Page 44 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 25
other case, Russian cinema went one stage further in the realisation of the project.
This happened as a result of the efforts of the eminent theatre actor Pavel
Nikolayevich Orlenev.
For the invention of the stage-screen performance we are apparently indebted to
Méliès. According to Madeleine Malthête-Méliès it was in about 1905 that Méliès
first realised the project that he later reproduced at the request of the organisers of
the Méliès Gala anniversary retrospective in 1929:

Lost in the streets of Paris, he looked everywhere for the Salle Pleyel…. On a
wall he saw an enormous poster for the Gala bearing a large portrait of
himself…. He butted the poster with his head. Suddenly the lights went up in
the hall. A screen was raised, revealing in the middle of the stage a frame to
which the poster that we have just been was affixed. Suddenly the paper was
ripped open by Méliès, appearing in the flesh. 51

This stunt reached Russia in 1913: Max Linder repeated it in his own way when he
visited Moscow and Petersburg. Here is a fragment of a newspaper report of
Linder’s appearance in the Zon Theatre in Petersburg:

The painful moments after the third bell passed slowly and the curtain had
still not been raised. The audience hooted, stamped their feet and demanded
a start–all apparently to no purpose. Eventually the director informed the
audience that Max Linder was late and would probably not be coming.
Those who wanted could have their money back. But no one left their seat….
The lights went out unexpectedly and on the screen that had appeared we
watched Max Linder’s journey to the Zon Theatre in a racing car along an
endless road, then an accident (with no injuries whatsoever), a gallop on
horseback, a swim across a river and, finally…a flight in a hot-air balloon,
with Max Linder appearing over St Petersburg and above the roof of the
Zon Theatre, where he intended to descend from the balloon by guide-rope,
crashing through the ceiling straight on to the stage…. The screen suddenly
gave way to a stage and there was Max Linder descending on a guide-rope,
surrounded by plaster-work, wearing a grey sports coat and a battered and
torn version of his famous top hat. 52

In the 1920s Eisenstein realised something similar to Max Linder’s stunt when he
combined the performance of The Wise Man in the Proletkult Theatre with a
screen on which the audience watched things that were happening on the roof of
the same theatre. The Dadaistic ending to René Clair’s Entr’acte [France, 1924]
also resembled Méliès’s exploit.
But even in the 1910s theatre remembered from time to time the opportunities
that cinema had to offer. The first notion was to bring the stage sets alive. In 1911
P.Konradi wrote: