The Oxford History of World Cinema (67 page)

Kino-Eye group was to capture 'life taken unawares', kino-pravda (cine-truth), 'revolution

by newsreel' -- based on the LEF idea of the 'literature of fact', in response to the call of

the constructivists to eliminate 'art itself'. However the transformation of reality by means

of the new language of cinema when it was transferred to the screen was permitted, and

the 'kino eye' was endowed with the ability to manipulate time and space.

Eisenstein's cine-collective 'The Iron Five' ( G. V. Alexandrov, M. M. Shtraukh, A. I.

Levshin, M. I. Gomorov, A. A. Antonov) came into being in 1923. In his very first

theoretical work Eisenstein proposed replacing the plot in the cinema by a montage of

attractions, and in his first full-length film, The Strike (Stachka, 1925), he put forward the

masses as hero as an alternative to the Russian prerevolutionary and contemporary

western system of stars. The frame for Eisenstein was an independently significant unit of

montage, an 'attraction' -- that is, a shock for the audience's perception -- and the 'montage

of attractions' was a sequence of shocks having an effect on the spectator and provoking a

response reaction in such a creatively productive way that the spectator became, as it

were, the director's co-author in creating the film text. Herein lay the chief difference

between Eisenstein's concept of montage and that of Kuleshov, within whose system the

spectator was allotted a passive role and was simply the recipient of prepared information.

According to Kuleshov's theory the role of the frame in a montage sequence was

equivalent to that of the letter in a word and it was not the content of each frame which

was significant but their juxtaposition.

Eisenstein was indebted to Kuleshov for the idea itself of the frame as a unit of montage.

According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, Eisenstein learnt to construct mass scenes

from the example of Kuleshov's The Death Ray (Luch smerti, 1925). He also

acknowledged his indebtedness to the re-editing school, mainly via the re-editing of

foreign films for Soviet distribution, in which he was involved working for Esfir Shub. As

for the idea of attractions, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg recollect that it was

suggested to Eisenstein by their show The Marriage, which represented a sequence of

attractions. Eisenstein first combined attractions into a montage series in his stage

production of The Wise Man in 1923.

FEX (The Factory of the Eccentric Actor) came into being in Leningrad under the

leadership of Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg in 1921 as a theatrical workshop

and from 1924 became a cinematographic collective. The emphasis on 'eccentrism' put

forward by FEX testified on the one hand to their orientation towards 'low' genres (circus,

vaudeville, the variety stage) and their rejection of the traditions of the 'serious' art of the

salon. On the other hand it encoded the self-perception of the artists of the Leningrad

school as new provincials, after the capital was moved to Moscow. On the cover of the

manifesto Eccentrism ( 1922, with articles by Kozintsev, Kryzhitsky, Trauberg, and

Yutkevich) the place of publication was indicated as 'Ex-centropolis' -- that is, Leningrad

(formerly Petrograd), now no longer the centre and therefore literally 'eccentric'. The

composition of the FEX acting troupe changed over time, as did its direction, and from

1926 it continued in being in name only.

Also based in Leningrad was a rival group, KEM (Experimental Cinema Workshop), led

by Friedrich Ermler, Edward Johanson, and Sergei Vasiliev. Unlike FEX, KEM was

purely a film group. Rejecting the Stanislavsky system, it modelled itself on the ideas of

Vsevolod Meyerhold, stressing professionalism above inspiration in the actor's craft. In

1927, at the height of the montage period, Ermler declared, 'the actor and not the frame

makes films', but this provocative statement was belied by his own formally subtle

Oblomok imperii ('Fragment of an empire', 1929).

'Eccentric' techniques, based on circus and vaudeville, were particularly prominent in

short films, including Ermler's Skarlatina ('Scarlet fever', 1924), Pudovkin and

Shpikovsky's Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaya goryachka, 1925), and Yutkevich's

Radiodetektiv ('The radio detective', 1926). The quintessence of the new genre, however,

was Kozintsev and Trauberg's Adventures of Oktyabrina (Pokhozdeniya Oktyabriny,

1924), which sought, in Trauberg's words, to combine the theme of an agitka with

political features from the Soviet satirical press, the tricks of American comics, and a

headlong montage rhythm that could outdo the French avant-garde.

What united all tendencies was a shared cult of Charlie Chaplin. Constructivists such as

Alexei Gan and Dziga Vertov saw Chaplin as a model to counterpoise to the

prerevolutionary tradition. For the FEX group, he was the embodiment of the Eccentric

view of the world. Eisenstein wrote of the 'attractional qualities of the specific mechanics

of [Chaplin's] movements'. For Kuleshov as well as for the FEXes, he was the

embodiment of America.

The ' America' celebrated by the Soviet avant-garde was not so much a real place as an

emblem of the machineage rhythm of the twentieth century. For Kuleshov this America

functioned as a kind of notional montage space, which he made the subject of one of his

early experiments in 'creative geography', Tvorimaya zemnaya poverkhnost ('The earth's

surface created', 1920), where Khoklova and Obolensky 'emerge' from Gogol Boulevard

in Moscow on to the steps of the Capitol in Washington. In another experiment around the

same time, Tvorimiy chelovek ('The person being created') applied the same abstract

notion to the human body, putting together 'the back of one woman', 'the eyes of another',

and 'the legs of a third'.

This idea of the film author as demiurge was shared by other film-makers. In his 1923

manifesto Dziga Vertov spoke of the ability of the 'kino eye' to put together in montage a

person 'more perfect than the creation of Adam', while Kozintsev and Trauberg in their

unfilmed scenario Zhenshchina Edisona ('Edison's woman', 1923) envisaged the creation

of a new Eve, the daughter of Edison and the primogenitrix of the new world.

Parallel with the avant-garde tendency, an academic and traditional cinema also survived

in the Soviet Union, practised largely by directors such as A. Ivanovsky, C. Sabinsky, and

P. Chardynin who had already been working in Russia before the Revolution. Needless to

say, this cinema was not entirely conservative. Rather it tended to mix traditional

technique with artificially introduced 'revolutionary' subject-matter. An interesting

example of this is Gardin's Prizrak brodit po Yevropie ('A spectre is haunting Europe',

1923). Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death', this film has a

subtly conceived montage but traditional narration, with a double-exposure nightmare

scene in which the masses rising in revolution confront the Emperor, who is in love with a

shepherdess. The masses are victorious, the Emperor and his shepherdess are consumed

by fire, but the ending is implausible, since the film is made in the melodramatic genre

leading the audience to sympathize with the 'hero' and 'heroine' rather than with the

depersonalized masses. Less ambiguous was Aelita ( 1924), made by Yakov Protazanov

on his return to the Soviet Union and based on the revolutionary sciencefiction fantasy by

Alexei Tolstoy, but incorporating all the staple elements and poetic conventions of the

émigré film.

By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), adapted by Viktor Shklovsky from a story by Jack

London, and directed by Lev Kuleshov

Constructing new genres was in fact a major problem of Soviet film-makers in the 1920s.

An implicit model early in the decade, according to Adrian Piotrovsky ( 1969), was the

Griffith melodrama, both at the level of plot ('disasterpursuit-rescue') and at that of

expressive technique (montage of details, exploitation of emotional attractions,

symbolism of objects). Plot features of the early Soviet film include the creation of the

role of the new Soviet detective -- as in Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr

West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Neobychainiye priklucheniya mistera Vesta v stranie

bolshevikov, 1924) -- while at the micro-level there developed techniques of 'montage of

attractions' (Eisenstein) and 'rhythmically regulated montage' (the 'Kino-Eye' group).

A fusion of new techniques, to some degree transcending the polemics over the 'played'

and 'unplayed' film, is found in the development in the mid-1920s of the 'historical

revolutionary epic'. Films in this category were distinguished by non-traditional plot

structure and narration, intensive montage, and rich use of metaphor and experiments in

film language, while fulfilling a social and ideological requirement by their treatment of

revolutionary themes. They include such classics as Eisen stein 's The Strike and The

Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potëmkin, 1925), Pudovkin's Mother (Mat, 1926), The

End of St Petersburg (Koniets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927), and The Heir of Genghis Khan

(Potomok Chingis-Khana, 1928-also known as Storm over Asia), and Alexander

Dovzhenko's Zvenigora ( 1927) and Arsenal ( 1929).

The 'standardization' of film genres which (according to Piotrovsky) took place after 1925

also led to the production of historical epics of a more academic type, such as Ivanovsky's

Dekabritsky ('The Decembrists', 1927) or Yuri Tarich 's Krylya kholopa ('Wings of the

serf', 1926), made under the influence of the Moscow Arts Theatre. The continuing battle

between traditionalists and innovators spurred Kozintsev and Trauberg and the FEX

group to abandon their commitment to purely contemporary subjects and to make their

own film about the Decembrist movement, The Club of the Big Deed (Soyuz velikova

dela, or SVD), later in 1927.

SVD had as script-writers the formalist theoreticians Yuri Tynyanov and Yuli Oksman,

and from 1926 the Soviet silent cinema enters what Eisenstein was to call its 'second

literary period'. Intense debates took place about the role of the scenario. At one extreme

were Vertov, who rejected the idea of the played film entirely, and the writer Osip Brik,

who went so far as to propose writing the scenario after the film had been shot. At the

other were Ippolit Sokolov and the proponents of the 'iron scenario' in which every shot

was numbered and pre-planned in advance. Against the iron scenario, Eisenstein proposed

an 'emotional' scenario, a 'stenographic record of the impulse', which would assist the

director in finding a visual incarnation for the idea.

On the whole the intervention of the formalist writers and critics led to at least a partial

reintegration of literary values into Soviet cinema. This is evident in Tynyanov's script for

The Overcoat (Shiniel, 1926), adapted from Gogol and directed by Kozintsev and

Trauberg, and Viktor Shklovsky's for Kuleshov's By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), based on

Jack London's story 'The Unexpected'. But Shklovsky also contributed to the transfer of

some of the cinematic and anti-literary values of Vertov's 'fact films' to the fiction film, as

in his work on Abram Room's Bed and Sofa (Tretya Meshchanskaya, 1927), a film

showing careful attention to the detail of everyday life.

The everyday genre, with its interest in the detail of surrounding reality, including

industry, gradually began to occupy a dominating position in Soviet cinema, with films

like Petrov-Bytov's Vodororot ('The whirlpool') and Ermler's Dom v sugrobakh ('The

house in the snowdrifts', 1928), not to mention Eisenstein's The General Line ( 1929).

Everyday life is also central to the comedies of Boris Barnet, such as The Girl with the

Hatbox (Devushka s korobkoi, 1927) and The House on Trubnaya Square (Dom na

Trubnoi, 1928), where it merges with another important trend in Soviet cinema -- the

urbanist film. Here the theme is the counterpoising of the city and the provinces, with the

city as a new world opening up before the new arrival from the provinces, as in Ermler's

Katka bumazhny ranet ('Katya's reinette apples'), Room's V bolshom gorodie ('In the big

city'), Y. Zhelyabuzhsky's V gorod vkhodit nelzya ('No entry to the city'), and also

Pudovkin's The End of St Petersburg.