Page 52 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 33
In his articles ‘Man as Material for Art. Music. Body. Dance’ and ‘Man and
Rhythm. The System and School of Jacque-Dalcroze’ (1912), Volkonsky refines
some of the theses of the Swiss theorist: ‘the first condition for creation in art is the
adoption of a different rhythm, whether in the voice, in the movements of the body
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or in the soul’s emotions.’ Furthermore, this different rhythm must be assimilated
by the actor to the point where it becomes an unconscious automatism:
‘Consciousness only plays its proper role when it is transformed into
unconsciousness, that is when everything that has been acquired through
consciousness is transformed into the mechanical impossibility of doing
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otherwise.’ Volkonsky’s actor is distinguished from Gordon Craig’s
‘supermarionette’ precisely because his rhythmicised movements are driven to
unconsciousness by inner, conscious impulses and not by simple mechanical
submission to the director’s will.
The Delsartian, ‘technological’ part of the system is essentially orientated
towards the search for a precise record of gesture, its segmentation like musical
notation, and the exposure of the psychological content of each gesture. Delsarte,
with his mania for the classification of the lexicography of mime, was even more
categorical than d’Udine in his insistence on the extreme segmentation of gestures:
‘Delsarte considered the independence of the limbs from one another to be the
essential condition for expressiveness: any interference by another limb weakens
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the impression.’ To achieve a geometrically precise record of gestures Delsarte
proposed to describe and produce them in three directions–width, height and
depth: ‘Each man is like the centre of his own universe. His “centrality” can
develop dynamically in three principal directions, which correspond to the three
“independent” directions in which the space of the universe is measured.’ 10
Furthermore man can, as it were, stretch out from the centre and enter an
eccentric state which expresses the manifestation of will, or gather himself in
towards the centre (a concentric state), expressing the dominant of thought, of
reason. Tranquillity, according to Delsarte, relates to the sphere of feeling.
Volkonsky, following his teacher, describes all human movements according to the
categories ‘normal’, ‘eccentric’ and ‘concentric’. In Expressive Man Volkonsky
provides a very detailed analysis of the sense of all sorts of ‘segmentary’ human
movements in three directions (he calls this section of his system ‘semiotics’), but
the main content of his work is the elaboration of the ‘laws of combination’ of
individual movements. He proclaims four principles of combination: 1. simultaneity;
2. succession; 3. opposition (total and partial); and 4. parallelism. Gesture acquires
significance only in relation to its starting-point, the centre, but a combination of
gestures acquires meaning only through the radial directions of movement (which
is why Delsarte’s three ‘axes’ are so important to him). Their opposition in radial
directions is the fundamental expressive principle of the organisation of a ‘phrase’
chain. Volkonsky provides a long list of examples of these oppositions, for
example, ‘between the head, radiating along a perpendicular either away from or
towards the body, and the hands, radiating from the elbows in the direction of
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breadth’, and so on. Volkonsky proposes that actors’ movements should be
constructed according to the principle of the succession of different combinations