Page 37 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

18 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
its accomplice. However, in those years Tom Mix was already jumping from
a bridge on to the roof of an express train. The ‘adventure’ script had
triumphed. But the Russian product was preoccupied with feeling, with the
vibration of the atmosphere surrounding motionless figures. The relationship
between patches of black and white, the concepts of chiaroscuro were more
expressive than an occasional gesture by the characters…. Sometimes the
banality of the attitudes and ideas was striking, but only to the Russian eye.
To a Western audience this banality was something inscrutably and
irrationally exotic. It is for this reason, rather than technical backwardness,
that the style remained a localised phenomenon–and soon afterwards war
broke out. 32

THE INTERTITLE
From the antithesis ‘film drama’/‘film story’ the ideologues of the ‘Russian style’
derived yet another postulate: the regimen for the perception of film was rethought
from scratch. ‘The time has gone when we just looked at the screen: the time has
33
come to read it.’ Films like Tanya Skvortsova the Student [Kursistka Tanya
Skvortsova] and His Eyes (both 1916) openly imitated a book. In Tanya
Skvortsova the reels were called ‘chapters’ rather than ‘acts’. His Eyes began and
ended with a shot of a girl leafing through the novel by Fyodorov on which the film
was based; the pages of the novel also appeared during the course of the action
and in the opening scene, the ‘players’ introduction’, the characters were made to
look like illustrations brought to life. When Fyodor Sologub suggested a screen
version of Lady Liza [Baryshnya Liza] to Alexander Sanin in 1918 he absolutely
insisted that the source for the screen version shruld be the short story rather than
the play:

I do not so much want pictures from real life, but rather as if you were
turning the pages of an old, slightly naive, forgotten and touching book. What
we want somehow is to look as though we are showing the pages of a book:
the engravings, the vignettes, the head-pieces–all, of course, with great tact. 34

Matters were not confined to the ornamental side. A serious reform of narrative
syntax was announced. Equality between image and intertitle was proposed:

The film story consists of two equally important elements: mimic scenes
performed by artistes and literary excerpts; in other words, of picture proper
and intertitles…. In a screen reading the ‘pages’ of words alternate with the
‘pages’ of images: both have an equal right to life. 35

At first sight paradoxical, this did in fact correspond to the literary essence
[literaturnost’] of Russian cultural consciousness. The Russian audience in the
1910s was glad to read the titles and even became anxious when a title did not appear