Page 27 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

8 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
make a sentimental melodrama which ended with a wedding–Jenny the Maid
[Gornichnaya Dzhenni]–but it is significant that he set the film abroad. In a
Russian setting such a turn of events would have seemed forced.
There is nothing strange in the fact that Russian film factories, which were
working to two markets–the domestic and the international–produced two
different versions of the same subject. The idea undoubtedly originated with Pathé,
whose Moscow office had had the international market in mind from the very
beginning. When Sofya Goslavskaya, who played the leading role in André
Maître’s film, The Bride of Fire [Nevesta ognya, 1911?], wanted to watch her own
film, it transpired that the film in distribution in Russia had employed other actors:

Whereas in our first version the story was treated like a lubok with a happy
ending–scenes of a peasant wedding with traditional ceremonies–which was
made specially ‘for export’, in the second version, made by Kai Hansen, it
was a drama which, if I’m not mistaken, ended with the deaths of the main
characters. 3

Another actress, Sofiya Giatsintova, has recalled how the firm of Thiemann &
Reinhardt solved the export problem. The film By Her Mother’s Hand [Rukoyu
materi, 1913] had two endings, both made by Yakov Protazanov and both using
the same actors and sets:

One ending, the happy ending, was ‘for export’: Lidochka recovers. The
other, more dramatic, was ‘for Russia’: Lidochka in her coffin. 4

On the day after the February Revolution twenty boxes of films were hurriedly
exported and so a batch of films with Russian rather than export ‘tails’ arrived in
America. It is scarcely surprising that American reviewers were inclined to
5
attribute their special quality to ‘terrific Slavic emotions’. However, one has to
forewarn audiences of our time: like any generalisation about national psychology,
the notion of the gloomy Russian soul was naive. ‘Russian endings’ came into
cinema from nineteenth-century Russian theatrical melodrama, which always
ended badly. Unlike the Western theatrical melodrama, the Russian version
derives from classical tragedy adapted to the level of mass consciousness. Hence
the only conclusion that we can draw about ‘Russian endings’ in cinema is one that
relates to Russian mass culture as a whole: the peculiarity of Russian cinema and
of Russian mass culture is its constant attempt to emulate the forms of high art. As
we shall see, this attempt is conditioned by several other features of the ‘Russian
style’ in cinema.