Page 221 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

202 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
In March 1918 he went further:

Montage is to cinema what the composition of colours is to painting or a
harmonic sequence of sounds is to music. 38

In a series of film experiments he demonstrated what is now known as the
‘Kuleshov effect’. He took a still shot of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine staring
expressionless straight ahead of him and cut that shot into three different
sequences: the context in which the shot was placed turned Mosjoukine’s
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expressionlessness into expression–into sadness, laughter, anger, hunger. It is
from these experiments that the whole notion of the fundamental importance of
montage develops. Vsevolod Pudovkin and other members of Kuleshov’s
Workshop later remarked: ‘We make films but Kuleshov made cinema.’ 40
For a newer and younger generation of artists, inspired by the ideals of the
October Revolution and dedicated to the construction of a new society and a new
way of life, cinema was seen as the art form with which to shape the new man.
41
One critic remarked: ‘Theatre is a game: cinema is life’, another defined it as ‘the
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new philosophy’, while a third argued:
There can be no doubt that cinema, this new art form, is the rightful heir for
our time, for its melodiousness, its rhythm, refinement and its machine
culture, and it therefore represents the central art form of the current
epoch. 43

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Even Lenin stated, ‘Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important.’ It
therefore mattered uniquely if Soviet cinema was not playing, or was thought not
to be playing, a central role in the transformation of Soviet society and this
‘backwardness’ became a particularly acute embarrassment at the time of the
‘cultural revolution’ that was to accompany the first Five Year Plan. But, as we
have seen, this was not a new problem, rather a more acute manifestation of an old
problem.
Shumyatsky argued that the inaccessibility or unintelligibility ascribed to some of
the major triumphs of Soviet silent film (Eisenstein’s The Strike or October, the
Kozintsev and Trauberg New Babylon or almost any of Vertov’s documentaries)
resulted from an emphasis on the primacy of montage at the expense of other
elements such as the script or the acting. This emphasis on montage paralleled a
similar emphasis on the director at the expense of the scriptwriter or the actor.
People behaved ‘as if the director was empowered to do with a film whatever he
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and he alone wanted’. The underestimation of the role of the scriptwriter had, in
Shumyatsky’s view, made it very difficult to attract good writers to the screen and
this had resulted in recurring ‘script crises’, acute shortages of material that was
suitable for filming, and Soviet cinema had suffered from an almost continuous
series of such ‘crises’ since its inception. Although there were some notable
exceptions (Mayakovsky and Shklovsky are obvious examples) the majority of