Page 61 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

42 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
rhythmic schema. Action on screen is composed of the alternation of
fragments and the movement of a man, a horse, a car, an aeroplane in
individual fragments. Each movement of the fragments (between and within
the fragments) must be constructed rhythmically (or metro-rhythmically, if
we accept the new phraseology). The rhythmic construction of cinema action
is montage. 37

Everything in this statement is very characteristic of the type of thinking associated
with the film school group. Everything begins with the actor, then passes to rhythm
and concludes with the assertion that the rhythmic construction of a film is
montage.
Turkin’s position is of course close to Kuleshov’s position in 1918. But we
should not assume that this is the result of a straightforward borrowing. In 1918
Kuleshov was saying the same thing as Gardin. In 1922 Turkin is repeating both
of them. What we have here is not so much the product of the individual creativity
of each one of them as the fundamental principle of what we have already called
‘the “film school” film theory’.

III
Gardin had met Kuleshov in Moscow in 1918. ‘In the space of ten minutes he
38
managed to utter the word “montage” twenty times’, Gardin recalled. Kuleshov’s
enthusiasm for montage probably predetermined his assignment to the newsreel
section and to his later work on re-editing films. In the process of re-editing
Kuleshov discovered his famous ‘effect’ with Mosjoukine’s face. In the summer of
1919 he set out with Eduard Tisse, later Eisenstein’s cameraman, for the Eastern
Front where he filmed a newsreel. He returned from the front in October 1919.
Gardin’s film school had begun work in September 1919. The work of the film
school interested Kuleshov a great deal and he was always visiting it ‘as a guest’. In
1920 he got what he had no doubt wanted very badly: he was appointed to the staff
of the school as a teacher. This happened approximately at the end of March or
the beginning of April 1920 and Kuleshov immediately joined in as one of the most
active members of the collective. For the whole of April he worked with Gardin and
his wife Olga Preobrazhenskaya on a ‘sketch of film rehearsals on an agitational
39
theme in three reels and 86 scenes with an apotheosis’. The sketch was based on
Gardin’s velvet screens and was shown on 1 May. At that moment Kuleshov was a
long way from opposition to Gardin and was actively assimilating the new
anthropology of the actor. At that time he was apparently mastering Volkonsky’s
teaching, with which he had come into contact at the school, and studying Delsarte
and Dalcroze,
Kuleshov arrived at the school as a ‘specialist in montage’ with a whole series of
relatively vague notions about it which gradually took shape into a system with an
active orientation towards the new anthropology. The year 1920 was marked by a
strengthening of his theoretical work. It was then that he wrote his programmatic