Chapter 2
Jay Leyda and Bezhin Meadow
David Stirk and Elena Pinto Simon
Jay Leyda’s death on 15 February 1988 ended a remarkable career that managed, over the course of six decades, to encompass an astonishing range of interests. Bridging East and West in a manner unique for an American scholar, his life was deeply interwoven with the great historical changes of this century.1 Now that Leyda’s resolute modesty can no longer intervene, it is important to reflect upon and re-evaluate one of the most important aspects of his contribution: his work as a Soviet film historian and Eisenstein scholar. This chapter might be considered as such an act of reflection and re-evaluation, informed by an investigation into the biographical, historical and political context of his work.2 Interest in Leyda’s Eisenstein scholarship is prompted in this case not only by a real sense of loss felt in his absence, but also by the important juncture scholars now face in Soviet film historiography, especially in the United States.3
We have decided to look at one episode from Leyda’s continually recurring interest in the concept of ‘Eisenstein at work’: his participation in the filming of the lost film Bezhin Meadow (1935–7), and his subsequent writing about the experience.4 As still photographer and production historian on this shoot, Leyda produced a substantial body of images as well as a production diary. Our intention here, in the light of recent biographical research, is to contextualise these images and to refer to the historiographical issues raised by the different manifestations of his written documentation. In doing so, we have two purposes in mind: to contribute towards an increased understanding of Eisenstein and Bezhin Meadow, and to acknowledge Leyda’s active role in the construction of this understanding.
I
Jay Leyda grew up in an industrial town in the middle of America. He once admitted that the only exciting thing about that town he could remember from his childhood was ‘cheering the troops as they went off to the great War across an ocean’. As a student in a very conventional American high school, he ‘learned to take photographs and daydream about making films’. ‘I heard that Russia had a film school and made films’, he once said, ‘but these were never shown in Dayton, Ohio.’ His life changed forever when he arrived in New York City late in 1929, at the age of 19, to serve as Ralph Steiner’s darkroom assistant. Here he received his first exposure to the Soviet cinema, an experience that would determine his life’s work.5
In those days, before an academy existed to certify experts in film, there were few limits to the range of Leyda’s interests. He immersed himself in the extraordinarily rich cultural scene of New York in the early 1930s. He wrote poems and short stories for the ‘little magazines’, while he assisted Steiner with studio and darkroom work, perfecting his craftsmanship in both photography and film along the way.6 Leyda eked out an existence during these depression years by holding down a bewildering variety of jobs: he sold projectors on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, selected sound recordings for silent film screenings in the Bronx (where he saw his first Eisenstein), tried his hand at fashion photography and carried out weekly portrait assignments for a short-lived arts journal.7 All the while he threw himself into the world of New York’s dance, music, theatre, museums and galleries, and even visited the grand old man of New York Modernism— Alfred Steiglitz.
Leyda found himself drawn toward two distinct circles of artists and intellectuals. One was the group of fine art photographers, aspiring filmmakers and patrons who gathered around Julien Levy’s extraordinary salon and gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street. Here he was befriended by Walker Evans, Paul Strand and Lincoln Kirstein, all central figures in the legacy of American Modernism.8 The second circle reflected Leyda’s emerging political consciousness and included several members of the New York Workers’ Film and Photo League: Leo Hurwitz, Sam Brody, Leo Seltzer, Irving Lerner and Ben Maddow. These young photographers and film-makers had an explicitly political agenda: the production of agitational newsreels and photographs aligned with working-class concerns, depicting the ravages of the economic class war.9 Moving back and forth between the two circles, Leyda was clearly interested in radical aesthetics and radical politics, and the cultural scene in New York at the time resonated with both.
The convergence of art and politics during Leyda’s early years in New York reached its logical culmination in a desire to make films himself. Around this time, the introduction of 16mm film-making as a viable option had changed many of the rules governing production and distribution. The use of 16mm meant not just increased accessibility to equipment, but also a chance to produce independent films with a social message, capable of reaching a wide audience outside the Hollywood system of distribution. Film, more than any other art-form, came to be seen as a potential instrument of social change. In this context, Soviet films of the 1920s provided concrete evidence of the kind of cinema rendered possible by socialist revolution and thus assumed supreme importance for radical filmmakers in America. Eisenstein exerted a particularly profound influence, made even more immediate by his trip to America and visit to New York. When he gave a lecture at Columbia University in 1931, Leyda, along with many of New York’s left film community, was in attendance.
The story of how Leyda came to make his first film is revealing, in that it prefigures the important role played by chance in his life. As a young boy in Dayton, he had been allowed to spend any extra money earned from after-school jobs on subscriptions to avant-garde magazines and inexpensive art objects. In this way he came to possess an old wooden figure from a downtown Dayton junk shop, purchased for ten or fifteen dollars. It turned out to be a statue of Henry Ward Beecher and an important piece of American folk art. In 1931 he sold it to a representative of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who was then setting up her folk museum. With this substantial sum of money he purchased an Eyemo camera and made A Bronx Morning, a beautiful ‘city symphony’ film showing a variety of avant-garde influences. He took this film to Moscow, after his acceptance by G.I.K., then the only film school in the world.10
As the only American at the school, Leyda began his studies with trepidation, and only a month of Russian language study. Originally accepted for the cinematographer’s course, he very much wanted to enroll instead in Eisenstein’s directing course. In his Moscow diary for 8 October 1933 Leyda notes that he had already shown his film to a few people in Moscow. When it was suggested that the film be shown to Eisenstein as a way into the course, Leyda was at first hesitant, but then agreed. ‘OK’, he writes in the diary, ‘let’s have it over with.’11
His first introduction to Eisenstein had been a shaky one, but on 9 October 1933 he notes in the diary that ‘Eisenstein seems to feel better towards this Leyda upstart, and is going to look at my film tomorrow at 3.30. So 3.30 tomorrow will mark a beginning or an end.’ Although Eisenstein had been told in advance that the film was not interesting by the only other English-speaking student, Herbert Marshall, the screening was a success, resulting in Leyda’s acceptance into the directing course. Both Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were present, and both claimed the film bore their influence, as indeed it does. Leyda’s diary goes on to note, ‘so now [Eisenstein] has changed his whole attitude towards me and things are looking up generally’.12
It should not be overlooked that Leyda continued to correspond, throughout his three years in the Soviet Union, with both circles of New York artists and intellectuals mentioned above. Today these letters constitute a remarkable record of American responses to Soviet culture, and demonstrate the centrality of Soviet art and politics for the American left during the mid-1930s. The list of Leyda’s correspondents includes several of the most important figures in socially committed American art of the period: Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Joseph Losey, Ralph Steiner, Aaron Copland, Alfred Barr, Iris Barry, Lincoln Kirstein and Walker Evans, among others.13 Ley da was a vital link for this group, disseminating news from the front on a wide variety of cultural topics. He was particularly important in relation to theatre, and edited two special magazine issues on Soviet theatre from Moscow.14
Leyda enrolled at the state film school in Moscow just as the Workers’ Film and Photo League was attempting to set up its own course of film instruction in New York. The New York school, which never really materialised, was a response to a growing need for institutional support for aspiring film-makers on the American left. Leyda’s activities, especially his studies with Eisenstein, were understandably of great importance to those interested in becoming film-makers themselves.15 Walker Evans summarised the feelings of the New York circle in a letter dated 22 November 1933: ‘How I wish there could be a film school here. Could you tell me how the Moscow one works in some detail? Who teaches, and what?’16
By the summer of 1934, the rules governing foreign students at G.I.K changed and Leyda found himself scrambling for a summer job. In a letter of application, he expressed some dissatisfaction with his lack of production activity: ‘I will be glad for any practical work near a film camera again, as nine months of talk minus practice is too much talk and too little practice.’ He eventually received an assignment on Vertov’s crew, making a film for Intourist about Leningrad. However, he soon became disenchanted with the work, going so far as to draft a letter to Vertov, who was not with the crew, in which he outlined everything wrong with the shoot. He later assisted Joris Ivens during the same summer on the realisation of a Russian version of Ivens’s Borinage, a 1932 film about Belgian coal workers, made with Henri Storck. He also helped Ivens shoot additional footage in the recently opened Moscow subway.17
Leyda’s year of study with Eisenstein and his brief production experience prepared him for what was undoubtedly his most important and formative experience in the Soviet Union: participation in the Bezhin Meadow shoot. His indefatigable spirit and persistence in the face of obstacles, qualities characteristic of his later academic career, are revealed in a letter to Eisenstein applying for the position:
Last summer, you and Pera and I considered the possibilities and advantage of my joining the E. group as a photographer. To this day, I am not sure whether an uninterested factory [studio] or the postponement of the expedition was the main obstacle to this plan. Anyway, it was dropped. But as soon as I read the announcement of your work on a new film, I remembered this prospect of last summer, and compared my present parched prospects to the usefulness and excitement of working in your group, particularly working in such a position where I could observe each moment of work from the film’s beginning to its completion. THEN I would have something to take back to the Film & Photo League—participation in the practical application of the theories contained in your lectures. I would have Soviet experience to take back with me—real knowledge of Soviet life that I cannot get in our present isolated ‘foreign’ position.
As for photography, I know that I have taken good photos in the past, and if my job is to take photos, the discipline will jolt me out of this year and a half of frightened modesty, and I will give you photos as good as any still photographer in Potilikha—(or better).
Now the Yes-Or-No rests in your hands. Once the factory gives its OK, I am ready to start straight off to work. Pera says that very soon (in about two weeks) you will look at locations. This will need a photographer, and I hope that I may start work with your group at this point.
Well, what do you say?18
Eisenstein accepted the proposal and Leyda was actively involved on the Bezhin Meadow production as apprentice director for most of 1935. One of four apprentices selected from Eisenstein’s directing class, he assisted in the casting, took still photographs both on location and in the studio, and kept a diary as a means of documenting the progress of the shoot. The experience was to have a profound and decisive impact on the future course of his career.
II
The fact that Eisenstein assigned one of his apprentice directors to keep a visual and written record of the production is an indication of his archival sensibility. The conception of the documentary assignment also demonstrates the extent to which he was fully aware of the historical importance of his film, as well as of its potential impermanence as a completed work of art. Perhaps for the same reasons, Eisenstein saved individual frames of each edited shot, thereby providing the basis for a reconstruction of the film in still images by Kleiman and Yutkevich in 1964. With remarkable historical foresight, the director thus made certain that Bezhin Meadow would somehow survive for future generations.19
Eisenstein gave Leyda very specific instructions when it came to the actual photography: cover the shoot from as many angles as possible, and avoid duplicating Tisse’s frame compositions. He was issued a 35mm Leica by Mosfilm studios, marking the first and only time he worked with this format. The versatility of the Leica accounts for the roving, all-encompassing nature of Leyda’s photographs, an indication that he must have been a constantly moving presence around the film camera. This freedom of movement was something entirely new and undoubtedly exciting for Ley da, as he had previously worked only with bulky and static 4×5 and 8×10 view cameras for his portraits.
The photographs provide a remarkable record of most of the shooting of the first version of Bezhin Meadow. After covering the filming on location in the Ukraine and in the Moscow studio, Leyda was forced to give up his duties late in 1935, after Eisenstein’s illness brought shooting to a halt. Although he missed the controversial church sequence and the subsequent revision and reshooting of the script (production continued until March 1937), the importance of his photographic documentation should not be underestimated. It constitutes the most complete visual account in existence of Eisenstein at work on a single project. More importantly, it provides much-needed insight into Eisenstein’s intentions for Bezhin Meadow, intentions that unfortunately remain shrouded in mystery, myth and controversy.
Some of the most illuminating images of the documentation are those of Eisenstein working with actors. They hint at the difficult directorial task he faced on this film, namely that of synthesising a number of acting methods, covering a spectrum of his stylistic influences and allegiances. They hint as well at the ways in which Eisenstein was moving to encompass the doctrines of Socialist Realism within his own aesthetic system.
The mix of seemingly contradictory performance styles would eventually prove to be one of the principal causes of the film’s political problems. It was charged that the acting was too individualised and psychologised (resulting in an atypical father-son relationship) and at the same time too mythic and iconographic (resulting in an interpretation of the father as Pan and the son as the Christ child).20 Both of these tendencies posed problems for the socialist realist aesthetic, and both were ‘corrected’ in the second version of the script.
Three different traditions are legible in the studio production stills. We see Eisenstein at work on his own typage system, which he had employed with great success in the silent films of the 1920s. A number of the actors for Bezhin Meadow were without previous training or experience, selected (after exhaustive searches) precisely for their look. These included the protagonist, Viktor Kartashov (Stepok), as well as the grandmother, who was found at an institute for aged working women. Elisaveta Teleshova (the head of the collective), on the other hand, was an accomplished stage actress and a director with the Moscow Art Theatre, while Boris Zakhava (the father) was trained in the Meyerhold school. Both were well-known figures in the world of Moscow theatre, although they represented what in the 1920s constituted radically opposed methods: the naturalism of Stanislavsky and the experimental biomechanics of Meyerhold.21
Eisenstein’s attempt to wed these latter two styles in this, his first sound film, is embodied in a quite literal manner by his choice of Nikolai Garin, an actor from the Meyerhold school, to play the role of Teleshova’s husband. While it is interesting to note this evidence of creative synthesis, it should not be overlooked that the Stanislavsky school would eventually triumph. As noted above, Zakhava’s performance was roundly condemned and excised from the film, while Teleshova went on to work with Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky.
And how did Eisenstein plan to use the actor’s voice in his first sound film? Leyda gives us one of the most practical answers to this crucial but unanswerable question in his account of the importance of the monologue in the acted scenes. He explains how emotion was to be conveyed by the silence of Stepok in the face of his father’s increasingly threatening speech.22
Leyda’s stills, understandably, provide some of the best documentation available on the nature of the Eisenstein-Tisse working relationship. In an unpublished essay written after observing this collaboration, Leyda notes that they were both ‘inventors and problem solvers, who approached difficulties with relish’. Several of the photographs show Tisse choosing the appropriate lens and Eisenstein and Tisse together framing the shot. Leyda notes Tisse’s careful precision in the choice of lenses and the relation of particular focal lengths to the emotional and psychological weight of a scene. He noted: ‘It was Tisse’s great gift to build climaxes without drawing the spectator’s attention to the camera equipment. This absence of showy photography is one of the clearest indications of integrated photography and direction.’23
Besides their historical value, however, Leyda’s stills are also of great interest in a purely formal sense. In his very first production photographs, taken in a sun-dappled apple orchard outside Moscow in May 1935, he successfully captured the quality of light Eisenstein himself sought to record in the prologue to the film, meant as a lyrical evocation of Turgenev’s prose.24 The conscious reference to nineteenth-century Romanticism and Impressionism in these photographs reveals the extent to which Leyda was consciously attempting to infuse his own images with Eisenstein’s directorial intentions. Furthermore, the marked tendency to frame compositions from oblique and overhead angles is a reminder of the important influence of the Constructivists, and specifically Rodchenko’s photography, on Leyda’s work.25Finally, in several instances Leyda shot frames in quick succession, searching for his own version of ‘the decisive moment’. One might recall here the importance of Cartier-Bresson’s early Leica photography to the Workers’ Film and Photo League, and that he, along with Leyda, exhibited work at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932–3.26
Looking at Leyda’s Bezhin Meadow photographs today one detects a real tension between the formal aspects of the composition of elements within the frame and the more utilitarian function of the photograph as a piece of history, as a record or document of an important event. The tension results, perhaps, from Leyda’s simultaneous absorption of two distinct yet related currents in the early 1930s: the aesthetics of the art photography movement and the radical politics of the Workers’ Film and Photo League. The photographs, therefore, are more than illuminations of Eisenstein and Bezhin Meadow: they refer back to Leyda’s brief career as a New York photographer and they refer forward to his future success as a film historian and Eisenstein scholar. In this sense, the experience of working on the film for eight months of 1935 marks a fundamental transition in his work and in his life.
III
In addition to his job as still photographer on Bezhin Meadow, Leyda kept a production diary between May and October of 1935, documenting and commenting upon the progress of the shoot. Although the diary manuscript appears lost (apparently having been misplaced by a publisher), a partial reconstruction from various appearances in print is possible. Excerpts from the diary and essays based upon it have appeared in many different contexts over the subsequent fifty years.
The reconstruction raises a number of interesting historiographical questions, for it is clear that Leyda’s editing of the diary changed significantly over time. Some sections first appeared in print in 1936, in an article written from the Soviet Union, prior to the halt in the film’s production. A second, longer essay, which remained unpublished, was written at around the same time, prior to Leyda’s departure from Moscow in July of 1936. Extended excerpts from this were used by Marie Seton in her 1952 Eisenstein biography and Leyda used edited selections himself from 1959 onwards in books and articles. When ‘the diary’ is viewed historically patterns begin to emerge: it becomes clear that the different ends to which Leyda employed the text over a fifty-year period corresponded with different rehabilitations of Eisenstein and Bezhin Meadow, which in turn corresponded with alternations in Western, and specifically US, attitude towards the Soviet Union since the mid-1930s.27
In an historiographical sense, Leyda’s written record and commentary on the Bezhin Meadow affair becomes an opening through which it is possible to re-evaluate the larger question of the nature of his contribution to Eisenstein scholarship. The politics embedded within this publishing history point toward the need to historicise our understanding of Leyda, not only in relation to Eisenstein, but also in relation to Soviet film scholarship in general.
To begin with, we must locate his position within the bitter and divisive conflicts taking place on the American left in the late 1930s. News of Stalin’s purges and the Moscow show trials had accelerated an already deepening split between Trotskyists on one side and members of the American Communist Party and intellectual fellow-travellers on the other.28 Against this background, changes in the form and content of Soviet film became a focal point for an ideologically charged debate over the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and the politics of popular culture. The wider implication of this debate in relation to modernist art and literature brought into prominence a group of anti-Stalinist intellectuals at the Partisan Review.29 Here, in 1938, the critic Dwight Macdonald published his ‘History of the Soviet Cinema’, which concluded with a polemical denunciation of production in the 1930s.30
Leyda, meanwhile, had returned to New York in 1936 to assume a position as assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He began his own history of the Russian and Soviet film, eventually published in 1960 as Kino, during his years at the museum. At the same time, he continued his political film-making activity, working as an editor on several Frontier Films productions.31 He also corresponded regularly with Eisenstein and late in the decade had already started the task of translating and editing what would become Eisenstein’s first volume of essays to appear anywhere, Film Sense, published in 1942.
As might be expected, Leyda’s response to Macdonald’s articles provides a fascinating glimpse of the politics and personalities involved in the debate. When Macdonald was preparing his article, he sent the manuscript to both Leyda and Seymour Stern, an anti-Stalinist critic to Macdonald’s right, for ‘possible criticism and correction’. Leyda’s answer was printed in the same issue of Partisan Review as the article itself and reads, in part:
My only criticism that you may care to hear is that your article exhibits its motives too clearly. I would prefer to think that the errors, in premise and detail, are unconscious, but the distortion of fact and quotation are too obviously channeled towards some childishly destructive purpose.
Forgive me if I have been too general in my comments, but I did not feel that you either needed or wanted them.
Macdonald printed this response along with a lengthy and highly favour able letter from Stern. Furthermore, under the text of Leyda’s succinct reply, he added the following note:
On receiving this extraordinary letter, I at once called up Mr Leyda to make it clear that I both needed and wanted his specific comments. As a result, we ate a most friendly lunch together, in the course of which it became clear that we disagreed profoundly as to both the aesthetic and political nature of the recent Soviet cinema, and that this disagreement was the basis for Mr Leyda’s letter.32
The exchange calls attention to the fact that tracking the trajectory of American response to Soviet film is a crucial element in understanding Leyda’s work. Although Macdonald later qualified the monolithic conception of the Soviet film industry expressed in his original Partisan Review articles, his viewpoint remained the dominant model, especially after the revolutionary socialism of the anti-Stalinist left evolved into reactionary anti-Communism after 1945.
In the ideology responsible for this conception it is possible to locate the reasons why Leyda’s Kino, begun in the late 1930s, remained unpublished until 1960, and even then was turned down by American publishers. It is important to note here as well that the conflict embodied in this brief encounter with Macdonald also had important personal consequences for Leyda: it initiated a series of reactionary attacks on his work by Seymour Stern in The New Leader, leading to his forced resignation from the Museum of Modern Art in the Spring of 1940.33
What the entire episode also suggests, in a much broader context, is that the complexity and contradictions of Leyda’s defence of Soviet film in the late 1930s reflected many similar contradictions encountered in Eisenstein’s work during the same period. Embracing these contradictions as an opportunity for historicising Leyda’s contribution seems particularly important as we seek a dynamic, rather than a static understanding of his scholarship.