Page 68 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

KULESHOV’S EXPERIMENTS AND THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR 49
way. In this respect the polemic conducted by Ippolit Sokolov against the
Dalcrozians was particularly characteristic:

The actor on the stage must first of all become an automaton, a mechanism,
a machine…. Henceforth painters, doctors, artists, engineers must study the
human body, not from the point of view of anatomy or physiology, but from
the point of view of the study of machines. The new Taylorised man has his
own new physiology. Classical man, with his Hellenic gait and gesticulation,
is a beast and savage in comparison with the new Taylorised man. 61

This was a clear attack on Dalcroze-Volkonsky and their cult of antiquity. Sokolov
went on to the heart of the matter: ‘The training for the aesthetic gesture is the
rhythmicisation of movement. The rhythmicised gesture must be constructed on
psycho-physiological and technical rhythm and not on purely musical rhythm.’ 62
The machine cult attempted to disavow its sources, to renounce the musical-
choreographic model. Henceforth the model actor was to be understood in a
purely mechanical sense. Oskar Bir set American film actors up as an ideal when
63
he said, ‘They are not actors at all but organs of movement.’ Cinema was once
again described as an organism with, in its structure, the same constitution as the
actor: ‘Cinema is first of all a machine…. What it shows on the screen is the
64
definitive mechanisation of life.’ Alexei Gan applied these ideas to the Kuleshov
Workshop:

Why? Because, as an element of cinema’s raw material, disorganised nature,
whether static or in motion, lies on the screen and produces absolutely
unnatural images. 65

As we can see, Gan’s ethic repeated Volkonsky’s almost word for word although it
is true that he only repeated what corresponded to the mechanistic laws of nature.
But the sudden move towards the declarative machine cult concealed the
continuity of ideas. Kuleshov responded actively to Constructivist slogans. In an
unsigned article, ‘The History of the State Institute of Cinematography’, published
in Kino-Fot and probably written by Kuleshov, Gardin was given a ‘dressing-down’
for distancing himself from the ‘left-wing tendency’, and the orientation towards the
66
‘mechanisation of human movements’ was proclaimed. The short period of
rapprochement with the Constructivists played an important role in the
later evaluation of Kuleshov’s work and in his break with preceding tradition. But
Kuleshov was too closely linked to the ideas of the new anthropology which had
their roots in the 1910s. It is precisely this that doubtless explains in part the
unexpected move by Kuleshov and his entire collective (Pudovkin, Barnet,
Komarov and others) to Mezhrabpomfilm, the most traditional film studio in the
1920s, which preserved the best traditions of the pre-Revolutionary Russian
cinema. The names of Delsarte and Dalcroze can be found in Kuleshov texts over
a period of many years and this has puzzled researchers. By the end of the 1920s