Page 173 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

154 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
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committed suicide [in 1965] like Mayakovsky’. In other words, the good Soviet is
a Soviet martyr. But the actual consequence of silence is frustration. When he did
at last return to production, the resulting One September Night was steeped in the
atmosphere of the time, reflecting the same sabotage psychosis as other films of
the period, such as Macheret’s Engineer Kochin’s Mistake [Oshibka inzhenera
Kochina, 1939] and Gerasimov’s Komsomolsk [1938].
One should not, however, think of Barnet’s engagement as purely formal. His
last silent film, The Ice Breaks [Ledolom; alternative title: Anka, 1931], portrays an
intensely political period. Deeply impressed by The Earth, he committed himself to
a strange reworking of Dovzhenko’s film, based on the same situation of a village
terrorised by kulaks, in which each frame, action and cut is carefully thought out to
express fully the tension of class conflict. The Ice Breaks is indeed the only one of
his films in which form assumes an autonomy to the extent of becoming a
discourse in its own right. In short, a truly Formalist film, which might seem quite
natural for Barnet, but in fact was alien to him.
One September Night, on the other hand, is not only a badly made film, but in
truth hardly seems made at all. Although Alexei Stakhanov’s name appears in the
credits as an ‘adviser’, the emphasis is on bomb-planters and kidnappers, a lurid
counterpoint to the heroic tone called for by the staging of historical characters
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(Ordzhonikidze), mass meetings and stentorian music. A girl detained in a clinic
and moaning on a bed is unusually framed by the diagonal line of an attic roof,
itself balanced by the diagonal pipe, with the light coming from the door: a stronger
echo of the world of Caligari and Mabuse than of anything from Gorky. In this film
supposedly dedicated to the rhythm of work, the characters seem to laze about.
One scene begins with some older men taking a discreet interest in the food
baskets brought by the youngsters and ends with them stuffing themselves,
without even waiting for the hero in whose honour they have gathered. All of which
counts for little in such a hopeless film, even if one wishes to interpret it ironically.
Barnet’s next film, by contrast, could not have been further from topical
concerns. In the loosely connected episodes of The Old Jockey [Staryi naezdnik,
1940, released 1959], an ageing jockey is defeated, his daughter leaves the village
to meet him, they return together, train for a last win, success results and the
illusory promise of other victories. It is hard to imagine a less ‘American’ film.
Indeed, it is surely a reaction against Alexandrov’s great comedy success, Volga-
Volga [1938], an Americanised and stereotyped film which the scriptwriters for
The Old Jockey, Erdman and Volpin, had written a year earlier. 9
It was an important collaboration for Barnet, who paid tribute to the two writers,
stating publicly that it was the best screenplay he had ever filmed and even
admitting that he did not feel he had risen to the level of his script. Such a remark
would have its consequences, when the author of The Suicide was exiled from
Moscow. Barnet had already worked with Erdman on Trubnaya, which brought
together among its six scriptwriters (even though these never met except in twos)
the ‘Formalist’ Shklovsky and two signatories of the 1919 Imaginist Manifesto who
were also close to Erdman, Shershenevich and Marienhof. He also employed