Page 64 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 45
By 1921 there was an urgent need to subject Kuleshov’s ideas to experimental
verification (cf. Gardin’s tendency to experiment with the model actor). In March
1921, after receiving 90 metres of film, Kuleshov shot six montage experiments.
Here is a list of them taken from Kuleshov’s application to the Photographic and
Cinematographic Section of the Artistic Sector of the Moscow Regional Political
Education Committee:

1. a dance, filmed from one place–10 metres
2 a dance, filmed using montage–10 metres
3. the dependence of the model actor’s experience on the causes of that experience:

(a) 14 metres
(b) 20metres

4. the arbitrary combination of various scenes of action into a single composition
–13 metres [the ‘creative geography’ experiment]
5. the arbitrary combination of the parts of different people’s bodies and the
creation through montage of the desired model actor–12 metres [the ‘created
man’ experiment]
6. the uniform movement of the eyes of a model actor–2 metres. 45

Of these six experiments the history of cinema has preserved the memory of only
two: the ‘created man’ and ‘creative geography’–the others are practically never
mentioned. But, if we look at the whole programme of experiments in its entirety,
we can easily see that the sixth experiment fell within the Dalcroze-Volkonsky
orbit. The third experiment recalled the Mosjoukine experiment but was partly
reformulated in the categories of reflexology. The first, second, fourth and fifth
experiments are closely linked to one another. First we have the non-montage
image of a dance (not specifically cinematographic), then we are offered three
different types of the dismemberment and combination of objects. The dance is
composed of fragments that have been filmed with a single model, while the fourth
and fifth experiments assemble the body of a man or the ‘body’ of the world from
fragments of various objects. The Delsartian idea of dismemberment and
combination is here clearly evident.
Judging by the frequency of the references in the texts and its place in the list,
the ‘dance’ experiment was the most important to Kuleshov, although in later
analyses it has been completely overshadowed. The significance of
this experiment does not depend merely on the retrospective polemic with the article
by Anna Lee, to which we have referred. The dance was essentially the only
subject which clearly raised the problem of rhythm. Rhythm had been postulated
as the principal aim of montage, but neither the Mosjoukine experiment nor the
‘created man’ were complete responses to this aim.
It is also essential to remember that in the 1920s, even more than in the 1910s,
the tendency to transform choreography into a metamodel for the performing arts