Page 58 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 39
Hence montage was also understood as the rhythmological key, given that the film
was, in the spirit of Dalcroze and Volkonsky, proclaimed to be a ‘recording’ of
rhythm.
In practice Gardin’s promised experiments with the model actor took the form of
a series of exercises with ‘velvet screens’. With the aid of these screens he formed
a window whose shape recalled the frame of a film shot. Into the window he put
the face of the actor who had to work out precise mimic reflex reactions to stimuli.
In this process most attention was devoted to the movement of the eyes, which
were recorded in complex schemata. As a result Gardin elaborated ‘1,245
compositions which could be used to arrange the head of the person being filmed
29
in the frame’. These compositions were partly copied from Delsarte’s schemata.
These experiments with frames transferred the whole emphasis on to close-up and
the miming of the actor. The rhythmic montage aspect was here almost absent,
remaining principally in the field of theory. The methodology of the velvet screens
was later vehemently criticised by Kuleshov. But it is obvious that this very
methodology is the direct consequence of the path taken by Gardin, a return to the
sources of his film theory, the close-ups of 1916 with the most scrupulous recording
of the ‘reactive phases’. But to a certain extent it is also Volkonsky’s ‘montage’; at
any rate it is very reminiscent of the experiments that the latter conducted in his
lectures. Thus, one account of his lectures reported as early as 1913 (the year
when Gardin made his first film):

S.M.Volkonsky showed nine faces on the screen with corresponding
expressions, from the normal-normal (serene calm) to the eccentric-eccentric
(ecstasy). These nine typical expressions incorporated nine typical glances….
Combined with the nine expressions that depended on the brows and eyelids,
these nine glances produced 81 typical expressions for the eyes. 30

The similarity to Gardin’s experiments with the screens is striking: 1,245
compositions are of course the product of a gigantic detailed study of Volkonsky’s
81 eye expressions. Let us note in passing that Volkonsky’s faces were
demonstrated on the screen and that Gardin’s velvet screens corresponded to this
pseudocinema.
After Gardin the film school was headed for a short time by F.Shipulinsky and his
place was then taken by Valentin Turkin. His positions in the field of theory had a
more radical character. Turkin’s theoretical evolution is more difficult to
reconstruct than Gardin’s but it is similar in part. In 1918 Turkin was one of the
leading figures on the Moscow newspaper Kino-gazeta. There he published an
article which was fundamental for that time, ‘Simulators and Models’, in which he
used Gardin’s term in extremely declarative form:

The first truth that I should like to proclaim is that on the screen the actor is
equal to the model actor and valuable because he can, when he has thrown off
the rags of stage theatricality, condescend, descend to the level of that