Page 171 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

152 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
Soviet book devoted to him: a fllm magazine published extracts from the script of
The House on Trubnaya and invited its readers to find any points of similarity with
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the film. Obviously he could cope with the challenge; instinct went hand in hand
with a very sure ‘touch’. Barnet is one of those rare film-makers whose narrative
forms were not bound by those of the stage (act, scene, etc.).
His films convey more than most the intensity of happiness, the physical
pleasure of meeting and contact, the inevitable tragedy of relationships. If a
wounded man smiles and says quietly, ‘I’m coming,’ at the end of Outskirts, this is
not accompanied by an arching of the back, as in Dovzhenko, but by a wish to
avoid the pain of death. ‘What goings-on,’ he murmurs mildly before the final
moment. Outskirts interlaces, with the intricacy of a miniaturist and simultaneously
an epic feeling, the tale of a Russian gutter-snipe in love with a German prisoner
and the course of events which leads to revolution, as seen in a provincial town.
These strands are interwoven within each sequence and even each shot. The Girl
with a Hatbox, which is contemporary with Katayev’s play The Squaring of the
Circle and Ilf and Petrov and Mayakovsky’s The Bed-Bug, shows, like no other film
of the time, the city and the countryside, handicrafts (here the making of hats),
overcrowded trains, people asleep on stations, the dizzying impact of city life and of
Nepmen–and all these in an exhilarating visual geometry which simul taneously
evokes Griffith, Keaton and Vertov (as does in more controlled fashion The House
on Trubnaya): the servant of a bourgeois hairdresser assumes an alarming angle
on top of a stepladder in order to dust, both parties in a marriage of convenience
conduct warfare in an empty room with a pile of books, a hatbox, a pair of boots
and a white mouse. 4
‘Nothing stood in his way.’ This can be understood literally as well as figuratively
when one has learnt to recognise the sturdy silhouette of Barnet, from Mr West
and Miss Mend to his magnificent little scene in Storm Over Asia and as the German
general in The Exploits of a Scout [Podvig razvedchika, 1947] whom he refuses to
make odious. The films themselves are athletic, not only in their direction (Otsep,
apparently, was too lazy to keep up with the pace of shooting on Miss Mend and
Kuzmina tells evocatively of the long-awaited storm that broke south of Baku
during By the Bluest of Seas) but in the very body of the narrative. People run,
hurl themselves against the elements or the enemy, against gravity itself (in The
Wrestler and the Clown). The loss of this vigour is in part the subject of Barnet’s last
film.
As for the famous ‘decline’ of which Kuzmina and many others have spoken, an
exemplary retrospective organised by the British Film Institute in 1980 finally
dispelled this myth, born of historians’ indifference to that part of cinema which
does not sell itself, promote itself with claims to artistic distinction. For one of these
historians (who saw the mediocre One September Night [Noch’ v sentyabre, 1939]
as ‘a didactic film about sabotage, but in which the images are carefully composed’)
the Barnet of the later films ‘is only a shadow of his former self’. This is the verdict
which prevails among many historians–disciples no doubt of Carlos Anglada,
invented by Borges and Bioy Casares, who was working on a ‘scientific history of