Page 60 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 41
There was none the less a passage that appeared to be extremely close to
Gardin’s views at that time:

Each individual work of art has its own basic method to express the idea of
art. Very few film-makers (apart from the Americans) have realised that in
cinema this method of expressing an artistic idea is provided by the
rhythmical succession of individual still frames or short sequences conveying
movement–that is what is technically known as montage. 35

This first definition of montage in Kuleshov’s work is still pure Gardin and imbued
with the spirit of Dalcroze-Volkonsky. The basis of cinema is rhythm (as in Anna
Lee) but its realisation is in montage. Lee’s article apparently had a powerful effect
on Kuleshov and played a particular role in his theoretical evolution. In 1920 in his
theoretical ‘summing up’, ‘The Banner of Cinema’, he openly argued against ‘The
Screen and Rhythm’, beginning the exposition of his own theory with precisely the
question of dance. Without naming Anna Lee, he sets out, with some
misrepresentation, her position on the discrepancy between the camera and the
choreography of cinema and then argues:

Let us suppose that dance turned out on screen as well as when it was
performed during the shooting, what would we have achieved by this? We
should have achieved a situation in which the art of dance could be precisely
reproduced on a strip of film. But in that case cinema would have been no
more than living photography of dance and on screen we should have
achieved the reproduction of the art of ballet but there would be no cinema
art in it at all. 36

This polemic explains the origin of one of Kuleshov’s experiments, ‘the dance’. But
it is equally evident that it also follows the broad outlines of film theory at that time,
from the rhythmic anthropology of man to rhythmic montage as its cinematographic
quintessence. In this sense Kuleshov was not very original. Gardin was thinking
along the same lines and Turkin was evolving in the same direction. In 1918 he
was fighting for the model actor. And there is nothing more natural than that in
1922 he should be one of the principal propagandists of rhythmic montage.
We shall cite a lengthy quotation from Turkin which expresses his 1922 views:

The basic element in the form of cinema art is montage…. Experience
[perezhivanie], mood, the expression of movements of the soul are false
means for the actor to make an impression on the audience. The principal
means of making an impression in cinema is montage. Montage is the
combination of separate moments of action according to the principle of the
strongest impression. Action unfolds in space and lasts in time. Art consists
in the construction of space and the composition of movement (action) in time.
The composition of movement (action) in time is its distribution in a definite