Page 184 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN 165
out, ‘He’s sitting here in the audience.’ ‘Where?…Stand up!’ So he stood
up: ‘I won’t do it again. That’s the last time.’ People laughed so much.
Another horse went to the rostrum. His head was tied up as though
he had toothache and he complained that his rider had left him out in the
cold wind. The rider had gone to see his girlfriend and had left his horse
outside in the cold wind all night while he made love. ‘No,’ the
commander shouted, ‘I didn’t.’ So it was a very jolly, very impassioned
and a very effective method of satire. It worked like a good whip, lashing
whatever harm was done to horses, making it unthinkable. They were
all afraid that they’d be a target so they had to kiss their horses’ heads–
or else they’d be exposed on stage. That’s how it all began, that’s an
example.
Often there were no examples to follow, but that was one. We had
all sorts of interesting scenes, like a lubok. The Russian lubok was a kind
of painting on a panel, like a cartoon in a newspaper. They pasted up the
newspapers, made a panel, and painted a man’s face on it. That was a
lubok. It had a special text and every two or three days we had a very
funny special show that served as an experimental laboratory for me,
where I learned to master comedy. That was more or less the
inspiration that determined my work in cinema. It had enormous
consequences too for the rest of the division and ultimately the whole
army.
The experiment was written up in the newspapers. I suddenly rose
through the ranks, moving higher and higher, and in the end, two years
later, I was summoned to Moscow and that’s where I came into contact
with the cinema organisation Gosvoyenkino, the military studio for
military films. I had such a wealth of experience in comedy, in what
made people laugh, that it was easy for me to start with comedy. So I
started working on comedy films. In 1931 I released five experimental
comedies that were just as trenchant as that whip of a play. They were
comedies that provoked anger, laughter and anger…. They really got up
your nose! There was protest and everything else in them. They weren’t
comedies just to make people laugh. The times were so very difficult: our
first Five Year Plan had only just begun.
There are not many of us left who lived through that first Five Year
Plan. But it marked a break, a turning-point, a kind of cataclysm when
everything was re-examined, everything was rejected, while here and
there new shoots appeared unexpectedly. They were still tender, still
unsure of themselves, but they did appear. Yet in cinemas you’d still
hear the pianist accompanying pictures with titles like Sadness, Be
Silent, Fireside Blues, I Love You and suchlike.
As a warrior, a soldier in a victorious army and a political activist who
was used to dealing with the education of Red Army soldiers, I entered
cinema in order to attack this kind of film, to defeat it and to arm cinema