Page 56 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 37
The foundations of future Soviet film theory were being laid around the film
school and in its midst. We might apparently even be justified in talking about a
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specific GTK-GIK film theory. Before we define the main body of ideas of this
collective theory, we must answer the question: why has the history of film thought
ignored this important theoretical complex? We can cite a whole range of reasons.
There is no written record of the ideas expressed by many of the participants in
the collective. Gardin, for example, never published his theoretical findings which
became known only in 1949 after their detailed exposition in his Memoirs. We
know practically nothing about Ilyin’s ideas. By 1922—3 there was in addition a
noticeable distance emerging between Kuleshov, who had adopted the positions of
LEF [Levyi front iskusstv (Left Front of the Arts)], and his former associates
(above all Gardin), who had maintained closer links with the pre-Revolutionary
artistic tradition. And we must not forget personal quarrels. At the beginning of the
1920s there was a break between Kuleshov and Ilyin, which in Kuleshov’s later
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memoirs was attributed to Ilyin’s scholastic Delsartism, although in this conflict
we must obviously not exclude personal motives. The break with Turkin followed
in 1925 after the publication of his book The Cinema Actor [Kino-akter], which
contained scarcely veiled attacks on Kuleshov. Thus, at the very moment when
Kuleshov’s theory was beginning to achieve widespread popularity–1925–the
collective of the film school was disintegrating and the traces of its former unity
were being lost in later polemics and personal conflicts.
Gardin was the central figure in the history of the film school in its first stage. He
had come to the notion of the need to create a new type of actor for cinema as
early as 1913 while working on the film The Keys to Happiness. He invited the
non-professional Alexander Volkov to play one of the leading roles and Volkov
astonished him with the veracity of his acting. Gardin was later to call Volkov ‘the
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first model actor [naturshchik] in cinema’. It was then that he came to the idea of
the prime importance for cinema of physiognomy and physiognomic
characterology and he divided actors into three groups: the emotional type, the
rational-technical type and the technical type. Simultaneously he began to use his
rudimentary knowledge of physiology and reflexology in his work with actors. By
1916, as is evident from his diary, Gardin’s film theory had been fully formed. His
orientation towards the model actor was already evident: indeed in 1916 Gardin
was already using the term widely (possibly for the first time in the history of
Russian film. theory). Gardin divided each action into four ‘physiological’ stages
and based the actor’s work on the transitions from one ‘segmentary phase’ to
another. On 18 May 1916 he wrote in his diary:

Today the shooting was difficult. In the schemata that I definitively adopted
for absolutely every draft close-up montage combination (and also for the
temporal calculations of the mechanics of spiritual life), I am beginning to
assemble the individual signs that characterise each element in the four-part
formula that I took as the basis for all schemata: