Page 35 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

16 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
Polonsky his refined grace. But with all of them, given their unusual
economy of gesture, their entire acting process is subjugated to a rhythm
that rises and falls particularly slowly…. It is true that this kind of portrayal is
conventional, but convention is the sign of any true art. 26
The best directors were, to a greater or lesser extent, followers of the Russian
style: Chardynin, Bauer, Viskovsky, Protazanov. One of the ideologists of the style,
Vladimir Gardin, called the school the ‘brakingschool’ and he had a clear claim to
be its leader. Subsequently Gardin recalled:
Protazanov developed and defined this school more by intuition than
calculation. My peremptory shouts while we were filming The Keys to
Happiness [Klyuchi schast’ya, 1913]–‘Pause!’ ‘The eyes!’–did not go
unnoticed. He took up this method and developed it in his own direction. On
more than one occasion while he was shooting, Yakov Alexandrovich would
lift his conductor’s baton and utter the magic word ‘Pause!’, sometimes
holding his hand up for a long time and not letting it drop. 27

Vladimir Gaidarov has given more details of Protazanov’s method in his
reminiscences about Jenny the Maid:

There we were, face to face, and…pause, pause, pause…Jenny lowers her
eyes…pause…she gets up quickly, turns and goes to leave…. Georges calls to
her…. She lingers in the doorway without turning round…pause, pause…and
then she turns and says, ‘I must get your medicine. It’s time for you to take
it!’ Pause…she turns and leaves…Georges is left alone. He looks after her…
again pause, pause, pause…. Then we see his elbow resting on the arm of the
chair, his head bowed towards his hand, and Georges thinking to himself,
‘What a strange girl she is!’ Pause, pause…and…iris. 28

Lenny Borger, who has studied the problem of shooting speed in silent cinema,
told me, after watching the films that Bauer and Protazanov made in 1916, that in
his view Russian cameramen shot at a higher speed than was generally accepted,
creating on screen a permanent slow-motion effect. It is possible that this was a
means of insuring the film against deformation by projectionists, especially those in
the provinces who were in the habit of ‘driving the picture’ faster than it had been
shot. In 1915 Ivan Mosjoukine [Mozzhukhin], worried about the fate of the slow
‘Russian style’ in the hands of these projectionists, published an open letter in
Teatral’naya gazeta calling on audiences who noticed discrepancies in speeds to
‘make their protest known by banging their sticks and stamping their feet, etc.’:

The poor innocent actors jump and jerk about like cardboard clowns and the
audience, which is unfamiliar with the secrets of the projection booth,
stigmatises them for their lack of talent and experience. I cannot convey the
feeling you experience when you watch your own scene transformed at the
whim of a mere boy from normal movements into a wild dance. You feel as