Page 176 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

A FICKLE MAN, OR PORTRAIT OF BORIS BARNET AS A SOVIET DIRECTOR 157
dynamics of scenes and gags, arranged symmetrically. But within this scrupulous
equilibrium, everything is constantly displaced. Once the point of a scene or a shot
is established, it is immediately side-stepped, as if being shown through the wrong
end of a telescope, or at least not developed. The rules of American (and indeed of
Soviet pre-war) cinema–maximum impact and maximum economy, following the
shortest line from one point in the story to the next–were not Barnet’s, even if he
knew how to make use of them.
The main characters are coming along the road: a kid slips under a fence. What
is going to happen: a meeting, a gag? In this case, nothing. A dissolve and we move
on to something else. The film is prodigal in its offering of inventions and ideas–
like the accident-prone female doctor. Every gesture, however minimal in itself,
carries an equal weight without also bearing an ideological price ticket. The vivid
secondary characters are by no means the least interesting. From the parachute
jumping and the letter recorded on a flexible disc, we see how minor incidents can
give rise to emotions that are simultaneously grave and gay: ageing, friendly rivalry,
patient effort; the city represented by a restaurant in which the race-course
grandstands are reflected, while the country is represented by wooden fences in the
style of John Ford.
The Old Jockey was one of those films which, according to the quaint Soviet
expression, ‘did not reach the screen’: it had to wait until 1959 for release.
Alexander Mitta (Shine, My Star, Shine [Gori, gori, moya zvezda, 1970]), who
later worked with Erdman and Volpin, recalls:

During the war, Barnet had three films banned one after another [the second
must have been The Novgoroders [Novgorodtsy, 1942]. He used to say of
13
himself that he had become a ‘director-colonel’. Erdmanand Volpin told me
about him. He was definitely not a dissident and knew absolutely nothing
about politics. Outside the cinema, he might almost have been thought
somewhat silly. He was absolutely and completely an artist. He thought that
the people who had been put up there to rule us were great figures, simply
because they were there; he listened to their speeches and really wanted to
put these themes into films. But he did not know how to make the
stereotypes that the bureaucrats gave him: he only knew how to reflect life.
He did not attack the stereotypes, but life seeped into them, washed them
away, and that made the bureaucrats absolutely mad because it could not be
corrected. Life had taken the place of the stereotypes.

After the war, in 1947, the ‘director-colonel’ played a Nazi officer for the second time
in The Exploits of a Scout, his most popular film in the USSR and, of those we
know, the least personal. The artificial style of its décor recalls the most
Expressionist aspects of American wartime cinema, as does the nightmare
atmosphere of the ruins where the hero stages the fake execution of a traitor, then
later really executes him. The film, however, is not set in some distant country, but
in Kiev, where it was actually shot and which is seen only in two short sequences