Page 69 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

50 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
they were already being perceived as strange anachronisms. It is symptomatic that
as late as 1924 an orthodox figure like Alexander Voznesensky, who belonged
entirely to the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema, persistently recommended the
methods of Dalcroze and Delsarte as a means of achieving the maximum
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‘incarnation’ [vzhivanie] in the character, prolonging in his own way the Gardin
line of film theory.
In the later Kuleshov texts (after 1929), which have until recently served as the
basis for the evaluation of this film theory, montage and the anthropological ideas
of the 1910s diverge, giving the impression of a strange eclecticism. The metro-
rhythmic approach and the new anthropology differed in their methods of teaching
the actor and of rehearsal but their direct link with the montage experiments of
1921 was lost.
Nevertheless the idea of the actor moving along axes, which was subsequently
to provoke such censure, is no more than a fusion of Volkonsky’s concepts on the
directions of the movement of the body and Ferdinandov’s inclination towards
recording the movements of the actor. They make complete sense only in the
context of the principle of the identity between montage and the movement of the
body, of their mutual rhythmic resonance. The methodology of the training of the
model actor, which was experienced in Kuleshov as a period of intensive research
in the field of the ‘synthetic’ theory of cinema, rudimentarily preserved within itself
the anthropological principle of montage.
The history of Kuleshov’s theoretical research reminds us once again of the fact
that for thousands of years the human body has served as a model for the
universe, from the theory of macrocosm and microcosm to the physiognomic
teachings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This traditional metamodel
has evolved from the intact body of the Middle Ages to the dismembered corpse of
the nineteenth century. The idea of montage as the specific basis of a new art,
cinema, is an important link in the long history of this evolution.