Page 31 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

12 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
We must not forget that, while Drankov was an experienced photographer, Boris
Godunov was his first excursion into shooting film for cinema. Previously he had
merely shot Russian titles for V.I.Vasilieva, who owned several Petersburg
cinemas. For this purpose Vasilieva had imported a second-hand Pathé camera for
him from Paris.
When he took up ‘moving photography’, Drankov had to confront some
unfamiliar problems. The first was that of changing light.

When at last everyone had stopped arguing and agreed to ‘rush’ the scenes
in front of the camera, it turned out that we had to move the trees. Since nine
o’clock, when the trees had been erected round the fountain, the sun had
moved and the shrubs were beginning to produce shadows that we didn’t
want. This meant that we had to change the whole mise-en-scène and that
meant changing the set as well. Once again we began to argue: what should
we change? The mise-en-scène or the set? Then the workmen came and
began ‘re-making the scenery’. 18

Drankov resolved this problem, just as Thomas Alva Edison had had to fifteen
years earlier. But, whereas Edison had built a ‘Black Maria’–a studio on a
turntable base–Drankov’s sets had to be moved each time the sun changed its
position:

We had to move the sets all the time to follow the movement of the sun. The
camera, which Drankov was in charge of, moved with the sets. 19

The second problem involved framing. In his photographic studio Drankov kept a
reflex camera that he had brought from London in 1905. The owner of a camera
like that naturally had no problem with framing. But the Pathé camera was
another matter. It needed a certain amount of experience to capture within the
frame, without a viewfinder, the precise scene that you wanted. The height and width
of the sets did not allow Drankov to get far enough away. Orlov recalls:

Drankov was disturbed more than anything else by the absence of a ceiling
in the set for the Granite Palace. As he could not work out how to film a long
shot of the Granite Palace from a distance, nothing came of it. Generally
speaking, the whole picture had to be filmed only in medium shot. Even the
boyars’ procession could not be shot full-length. 20

A year later, when Drankov was filming Stenka Razin, he remembered this lesson
from Boris Godunov and declined to use sets at all. Stenka Razin was filmed in
long and very long shot but even this was not accomplished without some errors in
framing. In the ‘forest revelry’ scene the main characters, Stenka and the princess,
are, according to tradition, placed to the left of the mass and slightly in front, but
Drankov ‘cut them off’ almost completely on the left side of the frame. At the right