Page 65 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

46 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
was being reinforced. It was Tairov who made a significant contribution to
choreographic rhythmology and Meyerhold’s biomechanics is genetically linked to
it. But for Kuleshov it was the theory and practice of Boris Ferdinandov’s
Experimental Heroic Theatre, with which he maintained very close links, that were
of major importance. It is of course no accident that, after the break with the film
school, the ‘Kuleshov collective’ moved into the building occupied by the
Experimental Heroic Theatre. In his memoirs Kuleshov wrote enthusiastically
about Ferdinandov, clearly counting him among his ‘teachers’. 46
Among Moscow theatres at the beginning of the 1920s there was none that was
as clearly orientated towards choreography as the Experimental Heroic Theatre.
V.Tikhonovich, who took Ferdinandov’s ideas to the verge of absurdity, wrote:

the ‘anarchy’ that reigned in the drama theatre was linked to the fact that in
drama people do not dance, but walk, stand, sit, lie, etc., they do not sing, but
speak, shout, cry, laugh, are silent, etc…. It has to be said that the dramatic
theatre has simply fallen behind opera and ballet in its own artistic
development…. But, say the Old Believers, we shall more or less eradicate
the clear boundaries between drama, ballet and opera. Even better, this is a
compliment to the Ferdinandov system: it seems to lead us towards a synthetic
theatre, a theatre of gesture and dance merged into a single whole, of merged
speech and song, a theatre which provides obvious opportunities for the
future. 47

Ferdinandov created the system of metro-rhythm that was popular in the 1920s.
His starting-point was the fact that theatre was a wholly dynamic art. The
organisation of the dynamics of artistic form had to take on a metro-rhythmic form
that was subject to the basic laws of mechanics. Ferdinandov tried to reduce all
stage movements to metres that were close to those of music and poetry. He
distinguished two-beat and three-beat measures of movement. The metric
organisation of stage movement set Ferdinandov the problem of recording
movement: ‘The resolution of the bases of theatrical recording’, he wrote, ‘is a
problem for regular theatre: we are also working on it in our theatrical
48
laboratory.’ He also paid a considerable tribute to reflexology. But it is
particularly interesting for us that Ferdinandov spoke systematically of montage:

Theatre is the art of the human body, consisting of three basic elements: the
acoustic (sound-voice), the mimic (movement proper) and the psychological
(sensation, reflex, deed, feeling–in a word, emotion)–plus montage which
surrounds the man-actor in his main work. 49

Although for Ferdinandov montage was in many ways an external element, it was
also subject to his metro-rhythm: ‘The same laws of metro-rhythm, tempo, accord,
theatrical harmony and counterpoint also guide the construction of theatrical
50
montage…and its combination with the actor’s basic work.’ Thus a kind of