The Oxford History of World Cinema (66 page)

down to the Crimea to film on location. Convinced that it would be impossible to 'sit out

the Revolution' there, they embarked on a tortuous journey westward. Most found their

way to Paris, but some went to Italy, and other centres of émigré film-making activity

were Germany, Czechoslovakia, and, later in the 1920s, Hollywood.

In February 1920 Iosif Yermoliev, together with his enterprise, emigrated to Paris, where

he adopted the spelling Ermolieff and organized a studio called ErmolieffFilm. After 1922

he handed it over to producers Alexander Kamenka and Noé Bloch and it was renamed

Albatros. Among artists who worked there were directors Yakov Protazanov (who later

returned to the Soviet Union), Alexander Volkov, Vladimir Strizhevsky, and Vyacheslav

Turzhansky (or Victor Tourjansky, as he became known in the west), and actors Ivan

Mozzukhin (Mosjoukine) and Natalia Lissenko. Also in France were the Russian-Polish

animator Madislaw Starewicz (in French Ladislas Starewitch), with his own studio at

Fontenay-sous-Bois, and the producer Pavel Thiemann, who settled at Joinville.

Ermolieff moved to Berlin, where a sizeable émigré community soon developed. He

brought with him Strizhevsky and Protazanov and drew Georgi Azagarov, who was

already there, into working with him. Another major Russian producer, Dmitri

Kharitonov, also emigrated, and in 1923 the major film company of Vladimir Vengerov

and Hugo Stinnes was created, bringing together many Russians who had settled in

Germany. Among the most important Russian actors working in Germany in the 1920s

were Vladimir Gaidarov, Olga Gsovskaya, and Olga Chekhova (Tschekowa) -- the latter

also a producer and director. Many film people moved between the two major centres of

Russian emigration, including Tourjansky, Volkov, and Mosjoukine.

The director Alexander Uralsky, the actresses Tatiana and Varvara Yanova, and the actors

Osip Runich and Mikhail Vavich became the centre of a film community that settled in

Italy. In Czechoslovakia the Russian diaspora was represented in the early 1920s by Vera

Orlova, Vladimir Massalitinov, and others, joined later in the decade by the famous Soviet

actress Vera Baranovskaya, who moved to Prague and established a new reputation for

herself there.

Hollywood became a centre of Russian film émigrés in the second half of the 1920s.

Besides Tourjansky and Mosjoukine (who did not stay long), Russians who came to seek

their fortune in America included actresses Anna Sten and Maria Uspenskaya

(Ouspenskaya), actors Vladimir Sokolov and Mikhail (Michael) Chekhov, nephew of the

playwright, and directors Ryszard Boleslawski (Richard Boleslawsky), Fyodor Otsep, and

Dmitri Bukhovetsky (Dimitri Buchowetzki). America created a powerful Russian myth in

the cinema, and at the same time, according to the recollections of contemporaries, was

capable of swallowing the émigrés and absorbing them into itself. The overriding idea of

the Russian emigration, to preserve Russian culture abroad intact in order to bring it back

to Russia when the Bolsheviks were overthrown, was impossible in practice in America.

Hollywood harshly imposed its own standards, and the most authentically Russian films

produced by the emigration were those of the émigré colony in France, clustered around

the most intensely Russian studio, Ermolieff-Film (Albatros).

The style of the Russian cinema in France could be defined as 'conservationist',

attempting to preserve the traditions of Russian pre-revolutionary cinema but gradually

giving ground to the demands of its western context. A number of films were direct

remakes of pre-revolutionary works. Protazanov remade his 1915 film The Prosecutor in

1921 as Justice d'abord ('Justice above all'), while Tourjansky remade Yevgeny Bauer's

Song of Triumphant Love under the same title in 1923. But there were also 'indirect

remakes', covering the same subjects and using the thematic structures of pre-

revolutionary films, such as Tourjansky's Le XVme Prélude de Chopin (Chopin's

Fifteenth Prelude, 1922), which repeats motifs from his earlier The Gentry's Ball ( 1918).

It is interesting that in both his French films Tourjansky uses Bauer's frame composition

and his method of articulating space by splitting the action in several layers at various

degrees of distance from the camera. The theme of visions appearing to characters who

are poised between the real and unreal worlds and expressive of the mystical

consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia of the early 1900s, which was widely used in

pre-revolutionary cinema, is transformed in émigré cinema into a subjectbased unreality.

This may take the form of hallucinations, as in Tourjansky's Song of Triumphant Love, or

delirium, as in the same director's Michel Strogoff ( 1926). More often, however, it is

represented as dream -- as in Angoissante Aventure ('Dreadful adventure', 1920) or

Mosjoukine's Le Brasier ardent ('The burning brazier', 1923) -- and is used by the émigrés

as a persistent metaphor of their post-revolutionary existence as something temporary and

transitory, which can only end with a happy awakening. Thus one of the major canons of

the pre-revolutionary film is broken -- the obligatory tragic finale, or 'Russian ending'. For

western audiences such an ending was acceptable only in the case of the classic

melodrama, such as Volkov's Kean, ou désordre et gÉnie ('Kean, or disorder and genius',

1923). Increasingly the ÉmigrÉ film-makers were forced to surrender this position --

though to varying degrees in different countries. Hollywood categorically demanded a

happy ending. For example, Dimitri Buchowetzki, working in 1925 on a film version of

Anna Karenina, felt obliged to prepare a version of the screenplay in which Anna turns

out to have thrown herself under the train only in dream and in actual fact she marries

Vronsky. In France the film-makers surrendered their position only after a longer struggle.

Distortion of the Russian classics was seen as a sacrilege, which was only conceded in the

1930s, as in Tourjansky's adaptation of Pushkin's story 'The Stationmaster' (under the title

Nostalgie) in 1937. More often a compromise was reached. For example, in Song of

Triumphant Love, Turgenev's story is simply left incomplete; it breaks off on a happy

note, creating for western filmgoers the sensation of a happy ending, while directing

Russians to the mystical tragic finale of the literary source. Alternatively use is made of a

double ending, with a happy end tacked on to the 'Russian finale', so that in Angoissante

Aventure the hero is shown awakening from a nightmare, while in Chopin's Fifteenth

Prelude the heroine's suicide is forestalled by chance.

Wedded as they were to the values of a conservative consciousness, and unwilling to give

up the traditions of pre-revolutionary cinema with its slowed-down rhythm and pace of

action, the ÉmigrÉs showed themselves unreceptive to the avant-garde experiment that

typified western cinema of the 1920s, particularly in France. The only exception was

Mosjoukine's Le Brasier ardent, which in this respect sets itself apart from the rest of

ÉmigrÉ cinema. The traditional approach, the lack of interest in experiment with

montage, the centrality of the actor, all distinguish the style of ÉmigrÉ cinerna from its

contemporary Soviet counterpart in the 1920s. It is significant that, according to

contemporary testimony, Le Brasier ardent was the only émigré film to exercise any

influence on the young directors of the Soviet cinema.

THE SOVIET STYLE

In contrast to the émigrés, the young Soviet directors strove to break the link with their

pre-revolutionary heritage completely. Their desire to create a new cinema reflected an

idea of renouncing the old world which was widespread in Russia in those years.

A commitment to reality in the cinema -- and particularly to the rapidly changing reality

of the Revolution -- came through the use of montage to transform cinematic

representation. In part this came about through economic necessity, coupled with a certain

unconscious aggression towards the past. With raw film in short supply, one way for the

cinema to develop was through the re-editing of old films, sometimes even on the

negative. With this in view, a special 'Re-editing Department' was created in the

production section of the Moscow Film Committee. According to film historian Veniamin

Vishnevsky, Vladimir Gardin was the first Soviet theoretician of montage. On 10

February 1919 Gardin delivered a lecture to the Re-editing Department on montage as

one of the fundamentals of film art. This lecture had a great impact on his colleagues,

notably on Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov, whose famous 'experiments' are traditionally

considered the origin of the Soviet concept of montage, was, according to Vishnevsky,

developing ideas put forward by Gardin.

The best known of these experiments -- the 'Kuleshov effect' -- took the form of a still

close-up of the face of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin, juxtaposed to three different frames: a

plate of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a child playing. As a result of the

juxtaposition the audience had the impression that the expression on the actor's face

altered, while the background (taken from an unknown pre-revolutionary film) remained

unchanged. With this experiment Kuleshov sought to confirm one of the laws of montage

that he had discovered: that the meaning of a montage sequence in cinema is determined

not by the content of the montage elements, but by their juxtaposition. This experiment,

known in the west from the lecture 'Model instead of actor' given in London by Vsevolod

Pudovkin in 1929 (and therefore often incorrectly referred to as the Pudovkin effect), was

sometimes seen by contemporaries not as a manifestation of the avantgarde thinking of

the new epoch, but as evidence of the vandalism of the Soviet cinema towards its

predecessors. Thus Moisei Aleinikov (head of the Rus film studio and later of

Mezhrabpom-Film) describes in his memoirs how Kuleshov's 'montage people', wearing

leather jackets and carrying revolvers, used to 'arrest' old film negatives in the studio, in

order to re-edit this 'rubbish . . . filmed by the bourgeoisie' into new revolutionary film --

there being no raw film in the country from which new films could be made.

In the early days, the embryonic Soviet cinema was heavily dependent on the principle of

creation through destruction. The smashing of the old commercial structures of the genre

film began almost at once. In 1919 a wave of propaganda films appeared, with titles like

Daredevil, Their Eyes were Opened, We Are above Vengeance, or For the Red Banner,

dedicated to the first anniversary of the Revolutionary Army. These agitki (agitational

pieces), which were to become a regular feature of early Soviet cinema, were shown

throughout the country with the aid of specially equipped mobile cinemas and of the

famous 'Agit-trains', the first of which set out for the countryside under the direction of

M. I. Kalinin in April 1919.

On 7 November 1920 shooting began on a mass-action film of the storming of the Winter

Palace. The concept of the action combined the principle of the play-film and the

'unplayed film' which was fundamental to the idea of the filmed chronicle. The film also

introduced the concept of group authorship (the production was the work of thirteen

directors headed by Nikolai Yevreinov), the de-individualizing of the actor (10,000 people

took part in the filming), a heightened concept of the audience (the performance was

played out in the presence of 100,000 people), and, finally, a blurring of the dividing line

between theatre and cinema (theatre was being enacted in the square, but being shot on

film).

Stage-screen hybrids were generally typical of Soviet cinema in the early 1920s. Grigory

Kozintsev's and Leonid Trauberg's theatrical productions of The Marriage (Zhenit'ba)

included screen projection in their structure, as did Eisenstein's show The Wise Man

(Mudrets), with its film interlude 'Glumov's Diary', and Gardin's production The Iron Heel

(Zheleznaya pyata). This technique goes back to pre-revolutionary experiments in the

theatre, but the Soviet directors seem to have been unaware of this and to have assumed

that here too they were the destroyers of tradition.

The idea of collective authorship was also important in the 1920s. The first group to be

formed (in 1919) was Kuleshov's and included Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, V. P. Fogel, and

others. Its work was based on the rejection of the pre-revolutionary 'psychological drama'

and it introduced a new concept of acting: the notion of the 'model' (a term suggested by

Turkin in 1918) in which psychological embodiment of character is replaced by the study

of reflexes and the automating of the acting.

Kuleshov's group was followed by one headed by Dziga Vertov (pseudonym of Denis

Arkadevich Kaufman), including among its members Vertov's wife Elisaveta Svilova and

his brother Mikhail, as well as A. M. Rodchenko and others. In its manifestos, published

in the magazines Kinofot and LEF. Vertov's group totally rejected the very concept of the

actor ('a danger', 'an error'), and the idea of play-films with a story-line. The aim of the