Page 51 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

32 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
system created by a professional musician. Dalcroze created a system of rhythmic
gymnastics which was extremely popular in the 1910s and on which he based an
original aesthetic theory. Delsarte’s ideas began to penetrate Russia at the very
beginning of the twentieth century. Yuri A. Ozarovsky lectured on his teaching as
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early as 1903 but it achieved real popularity around 1910—13 when the former
director of the Imperial Theatres, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, became its
propagandist. He published a series of articles on Delsarte and Dalcroze in the
periodical Apollon and then published, under that periodical’s imprint, several
books giving a detailed exposition of the new acting system. Since the Volkonsky-
Delsarte-Dalcroze system had a fundamental significance for film theory at the
beginning of the 1920s, and in particular for Kuleshov, we must familiarise
ourselves briefly with at least those elements that were later used by film-makers.
The Volkonsky system can conventionally be divided into two parts: the
theoretical system of Dalcroze and the technological system of Delsarte,
synthesised into a single whole. In 1912 Volkonsky published his translation of the
book by Dalcroze’s disciple, Jean d’Udine, that had gone into his system
organically and represented a kind of philosophical reworking of the teaching of
the Geneva rhythmologist (d’Udine relied mainly on Le Dantec, Bergson et al.).
D’Udine was an ardent propagandist of the idea of synaesthesia and he compared
man to a dynamo (in one of the first manifestations of the machine ethic in
aesthetics) through which the rhythmic synaesthetic inductive impulses pass.
Human emotion is expressed in external movement and, what is more, that
movement can ‘inductively’ provoke in man the emotion that gave rise to the
movement. He maintained that ‘for every emotion, of whatever kind, there is a
corresponding body movement of some sort: it is through that movement that the
complex synaesthetic transfer that accompanies any work of art is accomplished’. 2
To ensure its artistic effectivity every movement has to be rhythmicised and music
is the synaesthetic equivalent of body, movement: ‘the ability to express feelings
through musical combinations consists in nothing other than finding sound
movements whose subtle rhythm corresponds to the body movement of someone
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experiencing enjoyment or suffering.’ It is from this that d’Udine derives the idea
of the mimetic character of music, ‘imitating’ the internal rhythms that accompany
the phenomena that exist in life. Rhythmicised body movements must, according
to d’Udine, be ‘segmentary’–that is, they must be fixed in certain poses: ‘The
manifestation of real artistic quality…requires that the rhythms, whether felt or
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imagined, be crystallised in an immutable form’, he declared, making an analogy
between human expressive movement and the musical notation that records a
melody. D’Udine promoted music to the position of the metalanguage of art: ‘This
would allow us’, he wrote, ‘to apply my plastic definition of melody, which is that all
melody is a series of consecutive propositions, to the whole field of aesthetics and
in the end that would allow us to say in more general terms: every work of art is a
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series of consecutive propositions.’ D’Udine concluded his work with this
characteristic definition of art: art is ‘the transmission of an emotion by means of
stylised natural rhythm’. 6