Page 28 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 9
THE FIRST RUSSIAN FILM

The desire in Russian cinema to compete with ‘high art’ was present from the very
beginning. The story of how the first Russian feature film, Alexander Drankov’s
Boris Godunov, was made is indicative of this.
Traditionally Stenka Razin, shot by Drankov in 1908, has been accepted as the
first Russian film. Drankov himself called it the ‘first’, conscious of the advertising
value of such a description. Nevertheless Boris Godunov, a screen version of the
tragedy by Pushkin, had already been made and shown in 1907 but Drankov
preferred to forget all about it.
The history of Boris Godunov can be reconstructed from the texts of two
unpublished memoirs, one by Moisei Aleinikov, the well-known film journalist and
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entrepreneur, the other by the stage actor Nikolai Orlov. The events that led to
the making of this film may be depicted as a chain of accidents and
misunderstandings. What is more, they are entirely characteristic of the
psychology of Russian cinema.
According to Aleinikov, it all began with a lottery ticket. In 1907 Aleinikov had
as yet no connection with cinema but was a student at the Imperial Technical
School. One day he won a lottery prize of a ticket for the Moscow Art Theatre
production of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.
Traditionally Boris Godunov is regarded as difficult to stage. Pushkin preferred
a minute series of fragmented excerpts to the gradual intensification of the conflict
that is usual in tragedy. This particular quality, which had frightened other theatres
off, was what attracted the Moscow Art Theatre. As early as 1899 Stanislavsky
was nurturing the idea of a new stage form that he jokingly called the
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‘cinematograph’ [sinematograf]. In the vocabulary of the Moscow Art Theatre the
word ‘cinematograph’ developed as the designation for a show that presented the
audience with a sequence of fragmented excerpts instead of a single action. In a
letter to Anton Chekhov in October 1899 Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
explained Stanislavsky’s concept:

One could string together a large number of short pieces written by you, by
Turgenev, Shchedrin and Grigorovich, or Pushkin’s The Feast in Plague-
Time. The scenes would change at the speed they change in cinema. 8

Like The Feast in Plague-Time, Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov was entirely
suited to this kind of stage experiment.
Let us return to Moisei Aleinikov’s memoirs. At the Moscow Art Theatre
performance of Boris Godunov he had a conversation that stuck in his memory:

Scene followed scene…. There were twenty-two scenes in the play….
Eventually the curtain fell…. In the silence I heard the woman next to me
remark: ‘It’s just like the cinema!’