Page 47 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

28 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
We staged Karamazov against a single backdrop. This is too dogmatic. We
must stage some scenes against a backdrop, others naturalistically with a
proscenium arch, a third lot with almost straightforward live scenes, a fourth
group like cinema, and a fifth like a ballet. 58

As we can see, the principle of the stage ‘cinematograph’ as it evolved came close
to the principle of variety as realised a year later on the Russian stage by the Mozaika
Theatre of Miniatures. Yet neither Stanislavsky nor Nemirovich-Danchenko would
have dreamed of combining theatre and cinema in the way that it was done in
Submarine Shipwreck. I repeat: they had in mind not a stage mutant, but an implicit
internal structural reorientation of stage action.
At the same time there were those in the Russian theatre world who, having
grasped this idea, tried to take it to its logical conclusion. The critic B.Bentovin,
who had written such an enthusiastic review of Submarine Shipwreck at the
Mozaika, lost no time in suggesting to the Moscow Art Theatre that the same
device should be transferred to a ‘serious’ production:

I can imagine how successful this combination would be in an unwieldy play
in which the performer has frequently and at length to relate what has
happened to him in the interval between two acts. Cinema could show all this
in a series of vivid pictures and, instead of a dry and boring story in the play,
there would be the bonus, as it were, of more movement…. Of course, the
most interesting part of the dialogue should be communicated by live actors,
and the narrative part on the cinema screen. How beneficial this would be, for
instance, to the staging of Crime and Punishment–cinema could reproduce
Raskolnikov’s wanderings before the murder–or to The Brothers
Karamazov–cinema could depict the episodes that Mr Zvantsev reports so
tediously from the rostrum. 59

(In the Moscow Art Theatre production an actor called Zvantsev played the
reader.)
The project did not remain a paper one. Pavel Orlenev, a star of the Russian
dramatic stage, was attracted to the idea of hybrid performances. In December
1913 the newspaper Teatral’naya gazeta reported with astonishment that Orlenev
and his troupe, on a guest visit to the ‘Art Theatre of Miniatures’, were performing

the second and third act of Woe and Misfortune on stage, while the
remaining three acts are shown on a screen. Mr Orlenev makes the same
compromise in his performance of Crime and Punishment: only the scenes
between Sonya Marmeladova and her father are performed on the theatre
stage, while the rest are shown to the audience on a screen. 60

Orlenev used the same method to play five of his most famous roles, in addition to
those already mentioned for 1913, including Ibsen’s Ghosts and Brand and Alexei