Page 39 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

20 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
cinema in Western Europe. Tolstoy was interested and he returned to the subject
the following day:

‘You know,’ said Lev Nikolayevich when he met me in the morning, ‘I’ve
been thinking about cinema the whole time. Even during the night I woke up
and thought about it. I have decided to write something for cinema. There
would of course have to be someone to read it out, like there was in
Amsterdam, someone to communicate the text. Without a text it would be
impossible.’ 39

By ‘text’ he meant the spoken commentary that, as we know, accompanied the
showing of films in many cinemas right up until 1913. However, alongside the
habit of film shows with a commentary from a ‘lecturer’ (which is what barkers
were called in Russia; their performances were surrounded with the appropriate
‘academic’ paraphernalia: a small lectern or a table with a lamp in f front of the
screen), there existed in Russian cinema a peculiar genre, that of the ‘film
recitation’ [kinodeklamatsiya] or ‘speaking picture’ [kinogovoryashchaya
40
kartinag]. This genre emerged in 1909 and enjoyed unfailing success until 1917.
Strictly speaking, the idea of making the characters in a film ‘speak’ through a
real-life actor seems to have originated in European cinema. We should recall that,
according to the Star-Film catalogue, Méliès created a comic dialogue between the
King of England (speaking French but with an accent) and the President of France
for his film Le Tunnel sous la Manche, ou le cauchemar franco-anglais [Tunneling
under the English Channel, or the Anglo-French Nightmare, France, 1907].
Lumière’s earlier domestic experiment is well known. But, of course, none of these
experiments reached Russia. There the ‘film recitation’ genre was conceived
independently and the initiative came, not from the entrepreneurs, but from the
actors. In the Central Film Museum Archive in Moscow there are two manuscript
memoirs by ‘film reciters’: one by Yakov Zhdanov, a provincial actor, and the
other by K.Novitskaya, who acted for, and was the first wife of, Pyotr Chardynin.
Zhdanov relates in detail how he got the idea for ‘talking pictures’:

At that time I already knew what cinema was because I had seen several
ordinary performances in Moscow at the Gryozy [Day-dreams] Cinema on
Strastnoi Boulevard. The film show made such a stunning impression on me
that, after the sequence with the train, I got up off the bench and went up to
the screen so that I could look behind the canvas…. It was only after seeing
these first films that I was seized with the obsession that you could add
sound to a picture, so that the heroes would speak and crockery and
furniture would be smashed realistically. I began to propagate this idea
among my colleagues on stage and when at last the ‘cinematograph pictures’
appeared in our town, Ivanovo, we sat continually–even to the detriment of
our work–through the performances, watching the pictures and studying the
possibilities of making them ‘sound’. We wanted to add sound to the pictures