Page 183 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

164 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
to the rank of colonel, commanding regiments. Many of them had
previously passed through our hands…and now I’m getting round to why
I started in cinema.
I had my own methods of educating these people. I thought that for
a teacher words were very costly. So I declared war immediately on
verbosity, repetition and everything that was wasteful. I felt that using
words to educate someone like this was very expensive. I felt that there
must be a better way to turn a simple illiterate man into a great soldier.
I had my own theatre. I used grotesques, clowning, burlesque. I did
all this off my own bat, with no theatre training or experience. But I put
this little theatre to work straight away to educate these young people. It
was quite unique. We used comedy, circus, lubok, farce. The theatre
dealt with all the most important questions. I didn’t consult the
commanders and I had some big battles with them because they had no
faith in my methods. But I did all sorts of things that later helped me find
my way in cinema. There was one key example, one key production.
In a very remote Cossack village a long way from the nearest
railway we put up a notice announcing, ‘Today the General Assembly of
Horses opens in the club.’ We were really treating the theme of horses in
the army for the first time and yet, in the cavalry, the horse is half your
strength. You start with your horse and the rider merely sits on it. A
General Assembly of Horses. The horses had the floor for the very first
time.
For this production I made the horses’ heads and cloaks out of
papier mâché, out of old newspapers–a cloak and a head was enough to
make a horse. It wasn’t just a comedy, though, and it wasn’t just a play
because, before I put it on, I gathered all sorts of evidence about the
ways in which these young people maltreated their horses. They weren’t
familiar with horses, so we called the horses together. The curtain
opened.
On the stage was the Presidium: they were all horses. There was a
rostrum. On the rostrum, instead of a carafe of water, there was a
bucket full of water and the horses were drinking from it. The speaker
was a horse. What was he speaking about? I’d collected some funny
satirical examples of the maltreatment of horses. Poor grooming, wrong
feeding and watering, bad treatment–in other words, everything that
went on in the squadrons and commands, complete with the names of
the men who’d done the horses harm. All this was brought out in the
play and the whole regiment had a good laugh.
In the audience there were some ‘plants’, as we say–in other words,
trained actors who would say, ‘What?’ So then the horse-speaker would
begin: There’s that blacksmith Ivanov who killed a horse, wounded the
horse while he was shoeing it. He got angry and hit it with a rasp, and he
wasn’t even put in detention.’ Then our actor in the audience shouted