Page 48 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA: SOME OBSERVATIONS 29
Tolstoi’s Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, all in 1914. It is easy to understand why Orlenev
preferred stage-screen performances to ‘pure’ cinema, from the memoirs of Vladimir
Gardin, who produced the film episodes for Orlenev’s Ghosts:

I could never make Pavel Nikolayevich understand that there was no point in
speaking the lines in front of the camera: they would have to be replaced by
titles. He was disarmingly stubborn.
‘If you deprive me of the words, I am no longer Orlenev,’ he shouted in a
touchingly childish manner. ‘My whole life, all my emotions, have been given
over to speaking…’
And he spoke…and spoke…. We enjoyed listening to him but we did not
film. For us he only became a subject for the camera when his brilliant
monologues had ceased. How unrepeatably fine he was then! We had to put
a cover over the camera so that he did not see when we were cranking it and
to signal imperceptibly to the cameraman when he should start and stop
shooting. 61

The relationship between Orlenev and cinema is symptomatic of Russian culture
as a whole. Orlenev resorted to all sorts of devices so as not to deprive film of
words and the sound of speech. He even filmed one scene in Crime and
Punishment for so-called ‘gramophone exhibition’: the shooting and sound
recording of films was undertaken by the Russian division of Edison Kinetophone.
Like the film recitation genre, Orlenev’s stage-screen hybrids were the fruit of the
deep-seated logocentrism of the Russian stage. Pantomime did not exist in Russia.
Russian audiences, and Russian directors, did not like films without titles. Had
cinema been invented in Russia, it would probably not have been ‘Lumière’s
cinematograph’ that would have triumphed, but ‘Edison’s Kinetophone’.
What was the reaction to Orlenev’s theatre and cinema shows? Judging by the
critics, it was fairly cool. Emmanuil Beskin (who had savaged The Brothers
Karamazov at the Moscow Art Theatre) quite neatly called the undertaking a
‘chimera’ and added:

I am sorry for Orlenev, who is sincere in his enthusiasm, but I think this
project is doomed to fail: you cannot paste living and dead material together;
you cannot join a psycho-organic quiver to the soulless frigidity of the screen.
Whatever the technical perfection of such a combination, there will never be
a living cohesion between the picture and the transition to the plasticity of
real movement. 62

Orlenev himself recalled his Odessa tour with Brand, incorporating film, in his
memoirs written at the end of the 1920s:

The combination of cinema and stage was not properly prepared and was a
failure. But I never trust my first steps in any undertaking and I always go on