Page 113 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

94 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
landmark productions she designed: Annensky’s Thamyras Cythared [Famira
kifared] in 1916, Wilde’s Salomé in 1917 and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in
1921. 49
Tairov had been inspired in large part by Edward Gordon Craig’s 1911 Moscow
production of Hamlet, with its novel combination of two- and three-dimensional
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décor aiming at a Symbolist synthesis. The Wagnerian Adolphe Appia had
challenged the dominant naturalistic theatre with a proposed integration of set,
actors and plot within a mood created largely by music; and Georg Fuchs’s
Theatre of the Future encouraged not only Tairov but also Meyerhold to treat the
stage as an entirely artificial self-sufficient ‘world’, with increased emphasis on non-
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verbal, plastic and phatic means of communication. Tairov’s first steps towards
the realisation of this new ideal in 1914—15 involved collaboration with the painters
Pavel Kuznetsov and Nataliya Goncharova, members, like Exter, of the explosive
Russian avant-garde movement that began to distance itself from Symbolism with
the ‘Blue Rose’ and ‘Wreath’ exhibitions of 1907. A contemporary critic prophetically
dubbed them ‘heralds of the new Primitivism to which our modern painting has
come’; and indeed Primitivism was to be the Leitmotif of this factional movement
until, from about 1913, Futurism introduced a utopian social and quasi-scientific
rationale for its highly eclectic activity. 52
Exter, almost alone among these artists, spent considerable time in Italy and
France between 1908 and 1914, mixing in Futurist and Cubist circles, while
exhibiting in all the main Russian avant-garde shows. By the time the outbreak of
war confined her to Russia, her painting reflected these diverse influences in a highly
chromatic abstract Cubo-Futurism. The war period brought the new outlet of
theatre and, back in her native Kiev, led her to establish what was probably the first
art school to teach the formal grammar of modern art and deliberately lead its
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students towards abstract work. Significantly, many of the young Ukrainian
artists who studied with her in Kiev and Odessa from 1916 to 1919 went on to
become leading stage designers, including Bogomazov, Meller, Petritsky,
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Tchelitchew and her collaborator on Aelita, Rabinovich. While their idioms
would vary greatly, Exter had reached a degree of mastery at the very point where
the Futurist quest was about to face its final challenge. The Kamerny Salomé opened
less than a month before the October Revolution and its importance is attested by
Andrei Nakov:

This production provided a stylistic example which would nourish
‘Constructivist’ production until almost the end of the 1920s. In Salomé,
skilful lighting made the geometric forms vibrate, giving an impression of
floating, while moving on the vertical. The actors’ costumes were the result of
an ordering of geometric forms and their acting was constrained by the limits
of these forms. Like the scenery for Victory Over the Sun in 1913 (the real
prototype of this formal sequence), the décor for Salomé produced a strange
monumentalisation of dramatic tonality. The new pathos of the ‘machine age’
was born. 55