Page 54 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 35
of gestures and asserts that ‘only such a strict observation of the law of succession,
stripped of the confusion that inevitably accompanies simultaneity, is a real organic
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development of movement’ constructed according to natural laws, the laws of
mechanics: ‘Just as the law of gravity is indisputable, so too are the laws of body
movement and, consequently, also the laws of expressiveness; but, once laws are
indisputable, their non-observance produces a lie. Study, master, observe the law,
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if you want your art to be true.’ It was on this basis that the original ethic of the
new anthropology of the actor was constructed. The laws of movement were
equated to the laws of nature (mechanics) and contrasted to the voluntarism of
traditional artistic creation, in the same way as truth was contrasted to lie and
nature to art. The following declaration by Volkonsky had a major significance for
the aesthetics of the 1920s:
Man is a machine; yes, this machine is set in motion by feeling and ‘oiled’ by
feeling but, since it is a machine, it obeys the general laws of mechanics. But
you must remember this: if you make something mechanical without feeling
(or sense), you will produce a caricature of life; whereas, if you produce a
feeling with false mechanics, nothing will happen–you will achieve the
absence of life. 14

This combination, which seems strange to us now, of mechanics and ‘feeling’
differentiates Volkonsky’s ideas sharply from later Constructivism. We see before
us the fruit of a meandering movement of thought that derived from the old
physiognomy of pantomime and ballet but already anticipated the next step
towards the machine ethic of the 1920s.

II
The new anthropology of the actor spread through Russia with unusual speed. A
large number of centres for Dalcrozian rhythmic gymnastics [eurhythmics] were
set up and Volkonsky even started to publish a specialised periodical Rhythmic
Gymnastics Courses [Listki kursov ritmicheskoi gimnastiki] (1913—14). In St
Petersburg D.M.Musina-Ozarovskaya set up a ‘School for Stage Expressiveness’
and then the ‘One Art’ society, which set itself the aim of promoting a future
synthesis of the arts on the basis of Delsarte’s system. Representatives of the
Petersburg artistic elite joined the society. Yuri A, Ozarovsky published a
Delsartian journal called Voice and Speech [Golos i rech’] But the principal
propagandist was Volkonsky, who gave hundreds of lectures about his system.
The spread of the new anthropology was facilitated by the flowering of the Russian
ballet, the tours of Isadora Duncan, etc. The ballet seemed for some time to be the
principal expression of the new anthropological model of the actor and, more
broadly, of man.
It was through theatre that the ideas of Volkonsky and his associates penetrated
film circles. The first traces of their influence can be found around 1916. By 1918—
19 among film-makers there was already an entire group of followers of Delsarte
and Dalcroze. By coincidence there were among them a number of film-makers