Page 49 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

30 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
trying stubbornly to get what I want. After Odessa we toured with the same
Brand for about three months. We made good money. 63

The newspaper Teatr nevertheless remained dissatisfied:

Orlenev is right to say that the Russian actor is heavy, bad at mime, and not
vivid enough in his plastic movements. Even Orlenev is now playing Brand
in a strange fashion: half the scenes are played as usual, but the other half
appear only on the screen as a cinematographic performance. But the
second half, printed on soulless film, is as pale as the first half, the spoken part,
is vivid. 64

On this basis it came to this conclusion, so common in the pages of the Russian
theatre press:

The word is theatre’s soul. Take away the word and you will destroy its
soul. 65

Were Orlenev’s experiments unique? No: in the 1910s we come across references
to Vladimir Maximov’s stage-screen hybrids, for instance, in Lolo-Munshtein’s
Dance Among the Swords, to Baliev’s sketches in Die Fledermaus and two or
three cases of a similar kind. Leonid Trauberg relates that at the beginning of the
1920s in the FEKS show The Wedding there was someone on stage imitating
Chaplin while they showed extracts from Chaplin’s films on the screen.
Nevertheless, unlike film recitations, experiments in the field of a symbiosis
between stage and screen remained experiments, a peripheral, although not a
secondary, offshoot of the history of Russian cinema.
A peripheral offshoot of the mainstream of world cinema history might be the
best way to describe all the other features of Russian cinema that I have dealt with
in this essay. In fact, on a map of the world Russian endings, the immobility of the
figures, the predilection of Russian cinema for titles and film recitations would all
appear as an anomaly. But, just as a magnetic anomaly leads the geologist to
deposits of ore, so the anomalies of Russian cinema allow us to evaluate deep-
rooted layers in the psychology of Russian culture.