Page 32 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 13
side, however, a man in a bowler hat–probably Vasili Goncharov, the film’s
scriptwriter–jumps out of the right-hand frame for a moment and, gesticulating,
shouts something to the actors.
The story of Boris Godunov came to an inglorious end. The lead actor,
E.A.Alashevsky, who played Boris, categorically refused to be filmed. Boris
Godunov was released without Boris Godunov. At one time the film was shown
under the title Scenes from Boyar Life [Stseny iz boyarskoi zhizni] and later, from
1909 onwards, as The False Dmitri [Dmitrii samoz vanets]. Later still the scene by
the fountain was shown as a film recitation (see below, pp. 19—24). The film has
not survived to the present day.
The example of the first Russian film is a good illustration of the dynamics of
Russian culture. Russian culture was dynamic in the ‘vertical’ sense. When he
staged Boris Godunov at the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky tried to get away
from the canons of high tragedy. The twenty-two scenes in the production were
supposed to produce the impression of the ‘cinematograph’. Russian cinema, in
contrast, imitated elevated models. Even though he did not know how to ‘frame a
shot’, Drankov was already encroaching on Boris Godunov. When in the spring of
1908 at the international cinematographic exhibition in Hamburg the
representative of a French firm heard about this, he exclaimed in astonishment,
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‘Fancy the Russians starting with that!’ In constructing the edifice of their own
cinema, the Russians, as usual, had begun with the roof.

THE SPEED OF THE ACTION
The most paradoxical of the many strange features of Russian cinema in the
1910s is the immobility of its figures. The static Russian mise-en-scène, which to
the uninitiated might appear to be a sign of hopeless direction, in actual fact bore
all the characteristics of a conscious aesthetic programme. At the centre of this
programme lay the polemical formula ‘film story, not film drama’ which was the
motto of Russian film style during the First World War.
There is preserved in Fyodor Otsep’s archive the outline of a book that he was
planning to write in 1913—14. He intended to have a chapter in the book on The
Three Schools of Cinematography: 1. Movements: the American School; 2. Forms:
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the European School; 3. The Psychological: the Russian School’. The
‘psychologism’ of the Russian style was defined as a denial of the external signs of
‘cinema specificity’ [kinematografichnost’]: the dynamics of action and the dramatic
quality of events. Later, in 1916, the champions of Russian style began to call
American and French cinema ‘film drama’, a genre that in their view was
superficial. ‘Film drama’ was contrasted with ‘film story’, the preferred genre of
Russian cinema:

The film story breaks decisively with all the established views on the essence
of the cinematographic picture: it repudiates movement. 23