Page 66 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 47
choreography was promoted to the position of an organisational principle in
relation to montage as well. Furthermore the montage principle was also
introduced into the actual work of the actor. Ferdinandov’s theatre was called
‘normative’ or ‘analytical’ theatre precisely because it postulated the necessity for
the montage segmentation of movements: ‘you can construct a stage work on a
succession of elementary movements, using the movement of only one organ of
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the body at each moment in time’, wrote the theatre enthusiast Nikolai Lvov.
This ‘successive’ and analytical plastic art was described by Ferdinandov’s
opponent Ippolit Sokolov as a collection of ‘typically Jewish artificial little gestures
bordering on caricature…an insupportable uniformity of conventional and
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schematic movements’. In many ways theatre was being constructed as an
analogue of the system of ‘notation’ of rhythmicised movements.
Kuleshov’s move away from Gardin’s methodology was clearly stimulated by
the influence of Ferdinandov’s metro-rhythm, based essentially on Volkonsky’s
system which it had significantly modernised. ‘In normative theatre people work
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unconsciously with primitive cinematographic technique’, Kuleshovwrote in 1922.
But in the ‘Work Plan for the Experimental Cinema Laboratory’, compiled in
1923, we find: ‘Work in time. The preparatory concept of metre and rhythm.
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Exercises. Notes and notation. Exercises.’ These are already Ferdinandov’s
themes. As early as 1914 S.Volkonsky had called for the use of cinema for the
purpose of quasi-choreographic teaching, in conservatoires for instance, ‘as the most
powerful teaching instrument; it will be a mirror reflecting the way in which we
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should and should not move’. By the 1920s cinema was already beginning to
prove equal to choreographic notation. At that time the press put forward the idea
of using cinema to record dance: ‘It is very probable that a precise record of dance
is not possible…. The failures that have characterised research in this field compel
us to abandon the notion of developing a system to record dance and turn all our
hopes to cinema.’ 56
Turkin fully shared the idea of cinema as transfigured choreography and the
inclination towards Ferdinandov’s system. In his 1925 book The Cinema Actor this
problem is given prominence:

The developed technique of montage has enriched the transmission of dance
on the screen. Dance has begun to be composed of dismembered moments
of movement, filmed from various distances and various angles and
alternating in a proper and measured order. Its compositional element has
become the movement-fragment (i.e. a fragment of cinema film on which the
dancer’s movement has been recorded: because dance on screen is as much
the ‘dance’ of man in individual fragments of film as the alternation, the
‘dance’ of the actual fragments of film). 57

Cinema, as we shall see, was to be simultaneously an analytical record of dance
and rhythmicised montage choreography. Turkin went on: