Page 62 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 43

Figure 4 ‘Every emotion…is accompanied by a specific sign in the body and face,’ Vladimir
Inkizhinov (left), Leonid Obolensky and Alexandra Khokhlova in a 1923 rooftop ‘étude’ by
the Kuleshov Workshop.

text, ‘The Banner of Cinema’. But the differences in principle between his
theoretical position and Gardin’s soon became apparent. They are recorded in the
article ‘What Must Be Done in Film Schools’. The starting-point for Kuleshov’s
argument here was Delsarte’s system:

nature has made man so that every emotion he experiences is accompanied
by a specific sign in his body and face…. Consequently the teacher must show
the pupil the law of nature that corresponds to the particular task…. For
theatre actors these laws have been discovered by Delsarte. It would not be
a bad idea to re-examine them and extract from them anything that might
prove useful to the film-maker. 40

Kuleshov did not incline towards Delsartian semiotics, unlike Gardin, who had
stuck with the search for a mimic alphabet of signs, but towards Volkonsky’s ‘laws
of combination’ in which the sense derived from oppositions, contrasts,
parallelisms, etc. It was in this context that he subjected the system of velvet