Natasha's Dance (75 page)

    In the name of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, Destroy the museum, and trample over Art.
³⁵

    Yet there was also the Utopian faith that a new culture would be built on the rubble of the old. The most committed members of the Proletkult were serious believers in the idea of a purely Soviet civilization that was entirely purged of historical and national elements. This ‘Soviet culture’ would be internationalist, collectivist and proletarian. There would be a proletarian philosophy, proletarian science and proletarian arts. Under the influence of such ideas, experimental forms of art appeared. There were films without professional actors (using ‘types’ selected from the streets), orchestras without conductors and ‘concerts in the factory’, with sirens, whistles, hooters, spoons and washboards as the instruments. Shostakovich (perhaps with tongue in cheek) introduced the sound of factory whistles in the climax of his Second Symphony (‘To October’) in 1927.

    But was it possible to construct a new culture without learning from the old? How could one have a ‘proletarian culture’, or a ‘proletarian intelligentsia’, unless the proletariat was first educated in the arts and sciences of the old civilization? And if they were so educated, would they, or their culture, still be proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to recognize that they could not expect to build their new culture entirely from scratch and that, however Utopian their plans, much of their work would consist of educating workers in the old culture. After 1921, once the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was assured, official policy encouraged something of a rapprochement with the ‘petty-bourgeois’ (that is, peasant and small-trading) sector and what remained of the intelligentsia, through the New Economic Policy (NEP).

    Lenin, a conservative in artistic matters, had always been appalled by the cultural nihilism of the avant-garde. He once confessed to Klara Zetkin, the German communist, that he could not understand or derive any pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics were firmly based on the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and he took the view that the Revolution’s task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite culture. As he put it to Zetkin, ‘We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it

    as a starting point, even if it is “old”. Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is “old”? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is “new”?’
³⁶

    But pressure on the Proletkult came from below as well as above. Most of the workers who visited its clubs wanted to learn French, or how to dance in pairs; they wanted to become, as they put it, more
‘kul’turny’
(‘cultured’), by which they understood more ‘refined’. In their habits and artistic taste, the Russian masses appeared to be resistant to the experiments of the avant-garde. There was little real enthusiasm for communal housing, which never escaped its associations with grim necessity. Even the inhabitants of commune houses rarely used their social space: they would take their meals from the canteen to their beds rather than eat them in the communal dining room.
³⁷
In the Moscow Soviet’s model commune house, built in 1930, the residents put up icons and calendars of saints on the dormitory walls.
³⁸
The unlifelike images of the avant-garde were just as alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with the visual arts was based on the icon. Having decorated the streets of Vitebsk for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Chagall was asked by local officials: ‘Why is the cow green and why is the house flying through the sky, why? What’s the connection with Marx and Engels?’
³⁹
Surveys of popular reading habits in the 192Os show that the workers continued to prefer the adventure stories of the sort they had read before 1917, and even the nineteenth-century classics, to the ‘proletarian poetry’ of the avant-garde.
⁴⁰
Just as unsuccessful was the new music. At one ‘concert in the factory’ there was such a cacophonous din from all the sirens and the hooters that even the workers failed to recognize the tune of what was meant to be the anthem of their proletarian civilization: it was the Internationale.
⁴¹

    ’For us the most important of all the arts is cinema,’ Lenin is reported to have said.
⁴²
He valued film above all for its propaganda role. In a country such as Russia, where in 1920 only two out of every five adults could read,
⁴³
the moving picture was a vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party’s reach to the remote countryside, where makeshift

    cinemas were established in requisitioned churches and village halls. Trotsky said the cinema would compete with the tavern and the church: it would appeal to a young society, whose character was formed, like a child’s, through play.
⁴⁴
The fact that in the early 1920s nearly half the audience in Soviet cinemas was aged between ten and fifteen years (the age when political ideas start to form in a person’s mind) was one of the medium’s greatest virtues as far as its patrons in the Kremlin were concerned.
⁴⁵
Here was the art form of the new socialist society -it was technologically more advanced, more democratic, and more ‘true to life’ than any of the arts of the old world.

    ’The theatre is a game. The cinema is life’, wrote one Soviet critic in 1927.
⁴⁶
It was the realism of the photographic image that made film the ‘art of the future’ in the Soviet Union.
⁴⁷
Other art forms represented life; but only cinema could capture life and reorganize it as a new reality. This was the premise of the Kinok group, formed in 1922 by the brilliant director Dziga Vertov, his wife, the cine newsreel editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, a daring cameraman who had been with the Red Army in the civil war. All three were involved in making propaganda films for Soviet agitprop. Travelling by special ‘agit-trains’ around the front-line regions in the civil war, they had noticed how the villagers to whom they showed their films were free from expectations of a narrative. Most of them had never seen a film or play before. ‘I was the manager of the cinema carriage on one of the agit-trains’, Vertov later wrote. ‘The audience was made up of illiterate or semi-literate peasants. They could not even read the subtitles. These unspoiled viewers could not understand the theatrical conventions.’
⁴⁸
From this discovery, the Kinok group became convinced that the future of the cinema in Soviet Russia was to be found in non-fiction films. The basic idea of the group was signalled by its name. The word
Kinok
was an amalgam of
kino
(cinema) and
oko
(eye) - and the
kinoki,
or ‘cine-eyes’, were engaged in a battle over sight. The group declared war on the fiction films of the studios, the ‘factory of dreams’ which had enslaved the masses to the bourgeoisie, and took their camera out on to the streets to make films whose purpose was to ‘catch life as it is’ - or rather, insofar as their aim was ‘to see and show the world in the name of the proletarian revolution’, to catch life as it ought to be.
⁴⁹

    This manipulative element was the fundamental difference between the
kinoki
and what would become known as
cinema verite
in the Western cinematic tradition:
cinema verite
aspired to a relatively objective naturalism, whereas (their claims to the contrary notwithstanding) the
kinoki
arranged their real-life images in a symbolic way. Perhaps it was because their visual approach was rooted in the iconic tradition of Russia. The Kinok group’s most famous film,
The Man with a Movie Camera
(1929), is a sort of symphony of images from one day in the ideal Soviet metropolis, starting with early morning scenes of different types of work and moving through to evening sports and recreations. It ends with a visit to the cinema where
The Man with a Movie Camera
is on the screen. The film is full of such visual jokes and tricks, designed to debunk the fantasies of fiction film. Yet what emerges from this playful irony, even if it takes several viewings to decode, is a brilliant intellectual discourse about seeing and reality. What do we see when we look at a film? Life ‘as it is’ or as it is acted for the cameras? Is the camera a window on to life or does it make its own reality?

    Vertov, like all the Soviet avant-garde directors, wanted cinema to change the way its viewers saw the world. To engineer the Soviet consciousness, they hit upon a new technique - montage. By intercutting shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage aimed to manipulate the audience’s reactions, directing them to the ideas the director wanted them to reach. Lev Kuleshov was the first director to use montage in the cinema - long before it was adopted in the West. He came to the technique by accident, when the chronic shortages of film stock in the civil war led him to experiment with making new movies by cutting up and rearranging bits of old ones. The scarcity of film compelled all the early Soviet directors to plan out scenes on paper first (storyboarding). This had the effect of reinforcing the intellectual composition of their films as a sequence of symbolic movements and gestures. Kuleshov believed that the visual meaning of the film was best communicated by the arrangement (montage) of the frames, and not by the content of the individual shots, as practised in the silent films and even in the early montage experiments of D. W. Griffith in America. According to Kuleshov, it was through the mon-tage of contrasting images that cinema could create meaning and

    emotions in the audience. To demonstrate his theory he intercut a single neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin with three different visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a women’s body laid out in a coffin, and a child at play. It turned out that the audience interpreted the meaning of the close-up according to the context in which it was placed, seeing hunger in Mozzukhin’s face in the first sequence, grief in the second, and joy in the third, although the three shots of him were identical.
⁵⁰
All the other great Soviet film directors of the 1920s used montage: Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet and, in its most intellectualized form, Sergei Eisenstein. Montage was so central to the visual effect of Soviet experimental cinema that its exponents were afraid that their medium would be destroyed by the arrival of film sound. The essence of film art, as these directors saw it, lay in the orchestration of the visual images and the use of movement and of mimicry to suggest emotions and ideas. The introduction of a verbal element was bound to reduce film to a cheap surrogate for the theatre. With the advent of sound, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proposed to use it ‘contrapuntally’, contrasting sound with images as an added element of the montage.
⁵¹

    Montage required a different kind of acting, capable of conveying the meaning of the film quickly and economically. Much of the theory behind this new acting was derived from the work of Francois Delsarte and Emile Jacques Dalcroze, who had developed systems of mime, dance and rhythmic gymnastics (eurhythmies). The system was based on the idea that combinations of movements and gestures could be used to signal ideas and emotions to the audience, and this same idea was applied by Kuleshov to both the training of the actors and the montage editing for cinema.

    The Delsarte-Dalcroze system had been brought to Russia by Prince Sergei Volkonsky in the early 1910s. The grandson of the Decembrist had been Director of the Imperial Theatre between 1899 and 1901, but was sacked after falling out with the prima ballerina (and mistress of the Tsar) Mathilde Kshesinskaya. The cause of his dismissal was a farthingale. Kshesinskaya had refused to wear one in the ballet
Kam-argo
and, when Volkonsky had fined her, she persuaded the Tsar to dismiss him from his post. Volkonsky might have saved his career by rescinding the fine, but, like his grandfather, he was not the type to be

    diverted from what he saw as his professional duty by an order from the court.
⁵²
The one real legacy of Volkonsky’s brief tenure was the discovery of Diaghilev, whom he promoted to his first position in the theatre world as the editor and publisher of the Imperial Theatre’s annual review.* After 1901 Volkonsky became one of Russia’s most important art and theatre critics. So when he began to propagandize the Delsarte-Dalcroze system, even setting up his own school of rhythmic gymnastics in Petersburg, he drew many converts from the Russian theatre, including Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The essence of Volkonsky’s teaching was the conception of the human body as a dynamo whose rhythmic movements can be trained subconsciously to express the emotions required by a work of art.+ Volkonsky conceived of the human body as a machine which obeys ‘the general laws of mechanics’, but which is ‘oiled and set in motion by feeling’.
⁵³
After 1917, this idea was taken up in Soviet film and theatre circles, where similar theories of ‘biomechanics’ were championed by the great avant-garde director Meyerhold. In 1919 Volkonsky set up a Rhythmic Institute in Moscow. Until he was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921, he also taught his theories at the First State School of Cinema, where Kuleshov was one of the directors to be influenced by them. In Kuleshov’s own workshop, established in Moscow in 1920, actors were trained in a lexicon of movements and gestures based on the rhythmic principles of Volkonsky.
⁵⁴

    Many of the most important Soviet directors of the avant-garde graduated from the Kuleshov workshop, among them Pudovkin, Barnet and Eisenstein. Born in Riga in 1898, Sergei Eisenstein was the son of a famous
style moderne
architect of Russian-German-Jewish

    * Diaghilev was dismissed when Volkonsky left the Imperial Theatre. Diaghilev’s dismissal meant he was ruled out for any future job in the Imperial Theatre, so in a sense it could be said that Volkonsky had a hand in the foundation of the Ballets Russes.