Page 148 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 129
pathetic fish stall), then shows an elderly Jew wandering about an even more
desolate wilderness. Soon, however, sod-brick settlements rise and, as irrigation
ditches criss-cross the once-barren plain, the now-productivised Jews are equally
transformed: a new-born baby is named ‘Forget-Your-Sorrows’. Tractor drivers
and ‘Young Pioneers’ are given particular pride of place and the film-makers
emphasise that, among other livestock, these new Jewish ‘peasants’ are raising pigs.
More substantially, VUFKU inherited a pair of projects developed by Isaak
Babel: the first, a script based on Babel’s tales of the Odessa underworld and its
Jewish ‘king’ Benya Krik, the other taken from Sholom Aleichem’s novel
Wandering Stars. An instant literary celebrity after the publication of Red Cavalry
in 1924, Babel was much in demand as a scenarist. In December 1924, the
Eisenstein group prepared a script based on Babel’s stories of the Soviet-Polish
war. The project was shelved that April but, during June and July 1925, while
Eisenstein was shooting the film eventually released as The Battleship Potemkin
[Bronenosets Potemkin, 1926], he and Babel worked on an early version of Benya
Krik. The same summer, after Babel had completed the titles for Jewish Luck, he
was commissioned by Goskino to adapt Wandering Stars as a follow-up
production for the Moscow GOSET. Such was Babel’s reputation that both the
‘film novella’ Benya Krik and the ‘film script’ Wandering Stars [Bluzhdayushchie
zvezdy] were published as pamphlets in 1926, well before either reached the
screen.
Benya Krik, filmed during the summer of 1926 by the veteran theatre director
13
Vladimir Vilner, arrived first, despite the necessity for several rewrites. The first
two-thirds of Babel’s script were taken from a pair of published stories, ‘The King’
(set on the eve of the First World War) and ‘How It Was Done in Odessa’ (with the
action explicitly located during the ineffectual rule of the Provisional Government).
The last section, set shortly after the October Revolution, was original–albeit
based on the actual demise of Benya’s real-life prototype, Mishka Vinitsky–and
suggests that Bolsheviks were able to maintain order where tsarist and Menshevik
regimes failed. Here, Benya’s gang has become a swaggeringly
corrupt ‘revolutionary’ regiment. Ordered to disarm them under any pretext, the
local military commissar assigns the gang to ‘emergency revictualling patrol’.
Benya is lulled by this plum assignment, which consists mainly of requisitioning
melons from a ship in Odessa harbour, falls into a trap and is shot down by Red
soldiers.
Benya Krik was Vilner’s first film, his inexperience evident from the haphazard
mise-en-scène and overly stagey performances. (Although a fair amount of
authentic-seeming Odessa street life shows through the creaky plot contrivances,
Vilner used Ukrainian actors without even the most cursory attention to type.) The
film hews closely to Babel’s script, yet only two scenes suggest its vitality, however
coarsely. The wedding of Benya’s sister–much of it shot against a black backdrop
–has a frantic assemblage of ravenous pug-uglies and revelling floozies serenaded
by a single, hyperactive klezmer musician. In a related travesty of a traditional