Page 38 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 19
for a long time. There is a curious case relating to the film based on a script by
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das fremde Mädchen [The Strange Girl, 1913], which
was shown in Russia under the title A Mysterious Woman [Nevedomaya
zhenshchina]. The film was made as a mime and it was first distributed in the
original version without titles. But this proved too disturbing, as one reviewer noted:

This film–half fantasy, half real–did not have a single title throughout its
entire length (about 1,000 metres), while the action developed so intelligibly,
so freely that the fear arose almost instinctively that suddenly a title would
appear and the effect would be ruined…. But later it was featured in one of
the smaller cinemas with a large number of common-place titles: obviously
this was essential to the success of the film with the cinema-going public. 36

In 1914 Alexander Voznesensky (who, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was a
follower of the aesthetics of ‘silence’ enunciated in the famous article by Maurice
Maeterlinck) decided to have another go and wrote Tears [Slezy], the first Russian
script without words. The film was made later that year, but at the preliminary
screening it was rejected by the author himself. Later Voznesensky explained:

The shots with all their plot diversions were tiring to the eyes. Some kind of
intervals were necessary. Then it became clear that in silent cinema the title
does not play a purely explanatory role: rather it plays the role of a visual
entr’acte. I suggested making a few literary inserts which would have no
direct relation to the action but would provide a lyrical accompaniment to it
and supplement it psychologically. This turned out to be what was needed:
there were no explanations, but the visual entr’actes were preserved. 37

A similar view prevailed among many who wrote about cinema in the 1910s: while
titles were not really necessary, if you did not have them the loss would be that
much more tangible. Lecturing on cinema in 1918, Vsevolod Meyerhold linked this
effect to a longing for the word, to the logocentrism of our perception:

Titles should be inserted not merely for clarification…but so that the word,
which in art is so enchanting, should begin to resound. The title, which allows
one to rest from the picture, should lend enchantment to the sense of the
phrase. 38

FILM RECITATION
The logocentrism of Russian culture in the first decade of the twentieth century
was not only reflected in the particular attention paid to film titles. The following
episode is characteristic. In 1910 Russian papers reported the meeting in Yasnaya
Polyana between two celebrities, Leonid Andreyev and Lev Tolstoy. Andreyev,
who had just come back from a trip abroad, told Tolstoy about the progress of