Page 206 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 187
Parapraxes

1
Macheret’s Men and Jobs [1932] deals with the Five Year Plan policy of bringing
in foreign ‘experts’ to supervise major technological projects and train Soviet
technologists. In this film, the American construction expert, Mr Klin, is first seen
arriving by train with his portable gramophone and jazz records. His relationship–
at first antagonistic, eventually friendly–with an archetypal Soviet shock-worker,
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played by Nikolai Okhlopkov, forms the central body of the film. The theme is
the need to learn from foreign experts and the potential for converting them. What
is remarkable, however, is the device on which the final sequence turns: Klin is
writing home to his wife, explaining his change of heart on the Bolsheviks and that
he intends to stay longer, when a record playing on his gramophone suddenly
sticks in a groove and the word ‘darling’ begins to repeat. This is gradually
transformed on the soundtrack into the Russian word ‘udarnik’ [shock-worker] as
Klin goes to the window and looks out proudly over the construction site. His
moment of commitment is signalled by a ‘symptomatic’ interruption in routine and
‘slippage’ between languages.

2
Alexander Fainzimmer’s Lieutenant Kizhe [Poruchik Kizhe, 1934] is an
unexpectedly stylised comedy, with Prokofiev’s independently famous music
closely integrated into its structure. The story and script were by the Formalist
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critic Yuri Tynyanov, and, apart from its many intriguing visual devices–such as
the use of obvious model soldiers and optically duplicated images–the mainspring
of the plot is a slip between the written and the spoken word. Disturbed sound-
image relations are present from the beginning as two furtive lovers make contact
by exchanging cat and dog sounds, until the silence of the tsar’s sleep is shattered
by an alarm call shouted from guard to guard in a rising crescendo. The central
slip is of course the invention of Kizhe, who owes his birth to a clerk’s error in
drawing up an army promotion list. An ink blot is inadvertently converted into the
name Kizhe–which imaginary officer is promptly blamed for the original
disturbance and starts his career by being sent into exile in Siberia. Later, as he
rises through the ranks and is married, his bride punningly explains to the wedding
guests that Kizhe has no ‘presence’, to account for his invisibility during the
ceremony. Lieutenant Kizhe is in fact a remarkable working model of Formalist
literary theory, couched in the form of a fable on the generative power of language.
These and, doubtless, other examples point to an awareness of the potential for
renewing perception, as Formalist theory would have it, and exploring the new
terrain of talking cinema by introducing speech-specific devices. It would be
interesting in this respect to discover how the early sound film that featured a