Page 30 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 11
announcement, Drankov searched desperately for a theatre with Boris
Godunov in its repertoire. That theatre turned out to be the Eden open-air
theatre, where I was working as an actor at that time. 14

As Orlov relates, the first conflict between Drankov and the actors arose over cuts.
The Moscow Art Theatre took pride in the fact that, true to the structural principle
of the ‘cinematograph’ discovered by Stanislavsky, it made practically no cuts in
Pushkin’s Godunov. As to the Eden open-air theatre production, the reviewers
reproached the director, I.E.Shuvalov, for the significant cuts that he had made in
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the text of the tragedy. None the less the conditions proposed by Drankov
seemed quite absurd to the Eden actors:
Most of the actors were opposed to this ridiculous undertaking: acting at nine
o’clock in the morning in the open rather than on stage, but still using the
sets. And when Drankov insisted on cutting Pushkin’s tragedy, suggesting
that we confine ourselves to four or five scenes, we reached an impasse. 16

That would have been only a fifth of the whole play.
The second conflict arose over the sets. The actor G.F.Martini, who was playing
the role of Grishka Otrepev,

went on strike when he realised that the scene by the fountain would be shot
without the sets but next to a real fountain that was situated between the
theatre and a café-chantant. However, it was not long before Marina
Mnishek (played by K.Loranskaya) and Drankov were able to convince him
that everything would turn out even better by the real fountain. So they
decided to start with this scene by the fountain. But it transpired that there
were no trees around the fountain, and it was the view of both Martini and
Loranskaya that the whole sense of the scene derived from precisely the
point that Marina Mnishek suddenly appears from out of the bushes. After
endless arguments Drankov decided to pay for some trees to be felled,
brought along and re-erected as artificial shrubbery…. Next day, early in the
morning, a lot of tall felled trees were brought along and laboriously erected
round the fountain. They produced quite a picturesque landscape, but it was
spoiled by the fact that, through the trees, you could see quite clearly and
distinctly various buildings that were remote in style from the sixteenth
century…. Martini, seeing the whole set that had been prepared for shooting,
absolutely refused to start filming. He even began to take off his costume and
his make-up. Once again it was Loranskaya who talked him round–she even
cried, but she talked him round. We started to rehearse many times but we
made no progress. The rehearsal degenerated into arguments and
altercations. 17