Page 45 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

26 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
Take a set like a ‘waterfall’ or a ‘river’, which are quite common on the
stage. However skilfully the canvas is painted, however ‘realistically’ you
make it ‘move’, this kind of spectacle pales, in terms of its vividness and the
power of the impression that it makes, in comparison with any
cinematographic image of the same river and waterfall. The Maly Theatre was
the first of the major Petersburg theatres to appreciate this advantage of
cinema and in their production of V.P.Burenin’s play The King of Liberty
[Korol’ svobody], they employed ‘living photography’ to depict the waterfall.
The experiment was a complete success. On stage there was what looked
like a real waterfall, sparkling in a cloud of spray and foam in the beams of a
theatrical moon. Equally successful was the use of cinema at the People’s
House for a production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In this the
underwater world–a superb sequence of the actual marine depths and their
various inhabitants–came to life before the audience’s eyes in the window of
the ‘Nautilus’. 53

In September 1911 the new Mozaika [Mosaic] Theatre opened in St Petersburg.
This theatre, founded on the initiative of the well-known actor G.G.Ge, was
conceived as a new type of theatre. The aim of the Mozaika was to compete with
cinema. The productions were organised on the principle of the variety show,
which was unfamiliar to the Russian audience. The newspaper Artist i stsena
wrote as early as June 1911:

Every production will include miniature operas, playlets, ballet scenes …and,
to crown it all, a few pictures from cinema itself. 54

In the Mozaika Theatre the film part of the production was interwoven with the
stage part even more closely than in the Petersburg Maly Theatre. Here cinema
did not merely perform the role of ‘moving background’. In any event that was the
case with the production (which caused a sensation) of Submarine Shipwreck, in
which the screen alternated with the stage according to whether the setting for the
action was an interior or an exterior. The critic B.Bentovin described the show in
this way:

To begin with, cinema shows you this submarine riding the waves in the
midst of the other ships in the squadron; then catastrophe strikes: the boat
sinks helplessly to the bottom. The next scene, inside the submarine hold, is
played by live actors: you can hear them groaning, swearing and praying for
salvation. When the sailors are suffocating to death, cinema once more
shows the surface of the sea, where the squadron’s ships are making all
sorts of attempts to save the dying. 55

My account of Drankov’s Boris Godunov has already referred to the role of the
‘cinematograph’ in the reformist plans of the Moscow Art Theatre, although of