Page 170 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

A FICKLE MAN, OR PORTRAIT OF BORIS BARNET AS A SOVIET DIRECTOR 151
differently, showing the lives of ordinary, unimportant people and their
aspirations. He dealt with people instead of statues.
I was in Odessa to make Gorizont [1933] with Kuleshov. This was when I
got to know Barnet and it was a drama for him: he fell in love with me. I had
heard a lot of bad rumours and did not want to work with him. So I signed a
contract which stipulated that for Outskirts I would devise my own role, but
he forced me to become his wife! He was the father of my daughter Natasha
and her son resembles him. These family likenesses often show up a
generation later, but in fact Barnet and I were physically very like each other
and people used to say that we could live together for a century. In fact we
spent four years together before I fled. Romm helped me do this.
In personal terms, he treated me badly and it was difficult to work with
him. He was a fickle man. And I believe that art is a jealous mistress: it does
not permit any infidelity, either with drink or women. So, little by little, Barnet
began to decline.
Why did I find it difficult to work with him? I had been trained by the
FEKS, by Kozintsev and Trauberg, who had given me scope to be creative.
They had shaped me as a thinking actress. This was how Gerasimov became
a director and, if I had been gifted in that way, which I wasn’t, I could have
become a director too.
Barnet did not like this at all. He gave strict direction: it was always ‘Do
this’, ‘Do that’…. We had furious arguments. But when he really wanted
something, nothing stood in his way.
He used to say: ‘Everyone must create at least one thing’ and this is how
he would create his thing–he never kept to the original scenario. He would
write out each shot painstakingly and stick these pieces of paper one after
another to make a long scroll. Then he would unroll this on the ground and
get down on his knees to search for the shot he was about to do. And in the
end he would shoot something quite different, improvising on the spot. This
is the reason for the ‘freedom’ in his films.

‘Proportion’ says Barnet, and Kuzmina speaks of ‘freedom’: these terms seem
inescapable when one tries to take stock of his films. From Miss Mend [1926]
onwards, they use a wide variety of rhythms to give an impression of nonchalance
(another term commonly used by critics in relation to Barnet, Ioseliani and their
like) in the execution of a very precise project. We are reminded of Renoir
speaking about his liking for chaos while directing a film; or of Shklovsky declaring
that a book gets written only when the subject allows it by virtue of the attraction
between its contents.
In Soviet cinema of the 1930s, the scenario became a sort of fetish, as if it
guaranteed the conformity of the product to literary form and to expressed
intentions (thus negating the very idea of cinema which had been developed in the
1920s). But for Barnet, the written word was never more than a springboard.
Indeed he had been reproached for this even before the 1930s, according to the