Page 63 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

44 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
frames to a critique, but with one reservation: ‘Basically, of course, this idea is fine
but the significance of close-up for the film-maker lies solely in montage and it can
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have no independent value for him.’ He went on to set out his own methodology,
demonstrating the error of Gardin’s ways:

1. An incorrect exercise. In the first frame you show a man with a look of
hatred: in the second another man whose look answers the first–triumph,
etc.
2. A correct exercise, which has to be performed several times. The first
frame is as in the previous instance, for the second time you see the man’s
look of hatred in the frame, and in the following frame a hand holding a
letter. The content of the scene has changed. 42

It is not difficult to see that Kuleshov was proposing to reconstruct his own
experiment with Mosjoukine in the velvet frames. But the most interesting thing in
the article was the fact that the Mosjoukine experiment, which was not directly
mentioned, was inextricably linked to the body of the actor understood as the
universal model for montage: ‘If we mask the actor and force him to strike a sad
pose, the mask will express sadness: but if the actor strikes a joyful pose, it will
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look to us as if the mask is joyful too.’ Kuleshov was already re-thinking the
Delsarte-Volkonsky system as a source of pure montage: segments of the human
body are like signs opposed to one another and they make sense in precisely that
opposition. The description of the man in the mask is a direct transposition on to
the actor’s body of the ‘Kuleshov effect’, in which Mosjoukine’s mask-like face
changed its expression within various montage juxtapositions.
Thus, Kuleshov had fully mastered the main complex of ideas of the ‘film school
theory’ but was fighting to reorientate it in principle towards montage, towards the
cinematographisation of Delsarte on the basis of the principles of montage. The
conclusion to the article left no doubt whatsoever on this score:

all kinds of art have one essence and we must look for that essence in
rhythm. But rhythm in art is expressed and achieved in various ways: in
theatre through the actor’s gesture and voice, in cinema through montage.
Consequently the arts differ from one another in their specific methods of
mastering their material, their means of achieving rhythm…. In using the
arguments that have just been set out, we want to remind you once again of
the importance of Delsarte in the model actor’s pose. For now it is more
obvious that the working methods of other arts can also be applied to
cinema but that this must be done in a cinematographic way: that is, we take
the law of an idea that is common to all the arts and look for means that are
characteristic of cinema to exploit that idea. 44

An eloquent argument: for Kuleshov montage was a specifically cinematographic
analogue of the Delsartian pose. They had a common aim: rhythm.