Page 36 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 17
if you were being slandered in front of everyone and you have no way of
proving your innocence. 29

The ‘Russian style’ did not, of course, meet with universal approval. Its champions
were grouped round the journal Proektor, while its opponents featured in the pages
of that more ‘cultured’ journal Teatral’naya gazeta. Bauer’s Silent Witnesses
[Nemye svideteli, 1914], the paper remarked ironically, moved at about three miles
30
an hour, while his Boris and Gleb [Boris i Gleb, 1915] was spoilt by the rhythm it
had almost found:
The whole film is imbued with an irritating and unnecessary slowness.
Unnecessary because the psychological climax emerges on screen in
opposition to the drama, not through delays and pauses but, on the contrary,
through accelerations…. The long drawn-out ‘psychological’ scenes allow the
audience to start guessing and they have no difficulty in working out the
subsequent course of events and the final denouement. 31

Despite the paradoxical postulates of the ‘Russian style’, all this contributed to the
fact that in the five years from 1914 to 1919, culminating in 1916, the films that
were released in Russia were substantially different from the mainstream
international production of the period. It was the ballet critic André Levinson who
rather tellingly characterised this aesthetic system, writing in the Russian émigré
paper Poslednie novosti in Paris in 1925 (by which time the system had already
ceased to exist). Levinson recalled that pre-Revolutionary cinema

created a style that was completely divorced from European and American
experiments but enthusiastically supported by our own audiences. The
scripts were full of static poetic moods, of melancholy and of the exultation
or eroticism of a gypsy romance. There was no external action whatsoever.
There was just enough movement to link the long drawn-out pauses, which
were weighed down with languorous day-dreaming. The dramaturgy of
Chekhov, which had had its day on stage, triumphed on the screen. The
action of these intimate emotions was not played out against the expanse of
the steppes or the steep slopes of the Caucasus, even though the steppes
were as worthy as the pampas and the Caucasus as majestic as the Rocky
Mountains! Russian characters dreamed ‘by the hearth’. At that time the
sentimental heroes of the American Vitagraph film were doing the same,
abandoned by their brides, making out figures from the past through a light
haze of smoke. Vera Kholodnaya and Polonsky came back from the ball in a
car, facing the audience in close-up, each immersed in their own private pain;
they did not look at one another and they never moved. It was in this
immobility that their fate was decided. This was the drama. Nobody chased
after their car. It did not gather speed. Nothing beyond its windows existed.
It did not roll down a slope because the denouement did not need chance as