Page 67 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

48 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
The question of dance has a special significance for contemporary cinema
and, in particular, for the mastery of film acting. The search for strict artistic
form in cinema is moving towards the measured construction of the actor’s
movement on the screen and of the rhythmic montage of the film, i.e.
towards the creation from the movement on the screen of a kind of ‘dance’….
Film drama is trying to immerse itself in the culture of dance, in rhythm, so
that it actually becomes ‘dance’, a sort of contemporary, realistic or, if you
prefer, analytical or biomechanical ballet. 58

(This is comparable to the ideas expressed in Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet
mécanique [France, 1924].)
That is why on 8 March 1921 Kuleshov filmed a dance by the ballerina Zinaida
Tarkhovskaya in the first and most important of his series of projected montage
experiments. Later, in Alexander Belenson’s book Cinema Today [Kino segodnya,
1925] Kuleshov quite unambiguously indicated the link between montage and
choreographic notation:

Each gesture has its duration and that duration can be recorded by a sign
that can be studied and reproduced. The alternation of accented and
unaccented notes will create a temporal metre, which determines the metric
system and the temporal character (just as in montage). 59

Thus even in 1925 the ‘dance’ experiment preserved the importance of a ‘symbol of
f faith’ as the supreme expression of the link between montage and the new
anthropology. Montage was now the expression of the new conception of man and
derived literally from the human body, as a record of its movement, as the
mechanical expression of its natural rhythm, as the embodiment of the concept of
the body analytically dismembered. Montage was now induced by body rhythm, by
the body’s new being, in the broadest sense of the word. Man’s body was the raw
material for theatre. The ‘body’ of the world, transformed into the ‘body’ of the film
stock, was the raw material for cinema. The analogies now were almost absolute
and immutable.
The later development of cinema revealed the repetitive character of the metro-
rhythmic element in montage. In Kuleshov’s later analyses metro-rhythm passes into
the shadows and the semantics of montage is promoted to the forefront. By 1929
Kuleshov was already concentrating exclusively on his experiments with ‘creative
geography’ and ‘created man’ and further more he traced these experiments back
60
to Engineer Prite’s Project [Proekt inzhenera Praita, 1918]. Thelink with the
anthropology of the 1910s was also camouflaged by Kuleshov’s move closer to
Constructivism. In 1922 he was one of the leading theorists of Kino-Fot, the journal
headed by Alexei Gan, the theorist of Constructivism. This rapprochement was
based on the machine cult. Volkonsky had already made the connection between
the regularity of the movements of the human body, its automation and the
machine. But in the 1920s these ideas were developed in a much more radical