 25,000 metres of film. Seventy-two films. Usually one-reelers, because they weren’t just shown but also discussed and resolutions were passed. They were all silent films. In 1932 sound film was only just getting off the ground.
That’s the story of the film train. It was the second stage of my work but even on the film train I was busy with satirical comedies. Our train was conceived on a grand scale: we had the capacity to process ourselves 2,000 metres of film every day on the train, whether it was stationary or in motion. We worked round the clock. There were eight cameramen: they did all the shooting for these films. I put them together, approved the script. I was in charge: I was the scriptwriter and the chief director and I had four or five directors under me. There we were all crowded together, terribly crowded, a group of enthusiasts and romantics. If someone came to us who was idle, who didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night, he didn’t last long. We’d warn him once, twice at most, and then quietly, all smiles and without scolding him, we’d buy him a ticket back to Moscow. We’d shake him by the hand and take him to the station. The others—we had a complement of thirty-two— worked an eighteen-hour day. My job was not to drive them on but to pull them off their jobs when they needed sleep, when they were falling asleep while working in the laboratory or shooting the titles. That was how we worked in those days.
Our eleventh Five Year Plan is now coming to an end. Then it was the first Five Year Plan, when the country was living in great poverty, very frugally. There were enormous deprivations, great difficulties. As yet there were no trained cadres, no machinery. One statistic will show you how difficult it was. In Moscow our leaders were struggling to make sure that we produced 9 million tonnes of steel. Now we produce something like 200 million tonnes. 200 million now and 9 million then. The legacy of old Russia was so rotten and stultifying. The country was illiterate, starving, unshod, unclothed...torn in half. It was difficult to manage, to move forward. In the course of these eleven Five Year Plans we have created an entirely different world. Just look at the people then. Take just one village, see how it was in 1927. Now everything is quite different: everything has changed and in my view this great work has been worthwhile.
Question: You worked with Nikolai Okhlopkov?5
Answer: I joined Gosvoyenkino at the same time as Okhlopkov and began my creative career in cinema as his assistant director. The two of us made a short military training film called The Searchlight [Prozhektor, n.d.] and then we made a more interesting film called The Way of the Enthusiasts [Put’ entuziastov, 1930]. This film was experimental. Without thinking, we experimented and our experiments went beyond the confines of cinema. We sanctioned a whole series of incorrect and questionable political truths. The film was philosophically so confused that it was not released. We’d put our souls into it. There were a large number of creative innovations in it. Both Okhlopkov and I realised that it wasn’t really suitable for release. But the great value of the film lay in the fact that we had made it completely by ourselves, discovering for ourselves as a group the most critical and unexpected situations and the most unexpected forms.
Okhlopkov was an unusually interesting actor. He left Meyerhold’s theatre but took with him Meyerhold’s passion for turning theatrical stereotypes and clichés on their heads. Okhlopkov took Meyerhold’s campaign against the old traditional theatre and translated it to cinema.
Question: How did you come to make Happiness [Schast’e, 1935]?
Answer: Fiction film had always attracted me. I had a longing for art but this was all black bread, a job for an unskilled worker.6 It was a reaction not to my own inner spiritual requirements, but to the need to help at a most difficult moment, to use the film camera as a weapon, as a machine gun, an offensive weapon, a weapon of mobilisation. This was, of course, a long way removed from art.
Then I made Happiness: it was my greatest achievement. I’d like to tell you something that seems to have escaped the attention of the critics and journalists who’ve written about the film. I’ve never managed to ensure that people understood the real meaning of this film, which is as follows. When the first kolkhozes appeared around 1929–30 the country was still impoverished; we hadn’t cleared up the devastation and we had a very poor inheritance. The railways had no engines, no wagons. The factories had no machinery, and so on. Things were generally hard. It is through heroic effort that we’ve completely transformed the country in the past fifty or sixty years.
In the history of our country there is one very significant page. That was when the peasants, exhausted by the war and deprived of the most elementary comforts and material conditions, took the road to socialism. But we couldn’t give them what they wanted overnight. Lenin said that we must emerge from misery and poverty by small steps. But the peasant himself—and this is not just true of our country, it’s part of the social psychology of mankind in all civilised nations—dreams of ownership. He wants a prosperous life, to set himself apart from his thousands and millions of neighbours; he wants to creep ahead and have his own barn, his own horses, his own grain. In short, he wants to be his own boss.
Of course, for every 1,000, only one will manage it: the other 999 will remain farm-hands and starve, but this dream lives on among the peasants. Just imagine what happened when the vast millions of the peasant mass said yes and rejected the kulak path, and we created a collective economy together! But the peasant joined the kolkhoz dreaming of owning his own barn and his own horse. It was hard for him to cast all that aside: it was very deeply ingrained. Working on the film train, we travelled to different areas, to the Ukraine, to Siberia, along the Kuban River, and everywhere we came across the same thing: people who had joined the kolkhoz thinking they’d get everything they wanted straight away. They didn’t. But, you know, it’s a very difficult step to give up your horse, to blot out your dream and become involved in a completely different way of life when you don’t know what’s going to happen. So a peasant like Khmyr lived with the dream of his own horse, his own barn, his own grain, his own fence, because his next-door neighbour was eating fruit dumplings while he just licked his lips in anticipation.7
So Happiness is a satirical picture. I made it as the nail in the coffin of this rosy dream. I ridiculed that dream because it’s unrealistic: 999 people out of 1,000 get nothing from a dream like that. One person gets everything and then he crows about it and tramples the others underfoot. That’s how Happiness was conceived and I think that’s how it worked on the peasant audience, by telling them they had a choice. It was inspired by observations of real life and I did not skimp on tricks, hyperbole, farce, burlesque and all the other methods to make sure that it was very funny and at the same time very effective. It meant an end to all the Khmyrs—and Russia was full of them.
That’s how it came about and it’s still going strong today. It’s fifty years since I wrote Happiness and it’s still in distribution. I’ve just had a postcard from Paris to say they’ve extended the distribution contract with our Sovexportfilm for another five or ten years. According to our representatives, it’s been shown in a programme with Chaplin’s Modern Times [USA, 1936]. For me, of course, it’s a really marvellous and great reward to be seen alongside Chaplin, to be compared to him. A difficult film has stood the test of time. It is a difficult film in the sense that it was difficult to put two epochs together. It was unconvincing.... No, it was convincing throughout, both at the beginning when Khmyr was trying to be a kulak and later on when his wife turned him into a real man.
Question: May I ask which Chaplin and Keaton films you had seen then?
Answer: I got to know Chaplin a bit later. It was after Okhlopkov and I had gone our separate ways that I saw Chaplin’s The Kid [USA, 1921], The Pilgrim [USA, 1923], and a few of his early comedies. I’ve forgotten their names now.
I think that I’d already seen The Gold Rush [USA, 1925] by then. When I saw it on the screen I realised straightaway that it’s difficult to make a comedy and it’s something you have to learn. It’s true that I’d gained considerable comic experience in theatre. That’s why I was now writing things like the conference of horses or things for other variety acts that we put on in the evenings and that made people laugh a lot. If people laughed, that meant it was good. If they didn’t laugh, you had to rework it. This theatre of mine served as a good creative laboratory so that, when I started making films, I knew the secrets of making people laugh. After I’d seen Chaplin and Harold Lloyd I saw Buster Keaton’s The Three Ages and Our Hospitality [both USA, 1923], both of which I liked a great deal.
But it was Harold Lloyd who interested me more than anyone else. This may be because the first American comedy that I ever saw was Grandma’s Boy [USA, 1922]. I watched it and realised straightaway that directing comedy films was very difficult. Then I decided to learn, to teach myself. I watched this Harold Lloyd picture, went home and spent four days writing out the script because I could remember every shot, what happened where, which stunts were used. Then I began to analyse which gags had provoked the greatest laughter, which had passed without provoking a reaction, what had struck me most forcefully and what had left me unmoved, what hadn’t aroused my emotions. As I recall, I worked like this for four days. I’d written out the script, recorded everything. I’d remembered it so clearly.
Then I went and watched the film again. This second viewing revealed the film’s secret. I began to realise why particular gags were used. The film is full of gags. Of all American comedies (at least for me, but there’s a lot I haven’t seen) this Harold Lloyd comedy seemed the richest in its gags. One comic sequence ends and straight away, without a break, you start to laugh at another gag. It went from laugh to laugh without long motivating links, whereas in comedy nowadays people stop laughing. Now the director and the scriptwriter spend such a long time preparing each gag that the audience cools down in between them and has to be warmed up again like a samovar.
It was not so much from Lloyd’s films as from Chaplin’s that I understood the principle of progression from one laugh to another. It’s the basic principle in Chaplin’s work, beginning, perhaps, with his very first feeble and immature works. A pie is thrown into someone’s face and they laugh. Chaplin doesn’t let the audience cool down: he disturbs their equanimity. The audience is wound up because it knows that now it will be kicked, the door will open, the wife will burst in, and so on. Laughter, laughter, laughter. A cascade of laughter, of comic turns, clowning that’s close to the circus. This is the great art of Chaplin. I very much regret that he abandoned this kind of comedy and went in for more-or-less serious things like Monsieur Verdoux [USA, 1947], The Countess from Hong Kong [Great Britain, 1966] and A King in New York [Great Britain, 1957].
That’s not Chaplin. It was Charlie who gave pleasure to millions of people in every language, on every continent: it was Charlie the king, Charlie the clown, Charlie the unhappy and downtrodden little man who had such a heart, who aroused such enormous sympathy, who enriched people of the most varied nationality and skin colour. It was from Chaplin, from his early works, rather than from Harold Lloyd that I learned how much more it was possible to do: today a pie in the face, tomorrow a cake in the eye—and [it was from Chaplin that] I realised how limited this all was.
I did not know that cinema would develop to such an extent that it would be possible to get away from all this. But I did understand the mechanics of laughter, its technique, so to say, and in my subsequent work I tried to do things so that the laughter was already there and didn’t result from a door bursting open or someone being kicked. Because behind this laughter there is often a very important idea. That’s why we need laughter in film, that’s why we must strive for it. Eisenstein wrote a very good review of my film Happiness in which he compared me to Chaplin.8 It is worth thinking about because, from an analytical point of view, Eisenstein understood Happiness better than I do.
Question: And what did you do after Happiness?
Answer: After the success of Happiness—and it was very successful: it was well received by everyone from unsophisticated audiences to the intelligentsia—what was I to do? I was interested in developing the theme of the first three reels of Happiness: they show Khmyr’s life—his misery, his dreams, his unhappy fate, the lack of any prospects in life. I felt limited by length and structure in my depiction of two epochs. You could cram two epochs into a single film in one of those eighteen-part TV serials they make nowadays, but in those days you had to be extremely concise. So after Happiness I still had so many ideas and images that I hadn’t managed to use in the limited space available. I realised that it would be very valuable to make a film, not about an individual like Khmyr but about the fate of the nation, of the peasantry as a whole. I thought it would be a good idea to make an epic film about the fate of the peasantry, which had been very downtrodden in the old pre-Revolutionary Russia. People were traded like cattle. The landowners and the exploiters were barbaric. The people paid for it: all progress, every step forward has been paid for in their blood. This tragedy seemed insurmountable. So I decided to show that there was no place in Russia for the muzhik, for the peasantry, on the land. It was a satirical paradox: how could there be no place for the lord of the land? But it turned out that there wasn’t, and that’s how I developed the structure of a new comedy, a new philosophical comedy that I called The Damned Force [Okoyannaya sila]. The damned force was the peasantry, a gigantic force...
Question: Why didn’t you make the film?
Answer: Well, they were difficult times. I didn’t persevere very hard. Other more contemporary themes distracted me. I made a comedy about contemporary life: partly to test myself, partly to scotch the rumours that I could portray the old Russia but not the present day. This was The Miracle Worker [Chudesnitsa, 1937], a good film, but it wasn’t Happiness, of course. It was weaker, but it had a very great success and they still have it in Gosfilmofond. Jay Leyda liked The Miracle Worker better than Happiness.
When I made The Miracle Worker, I realised that all these films, the usual sort depicting love, the good life and good positive people, were not for me. I think that a comedy that has some greater philosophical meaning will succeed, but the kind where Vanya loves Tanya or Tanya loves Petya and so there’s a triangle—I leave that kind of work to others. I do not believe that it is true to life. That is not my way.