As we sit watching the USSR collapse and the failed experiment of communism slip irrevocably into the past, it may be important to remember a time when the Soviet Union seemed to have an exclusive claim on the future.
In the years immediately following the October Revolution, and before the Stalinist freeze, Soviet culture was open to every kind of innovation and every new twist of the avant garde, from formalist to futurism to
constructivism to proletcultism.
That feverish rush of invention was felt nowhere more strongly than in the movies, the new, supremely modern medium that Lenin described as ”for us, the most important of the arts.”
Out of the hundreds of films produced between 1918, when the first state- produced feature (”The Signal,” by A. Artakov) was released, and 1936, when the drab didacticism of socialist realism became the official aesthetic of the state and the Moscow show trials began, a handful have come down as certified classics.
”Red Silents,” a new series of 10 cassettes released by Kino Video in New York (212-629-6880) and available this month in the more adventurous video stores, includes freshly mastered and, at $29.95, reasonably priced editions of several of the best-known titles.
No film education is complete without a viewing of Vsevolod Pudovkin`s
”The End of Saint Petersburg” (1927), Lev Kuleshov`s ”The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks” (1924), Alexander Dovzhenko`s ”Earth” (1930), Esther Shub`s pioneering compilation film ”The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty” (1927), Dziga Vertov`s rapturous 1934 ”Three Songs of Lenin” or Sergei Eisenstein`s genuinely revolutionary debut feature, ”Strike” (1924).
But the Kino series also includes four fascinating lesser-known works that suggest there is still a great deal of the Soviet silent cinema left to discover.
Directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, ”The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom”
seems at first one of the left-behinds of 1924, the year in which the Soviet cinema, led by Eisenstein and Kuleshov, took its definitive turn into radical experimentation.
A modest romantic comedy about a comely street-corner cigarette peddler
(the startlingly bright-eyed Julia Solnceva) who becomes the object of romantic competition among a dashing movie cameraman, a portly but devoted assistant bookkeeper and a visiting American industrialist, the film seems almost pre-revolutionary in its light-heartedness and straightforward technique.
But Zhelyabuzhsky, who seems to have disappeared from film history after releasing an acclaimed version of Pushkin`s ”The Postmaster” that same year, nudges the story toward a modernist self-consciousness: The cameraman recruits the girl as a potential movie star and takes her back to his studio, where the director stages some unusually extensive and honest behind-the-scenes footage. The movie`s richest and funniest moment is a film-within-the-film-a documentary on ”daily life in Moscow” that the cameraman has been assigned to film as punishment for his romantic escapades, but which turns out to feature the same beautiful, bright-eyed girl wandering through every shot. Revealing the unshakeable subjectivity that lies behind every supposedly dispassionate documentary, ”The Cigarette Girl” is deconstructionism with a human face.
”Aelita, Queen of Mars” is another transitional film of 1924, a science-fiction spectacular mounted to compete with the epic productions then arriving from Germany and America. The director, Yakov Protozanov, had been one of the most prolific Russian filmmakers of the pre-Revolutionary years
(reportedly, some 40 films between 1909 and 1917) before going into exile in France; he was lured back to the Soviet Union with the promise of the largest budget ever deployed in a Soviet film.
Seen today, ”Aelita” is a dumbfounding combination of ultra-conventional melodrama and the wackiest avant-garde design. The screenplay, based on a propagandistic short story by Alexei Tolstoy, concerns a scientist, Los (Nikolai Ceretli), who dreams of traveling to Mars and stays up all night inventing a spaceship to get him there.
No sooner has he constructed his ship, than it comes in handy: In a fit of jealousy, Los shoots his unfaithful (and apparently, politically reactionary) wife and takes off for the (other) red planet, accompanied by Gusev (Nicolai Batalov), a loyal Red Army veteran and, as a stowaway, Kracov
(Igor Illinisky), a private detective who suspects Los of the killing.
Mars turns out to be exactly as Los has imagined it in his dreams-a vast stage set designed in high constructivist style by Sergei Kozlovsky. Amid the towering geometrics of the Martian royal palace, Los allows himself to be seduced by the glamorous, power-hungry Aelita (Julia Solnceva, once again), while Gusev organizes a bolshevik-style revolt among Mars` enslaved working class.
Just as in one of Cecil B. DeMille`s contemporary Biblical epics, the other-world sequences are used to abstract and resolve the emotional problems besetting the characters in their dull, daily lives. Despite the portrayal of Mars as a distinctly old-line, imperialist state, the film was criticized when it was first released for ”utopianism”-for suggesting, if only through its seductive design, that there could possibly be a world out there more interesting and rewarding than the workers` paradise.
After the shock of Eisenstein`s ”Potemkin” in 1925, the Soviet cinema was irrevocably altered. Driven by new theories of editing, ingeniously linked to Marx`s dialectical materialism, the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov ascended even more extreme heights of formal experimentation, often leaving character psychology and emotional nuance far behind.
In this context, Boris Barnet`s 1927 ”The Girl With the Hat Box” seems particularly valuable. A student of Kuleshov, Barnet was able to apply his theories of cutting and composition to this gentle romantic comedy without losing sight of the warmth and humanity of his characters.
Anna Sten is the young lady of the title, a milliner who works out of her home in the country and commutes to Moscow with her handmade hats in a big round box, for sale to the comically grasping boutique owner Madame Irene
(Serafima Birman).
During one trip, she meets a young, addled student (Ivan Koval-Samborski) who has no place to stay in the overcrowded city. She offers to marry him, in name only, as a way of installing him in the apartment that Madame Irene has illegally kept empty above the shop, claiming that the hatmaker lives there.
Though Sten is a marvel of radiant naturalism, the stylized, caricatured acting around her betrays the influence of the experimental theatrical troupe FEKS-the ”Factory of the Eccentric Actor.” As in ”Aelita,” a constructivist interest in abstract geometry underlies the compositions (the line of a footbridge across a snow-covered field, the empty apartment with its few sticks of furniture, the ever-present hat box), but the effect is not to denature the drama but give it a whimsy and lightness.b
”Happiness,” directed by Alexander Medvedkin in 1934, is the film that occasioned Sergei Eisenstein`s famous remark, ”Today, I have seen how a bolshevik laughs.” Using a number of camera tricks, from speeded-up action to stop-motion animation, Medvedkin relates a frankly propagandistic fable about a suffering pre-revolutionary peasant, christened ”the Loser” (Petr Zinoviev), who finally manages to bring in a decent harvest only to have it all carted off by the local landowners, officials and churchmen.
The film is particularly vicious in its portrayal of the church-a monk and a priest gallantly pass up a kopek found on the ground, but fight almost to the death over a purse filled with banknotes; their nuns are thinly disguised concubines, parading around in see-through habits. When the Loser is arrested for attempting suicide, he is hauled off by a legion of czarist soliders, all wearing identical kewpie-doll masks.
The rolling landscapes and fanciful perspectives suggest the village paintings of Chagall, and even after the October Revolution arrives and the Loser is transformed into a happy collective farmer, Medvedkin maintains a folkloric tone, as if he were trying to invent traditions for a new generation.
”Happiness” represents how far it is possible to go into stylization and abstraction for a narrative film, and indeed, the Soviet cinema went no further. The crackdown against ”formalist” tendencies came the following year, initiating three decades of almost complete artistic silence.
