Page 126 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: YAKOV PROTAZANOV AND SOVIET CINEMA 107
elsewhere at this time, the urban middle classes were the chief filmgoers.)
Protazanov directed his share of these lavish costume dramas and screen
adaptations, the best-known being his mammoth version of War and Peace [Voina
i mir, 1915, with Gardin] and The Queen of Spades [Pikovaya dama, 1916]. 17
But the film that placed Protazanov at the forefront of Russian film directors did
not bring a serious work of literature down to the lowly screen; it was instead an
adaptation of one of the most popular works of Russian boulevard fiction,
Anastasiya Verbitskaya’s sensational novel of illicit miscegenistic love, The Keys
to Happiness, made in 1913. Protazanov’s instinct for the entertaining was an
unerring as his instinct for the cinematic, and The Keys to Happiness was a
legendary box-office success. It was sold out for days in advance and attracted an
audience that had never before attended the movies. At ten reels, in two parts, this
film was four to five times longer than the typical movie of the day and
demonstrated to the Russian studio heads that lengthy movies could sustain
audience attention. In direct response to the phenomenon of The Keys to
Happiness, Thiemann & Reinhardt established its famous ‘Golden Series’ of full-
18
length feature films, mainly directed by Protazanov. Although Protazanov
continued making movies based on the classics, his biggest hits were usually
derived from popular fiction. It is not surprising that these enjoyed great success
with audiences, which as mentioned above were drawn largely from the middle
classes–especially from the petty bourgeoisie, which also formed the market for
this fiction. 19
The outbreak of the First World War scarcely affected the pace of his
production: he completed nineteen pictures in 1914; twelve in 1915; and fifteen in
1916. As late as 1917, he managed eight, including the notorious Satan
Triumphant, a film about demonism apparently so lurid that Soviet histories of the
20
Russian film gloss over it. The war did, however, affect his studio, as the
‘German’ firm of Thiemann & Reinhardt was attacked by mobs. In 1915, after
making War and Peace for the ‘Golden Series’, Protazanov left Thiemann to join
the Yermoliev studio; like Protazanov, Iosif Yermoliev was the scion of a Moscow
merchant family but the princely 20,000-rouble salary that Yermoliev promised
21
probably influenced Protazanov more than did class solidarity. The fact that he
was drafted at the end of September 1916 and remained in uniform at least until
the end of February 1917 was of so little import that neither Protazanov nor his
friend Aleinikov bother to mention it when discussing the director’s work during
this period. 22
After the February Revolution, the Yermoliev studio adjusted to the new
Revolutionary mentality and began producing works on Revolutionary themes.
Protazanov adapted as well and in 1917 made two films on Revolution in quick
succession: Andrei Kozhukhov and We Don’t Need Blood [Ne nado krovi] (about
Sofiya Perovskaya). More to his taste, certainly, was his adaptation of a story
which he had wanted to film for some time, but which the pre-Revolutionary
censors had suppressed as a movie script–Tolstoy’s Father Sergius [Otets Sergii,
1918]. This picture, starring Ivan Mosjoukine as the tsarist officer who becomes a