Page 46 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 27
course the theatre never lowered itself to a mechanical realisation of the idea of
stage ‘cinema’, of experiments with stage-screen hybrids. For Stanislavsky the
word ‘cinematograph’, when applied to theatre, signified a structural principle:
fragmented dramaturgical construction, instantaneous changes of scene, portable
sets. Hence the Art Theatre’s love of works that were ill-suited to, or entirely
unintended for, the stage: Boris Godunov, or Chekhov’s short stories, which were
staged in 1904. Later the ‘cinematograph’ method was used for a stage version of
Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in 1910.
The novel was broken down into short fragments. These fragments of action
were linked to one another by the author’s text, narrated by a special character,
‘the reader’. The reader reminded the audience of the ‘lecturer’ in cinemas, while
the actual scenic structure, alternating sections of action with sections of text,
recalled the narrative regime of silent cinema: title, shot, title, shot. The critic
Emmanuil Beskin, a fierce opponent of the Moscow Art Theatre, published a
review in the Moscow newspaper Rannee utro [Early Morning] in which he used
this comparison to compromise the theatre:

The greatest page, not just in Russian, but in world literature has been
crumpled. Rendered colourless. Bloodless. Mindless.
Transformed into cinema. Into a film show.
Scene after scene. Only instead of titles on the screen: a reader to one
side.
— Alyosha leaves the monastery…
And Alyosha enters from the right slips.
— Alyosha tells what has happened to him.
And Alyosha remains silent, while the reader speaks. The reader finishes,
and Alyosha walks on….
What is more, Dostoyevsky has been stylised. He is played without sets
on the flat grey surface of the backdrop….
A series of five-minute cinematograph pictures. 56

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who staged The Brothers Karamazov, wrote to
Stanislavsky about this production in October 1910:

Something enormous has happened: there has been a colossal bloodless
revolution. During the first performances there were a few who felt, but did
not yet realise, that Karamazov marked the end of some vast process that
had been maturing for ten years. What was it? It was this. Whereas with
Chekhov theatre shifted the limits of convention, with Karamazov those
limits are entirely destroyed. 57

Developing the underlying concept of the production, he went further: