Page 192 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN 173
without long motivating links, whereas in comedy nowadays people stop
laughing. Now the director and the scriptwriter spend such a long time
preparing each gag that the audience cools down in between them and
has to be warmed up again like a samovar.
It was not so much from Lloyd’s films as from Chaplin’s that I
understood the principle of progression from one laugh to another. It’s
the basic principle in Chaplin’s work, beginning, perhaps, with his very
first feeble and immature works. A pie is thrown into someone’s face
and they laugh. Chaplin doesn’t let the audience cool down: he disturbs
their equanimity. The audience is wound up because it knows that now it
will be kicked, the door will open, the wife will burst in, and so on.
Laughter, laughter, laughter. A cascade of laughter, of comic turns,
clowning that’s close to the circus. This is the great art of Chaplin. I very
much regret that he abandoned this kind of comedy and went in for
more-or-less serious things like Monsieur Verdoux [USA, 1947], The
Countess from Hong Kong [Great Britain, 1966] and A King in New
York [Great Britain, 1957].
That’s not Chaplin. It was Charlie who gave pleasure to millions of
people in every language, on every continent: it was Charlie the king,
Charlie the clown, Charlie the unhappy and downtrodden little man who
had such a heart, who aroused such enormous sympathy, who enriched
people of the most varied nationality and skin colour. It was from
Chaplin, from his early works, rather than from Harold Lloyd that I
learned how much more it was possible to do: today a pie in the face,
tomorrow a cake in the eye–and [it was from Chaplin that] I realised
how limited this all was.
I did not know that cinema would develop to such an extent that it
would be possible to get away from all this. But I did understand the
mechanics of laughter, its technique, so to say, and in my subsequent
work I tried to do things so that the laughter was already there and
didn’t result from a door bursting open or someone being kicked.
Because behind this laughter there is often a very important idea. That’s
why we need laughter in film, that’s why we must strive for it.
Eisenstein wrote a very good review of my film Happiness in which he
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compared me to Chaplin. It is worth thinking about because, from an
analytical point of view, Eisenstein understood Happiness better than I
do.
Question: And what did you do after Happiness?
Answer: After the success of Happiness–and it was very
successful: it was well received by everyone from unsophisticated
audiences to the intelligentsia–what was I to do? I was interested in
developing the theme of the first three reels of Happiness: they show
Khmyr’s life–his misery, his dreams, his unhappy fate, the lack of any
prospects in life. I felt limited by length and structure in my depiction of