NATASHA

3

'For us the most important of all the arts is cinema,' Lenin is reported to have said.⁴² He valued film above all for its propaganda role. In a country such as Russia, where in 1920 only two out of every five adults could read,⁴³ the moving picture was a vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party's reach to the remote countryside, where makeshift

cinemas were established in requisitioned churches and village halls. Trotsky said the cinema would compete with the tavern and the church: it would appeal to a young society, whose character was formed, like a child's, through play.⁴⁴ The fact that in the early 1920s nearly half the audience in Soviet cinemas was aged between ten and fifteen years (the age when political ideas start to form in a person's mind) was one of the medium's greatest virtues as far as its patrons in the Kremlin were concerned.⁴⁵ Here was the art form of the new socialist society -it was technologically more advanced, more democratic, and more 'true to life' than any of the arts of the old world.

'The theatre is a game. The cinema is life', wrote one Soviet critic in 1927.⁴⁶ It was the realism of the photographic image that made film the 'art of the future' in the Soviet Union.⁴⁷ Other art forms represented life; but only cinema could capture life and reorganize it as a new reality. This was the premise of the Kinok group, formed in 1922 by the brilliant director Dziga Vertov, his wife, the cine newsreel editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, a daring cameraman who had been with the Red Army in the civil war. All three were involved in making propaganda films for Soviet agitprop. Travelling by special 'agit-trains' around the front-line regions in the civil war, they had noticed how the villagers to whom they showed their films were free from expectations of a narrative. Most of them had never seen a film or play before. 'I was the manager of the cinema carriage on one of the agit-trains', Vertov later wrote. 'The audience was made up of illiterate or semi-literate peasants. They could not even read the subtitles. These unspoiled viewers could not understand the theatrical conventions.'⁴⁸ From this discovery, the Kinok group became convinced that the future of the cinema in Soviet Russia was to be found in non-fiction films. The basic idea of the group was signalled by its name. The word Kinok was an amalgam of kino (cinema) and oko (eye) - and the kinoki, or 'cine-eyes', were engaged in a battle over sight. The group declared war on the fiction films of the studios, the 'factory of dreams' which had enslaved the masses to the bourgeoisie, and took their camera out on to the streets to make films whose purpose was to 'catch life as it is' - or rather, insofar as their aim was 'to see and show the world in the name of the proletarian revolution', to catch life as it ought to be.⁴⁹

This manipulative element was the fundamental difference between the kinoki and what would become known as cinema verite in the Western cinematic tradition: cinema verite aspired to a relatively objective naturalism, whereas (their claims to the contrary notwithstanding) the kinoki arranged their real-life images in a symbolic way. Perhaps it was because their visual approach was rooted in the iconic tradition of Russia. The Kinok group's most famous film, The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), is a sort of symphony of images from one day in the ideal Soviet metropolis, starting with early morning scenes of different types of work and moving through to evening sports and recreations. It ends with a visit to the cinema where The Man with a Movie Camera is on the screen. The film is full of such visual jokes and tricks, designed to debunk the fantasies of fiction film. Yet what emerges from this playful irony, even if it takes several viewings to decode, is a brilliant intellectual discourse about seeing and reality. What do we see when we look at a film? Life 'as it is' or as it is acted for the cameras? Is the camera a window on to life or does it make its own reality?

Vertov, like all the Soviet avant-garde directors, wanted cinema to change the way its viewers saw the world. To engineer the Soviet consciousness, they hit upon a new technique - montage. By intercutting shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage aimed to manipulate the audience's reactions, directing them to the ideas the director wanted them to reach. Lev Kuleshov was the first director to use montage in the cinema - long before it was adopted in the West. He came to the technique by accident, when the chronic shortages of film stock in the civil war led him to experiment with making new movies by cutting up and rearranging bits of old ones. The scarcity of film compelled all the early Soviet directors to plan out scenes on paper first (storyboarding). This had the effect of reinforcing the intellectual composition of their films as a sequence of symbolic movements and gestures. Kuleshov believed that the visual meaning of the film was best communicated by the arrangement (montage) of the frames, and not by the content of the individual shots, as practised in the silent films and even in the early montage experiments of D. W. Griffith in America. According to Kuleshov, it was through the mon-tage of contrasting images that cinema could create meaning and

emotions in the audience. To demonstrate his theory he intercut a single neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin with three different visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a women's body laid out in a coffin, and a child at play. It turned out that the audience interpreted the meaning of the close-up according to the context in which it was placed, seeing hunger in Mozzukhin's face in the first sequence, grief in the second, and joy in the third, although the three shots of him were identical.⁵⁰ All the other great Soviet film directors of the 1920s used montage: Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet and, in its most intellectualized form, Sergei Eisenstein. Montage was so central to the visual effect of Soviet experimental cinema that its exponents were afraid that their medium would be destroyed by the arrival of film sound. The essence of film art, as these directors saw it, lay in the orchestration of the visual images and the use of movement and of mimicry to suggest emotions and ideas. The introduction of a verbal element was bound to reduce film to a cheap surrogate for the theatre. With the advent of sound, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proposed to use it 'contrapuntally', contrasting sound with images as an added element of the montage.⁵¹

Montage required a different kind of acting, capable of conveying the meaning of the film quickly and economically. Much of the theory behind this new acting was derived from the work of Francois Delsarte and Emile Jacques Dalcroze, who had developed systems of mime, dance and rhythmic gymnastics (eurhythmies). The system was based on the idea that combinations of movements and gestures could be used to signal ideas and emotions to the audience, and this same idea was applied by Kuleshov to both the training of the actors and the montage editing for cinema.

The Delsarte-Dalcroze system had been brought to Russia by Prince Sergei Volkonsky in the early 1910s. The grandson of the Decembrist had been Director of the Imperial Theatre between 1899 and 1901, but was sacked after falling out with the prima ballerina (and mistress of the Tsar) Mathilde Kshesinskaya. The cause of his dismissal was a farthingale. Kshesinskaya had refused to wear one in the ballet Kam-argo and, when Volkonsky had fined her, she persuaded the Tsar to dismiss him from his post. Volkonsky might have saved his career by rescinding the fine, but, like his grandfather, he was not the type to be

diverted from what he saw as his professional duty by an order from the court.⁵² The one real legacy of Volkonsky's brief tenure was the discovery of Diaghilev, whom he promoted to his first position in the theatre world as the editor and publisher of the Imperial Theatre's annual review.* After 1901 Volkonsky became one of Russia's most important art and theatre critics. So when he began to propagandize the Delsarte-Dalcroze system, even setting up his own school of rhythmic gymnastics in Petersburg, he drew many converts from the Russian theatre, including Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The essence of Volkonsky's teaching was the conception of the human body as a dynamo whose rhythmic movements can be trained subconsciously to express the emotions required by a work of art.+ Volkonsky conceived of the human body as a machine which obeys 'the general laws of mechanics', but which is 'oiled and set in motion by feeling'.⁵³ After 1917, this idea was taken up in Soviet film and theatre circles, where similar theories of 'biomechanics' were championed by the great avant-garde director Meyerhold. In 1919 Volkonsky set up a Rhythmic Institute in Moscow. Until he was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921, he also taught his theories at the First State School of Cinema, where Kuleshov was one of the directors to be influenced by them. In Kuleshov's own workshop, established in Moscow in 1920, actors were trained in a lexicon of movements and gestures based on the rhythmic principles of Volkonsky.⁵⁴

Many of the most important Soviet directors of the avant-garde graduated from the Kuleshov workshop, among them Pudovkin, Barnet and Eisenstein. Born in Riga in 1898, Sergei Eisenstein was the son of a famous style moderne architect of Russian-German-Jewish

* Diaghilev was dismissed when Volkonsky left the Imperial Theatre. Diaghilev's dismissal meant he was ruled out for any future job in the Imperial Theatre, so in a sense it could be said that Volkonsky had a hand in the foundation of the Ballets Russes.

+ The theory was not dissimilar to Gordon Craig's conception of the actor as a 'supermarionette', with the one important distinction that the movements of Craig's actor were choreographed by the director, whereas Volkonsky's actor was supposed in internalize these rhythmic impulses to the point where they became entirely uncon-scious. See further M. Yampolsky,'Kuleshov's Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor', in R. Taylor and I.Christie, Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, 1991), pp. 32-3.

ancestry. In 1915 he went to Petrograd to study to become a civil engineer. It was there in 1917 that, as a 19-year-old student, he became caught up in the revolutionary crowds which were to become the subject of his history films. In the first week of July Eisenstein took part in the Bolshevik demonstrations against the Provisional Government, and he found himself in the middle of the crowd when police snipers hidden on the roofs above the Nevsky Prospekt opened fire on the demonstrators. People scattered everywhere. 'I saw people quite unfit, even poorly built for running, in headlong flight', he recalled.

Watches on chains were jolted out of waistcoat pockets. Cigarette cases flew out of side pockets. And canes. Canes. Canes. Panama hats… My legs carried me out of range of the machine guns. But it was not at all frightening… These days went down in history. History for which I so thirsted, which I so wanted to lay my hands on!⁵⁵

Eisenstein would use these images in his own cinematic re-creation of the scene in October (19Z8), sometimes known as Ten Days That Shook the World.

Enthused by the Bolshevik seizure of power, Eisenstein joined the Red Army as an engineer on the northern front, near Petrograd. He was involved in the civil war against the White Army of General Yudenich which reached the city's gates in the autumn of 1919. Eisen-stein's own father was serving with the Whites as an engineer. Looking back on these events through his films, Eisenstein saw the Revolution as a struggle of the young against the old. His films are imbued with the spirit of a young proletariat rising up against the patriarchal discipline of the capitalist order. The bourgeois characters in all his films, from the factory bosses in his first film Strike (1924) to the well-groomed figure of the Premier Kerensky in October, bear a close resemblance to his own father. 'Papa had 40 pairs of patent leather shoes', Eisenstein recalled. 'He did not acknowledge any other sort. And he had a huge collection of them "for every occasion". He even listed them in a register, with any distinguishing feature indicated: "new", "old", "a scratch". From time to time he held an inspection and roll-call.'⁵⁶ Eisenstein once wrote that the reason he came to support the Revolution 'had little to do with the real miseries of

social injustice… but directly and completely with what is surely the prototype of every social tyranny - the father's despotism in a family'.⁵⁷ But his commitment to the Revolution was equally connected with his own artistic vision of a new society. In a chapter of his memoirs, 'Why I Became a Director', he locates the source of his artistic inspiration in the collective movement of the Red Army engineers building a bridge near Petrograd:

An ant hill of raw fresh-faced recruits moved along measured-out paths with precision and discipline and worked in harmony to build a steadily growing bridge which reached across the river. Somewhere in this ant hill I moved as well. Square pads of leather on my shoulders supporting a plank, resting edgeways. Like the parts of a clockwork contraption, the figures moved quickly, driving up to the pontoons and throwing girders and handrails festooned with cabling to one another - it was an easy and harmonious model of perpetuum mobile, reaching out from the bank in an ever-lengthening road to the constantly receding edge of the bridge… All this fused into a marvellous, orchestral, polyphonic experience of something being done… Hell, it was good!… No: it was not patterns from classical productions, nor recordings of outstanding performances, nor complex orchestral scores, nor elaborate evolutions of the corps de ballet in which I first experienced that rapture, the delight in the movement of bodies racing at different speeds and in different directions across the graph of an open expanse: it was in the play of intersecting orbits, the ever-changing dynamic form that the combination of these paths took and their collisions in momentary patterns of intricacy, before flying apart for ever. The pontoon bridge… opened my eyes for the first time to the delight of this fascination that was never to leave me.⁵⁸

Eisenstein would try to re-create this sense of poetry in the crowd scenes which dominate his films, from Strike to October.

In 1920, on his return to Moscow, Eisenstein joined Proletkult as a theatre director and became involved in the Kuleshov workshop. Both led him to the idea of typage - the use of untrained actors or 'real types' taken (sometimes literally) from the street. The technique was used by Kuleshov in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1923) and, most famously, by Eisenstein himself in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October. Proletkult

would exert a lasting influence on Eisenstein, particularly on his treatment of the masses in his history films. But the biggest influence on Eisenstein was the director Meyerhold, whose theatre school he joined in 1921.

Vsevolod Meyerhold was a central figure in the Russian avant-garde. Born in 1874 to a theatre-loving family in the provincial city of Penza, Meyerhold had started as an actor in the Moscow Arts Theatre. In the 1900s he began directing his own experimental productions under the influence of Symbolist ideas. He saw the theatre as a highly stylized, even abstract, form of art, not the imitation of reality, and emphasized the use of mime and gesture to communicate ideas to the audience. He developed these ideas from the traditions of the Italian commedia dell'arte and the Japanese kabuki theatre, which were not that different from the practices of Delsarte and Dalcroze. Meyerhold staged a number of brilliant productions in Petrograd between 1915 and 1917 and he was one of the few artistic figures to support the Bolsheviks when they nationalized the theatres in November 1917. He even joined the Party in the following year. In 1920 Meyerhold was placed in charge of the theatre department in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the main Soviet authority in education and the arts. Under the slogan 'October in the Theatre' he began a revolution against the old naturalist conventions of the drama house. In 1921 he established the State School for Stage Direction to train the new directors who would take his revolutionary theatre out on to the streets. Eisenstein was one of Meyerhold's first students. He credited Meyerhold's plays with inspiring him to 'abandon engineering and "give myself" to art'.⁵⁹ Through Meyerhold, Eisenstein came to the idea of the mass spectacle - to a theatre of real life that would break down the conventions and illusions of the stage. He learned to train the actor as an athlete, expressing emotions and ideas through movements and gestures; and, like Meyerhold, he brought farce and pantomime, gymnastics and circus tricks, strong visual symbols and montage to his art.

Eisenstein's style of film montage also reveals Meyerhold's stylized approach. In contrast to the montage of Kuleshov, which was meant to affect the emotions subliminally, Eisenstein's efforts were explicitly didactic and expository. The juxtaposition of images was intended to engage members of the audience in a conscious way - and draw them

towards the correct ideological conclusions. In October, for example, Eisenstein intercuts images of a white horse falling from a bridge into the Neva river with scenes showing Cossack forces suppressing the workers' demonstrations against the Provisional Government in July 1917. The imagery is very complex. The horse had long been a symbol of apocalypse in the Russian intellectual tradition. Before 1917 it had been used by the Symbolists to represent the Revolution, whose imminence they sensed. (Bely's Petersburg is haunted by the hoofbeat sound of Mongol horses approaching from the steppe.) The white horse in particular was also, paradoxically, an emblem of the Bonapar-tist tradition. In Bolshevik propaganda the general mounted on a white horse was a standard symbol of the counter-revolution. After the suppression of the July demonstrations, the new premier of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, had ordered the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders, who had aimed to use the demonstrations to launch their own putsch. Forced into hiding, Lenin denounced Kerensky as a Bonapartist counter-revolutionary, a point reinforced in the sequence of October which intercuts scenes of Kerensky living like an emperor in the Winter Palace with images of Napoleon. According to Lenin, the events of July had transformed the Revolution into a civil war, a military struggle between the Reds and the Whites. He campaigned for the seizure of power by claiming that Kerensky would establish his own Bonapartist dictatorship if the Soviet did not take control. All these ideas are involved in Eisenstein's image of the falling horse. It was meant to make the audience perceive the suppression of the July demonstrations, as Lenin had described it, as the crucial turning point of 1917.

A similarly conceptual use of montage can be found in the sequence, ironically entitled 'For God and Country', which dramatizes the march of the counter-revolutionary Cossack forces led by General Kornilov against Petrograd in August 1917. Eisenstein made a visual deconstruc-tion of the concept of a 'God' by bombarding the viewer with a chain of images (icon-axe-icon-sabre-a blessing-blood) which increasingly challenge that idea.⁶⁰ He also used montage to extend time and increase the tension - as in The Battleship Potemkin (1925), in the famous massacre scene on the steps of Odessa in which the action is slowed down by the intercutting of close-ups of faces in the crowd with

repeated images of the soldiers' descent down the stairs.* The scene, by the way, was entirely fictional: there was no massacre on the Odessa steps in 1905 - although it often appears in the history books.

Nor was this the only time when history was altered by the mythic images in Eisenstein's films. When he arrived at the Winter Palace to shoot the storming scene for October, he was shown the left ('October') staircase where the Bolshevik ascent had taken place. But it was much too small for the mass action he had in mind, so instead he shot the scene on the massive Jordan staircase used for state processions during Tsarist times. The Jordan staircase became fixed in the public mind as the October Revolution's own triumphant route. Altogether Eisenstein's October was a much bigger production than the historical reality. He called up 5,000 veterans from the civil war - far more than the few hundred sailors and Red Guards who had taken part in the palace's assault in 1917. Many of them brought their own guns with live ammunition and fired bullets at the Sevres vases as they climbed the stairs, wounding several people and arguably causing far more casualties than in 1917. After the shooting, Eisenstein recalled being told by an elderly porter who swept up the broken china: 'Your people were much more careful the first time they took the palace.'⁶¹

Meanwhile, Meyerhold was storming barricades with his own revolution in the theatre. It began with his spectacular production of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe (1918; revived in 1921) - a cross between a mystery play and a street theatre comedy which dramatized the conquest of 'the clean' (the bourgeois) by 'the unclean' (the proletariat). Meyerhold removed the proscenium arch, and instead of a stage constructed a monumental platform projecting deep into the auditorium. At the climax of the spectacle he brought the audience on to the platform to mingle, as if in a city square, with the actors in their costumes, the clowns and acrobats, and to join with them in tearing up the curtain, which was painted with symbols - masks and wigs -of the old theatre.⁶² The war against theatrical illusion was summed up in the prologue to the play: 'We will show you life that's real - but

* Usually described as 'temporal expansion through overlapping editing'. See D. Bordwell and K. Thompson, Film Art, An Introduction, 3rd edn (New York, 1990), p. 217.

28. Liubov Popova: stage design for Meyerhold's 1922 production of the Magnanimous Cuckold

in this spectacle it will become transformed into something quite extraordinary.'⁶³ Such ideas were far too radical for Meyerhold's political patrons and in 1921 he was dismissed from his position in the commissariat. But he continued to put on some truly revolutionary productions. In his 1922 production of Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck's Magnanimous Cuckold (1920) the stage (by the Con-structivist artist Liubov Popova) became a kind of 'multi-purpose

scaffolding'; the characters were all in overalls and identified themselves by performing different circus tricks. In Sergei Tretiakov's 1923 play The Earth Rampant, adapted from La Nuit by Marcel Martinet, a drama about the mutiny of the French troops in the First World War, there were cars and machine-guns, not just on the stage but in the aisles as well. The lighting was provided by huge searchlights at the front of the stage, and actors in real soldiers' uniforms passed through the audience to collect money for a Red Army plane.⁶⁴

Some of Meyerhold's most interesting techniques were close to those of the cinema, in which he also worked as a director (he made two films before 1917) and (thanks to his impact on directors like Eisenstein and Grigory Kozintsev) arguably had his greatest influence.⁶⁵ In his 1924 production of Ostrovsky's The Forest, for example, Meyerhold used montage by dividing the five acts into thirty-three small episodes with pantomimic interludes to create contrasts of tempo and mood. In other productions, most notably that of Gogol's The Government Inspector in 1926, he placed certain actors on a little stage trolley and wheeled it to the front of the main stage to simulate the cinematic idea of a close-up. He was deeply influenced by movie actors such as Buster Keaton and, above all, Charlie Chaplin, whose films were shown in cinemas right across the Soviet Union. Chaplin's emphasis on mime and gesture made him close to Meyer-hold's theatrical ideal.⁶⁶

That ideal was expressed by the system known as 'biomechanics', which was not unlike the reflexology and rhythmic gymnastics of the Delsarte-Dalcrozean school, insofar as it approached the actor's body as a biomechanical device for the physical expression of emotions and ideas. Meyerhold would have his actors trained in the techniques of the acrobatic circus, fencing, boxing, ballet and eurhythmies, gymnastics and modern dance so that they could tell a story through the supple movements of their whole bodies or even just their faces.⁶⁷ The system was consciously opposed to the Stanislavsky method (in which Meyerhold was trained at the Moscow Arts Theatre between 1898 and 1902), in which the actor was encouraged to identify with the inner thoughts and feelings of his character by recalling moments of intense experience in his own life. In place of such free expressivity, Meyerhold insisted on the actors' rhythmic regimentation. He was

very interested in the Red Army's programme of physical culture (synchronized gymnastics and all that) and in 1921 he even took command of a special theatre section for physical culture in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which aimed to use the army's system of gymnastics for the 'scientific organization of labour' in an experimental military settlement.⁶⁸ This aspect of labour management was the crucial difference between biomechanics and the Delsarte-Dalcrozean school. Meyerhold envisaged the actor as an artist-engineer who organizes the 'raw material' of his own body on the scientific principles of time and motion. He saw his system as the theatrical equivalent of 'scientific management' in industry. Like all the Bolsheviks, he was particularly influenced by the theories of the American engineer F. W. Taylor, who used 'time and motion' studies to divide and automate the labour tasks of industry.

Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism. Its premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole manufacturing process accorded with his view of the Russian working class. He saw Taylorism's 'scientific' methods as a means of discipline that could remould the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines. All this was of a piece with the modernist belief in the power of machines to transform man and the universe. Meyerhold's enthusiasm for mechanics was widely shared by the avant-garde. One can see it in the Futurists' idealization of technology; in the fascination with machines which pervades the films of Eisenstein and Vertov; in the exaltation of factory production in left-wing art; and in the industrialism of the Constructivists. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylor and of another great American industrialist, Henry Ford, inventor of the egalitarian Model 'T', which flourished throughout Russia at this time: even remote villagers knew the name of Henry Ford (some of them believed he was a sort of god who organized the work of Lenin and Trotsky).

The most radical exponent of the Taylorist idea was Aleksei Gastev, the Bolshevik engineer and poet who envisaged the mechanization of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of production to the thinking patterns of the common man. A friend of Meyerhold, Gastev may have been the first person to use the term 'biomechanics', sometime around 1922.⁶⁹ As a 'proletarian poet' (the 'Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers', as he was described by

fellow poet Nikolai Aseev),⁷⁰ Gastev conjured up the vision of a future communist society in which man and machine merged. His verse reverberates to the thunderous sounds of the blast furnace and the factory siren. It sings its liturgy to an 'iron messiah' who will reveal the brave new world of the fully automated human being.

As head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, Gastev carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance, by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' - a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian (and Czech) verb 'to work': rabotat'. Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought bio-mechanization would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed, he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a Utopia where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' identified by ciphers such as 'A, B, C, or 325, 075, o, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controller. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer'.⁷¹ This was the Soviet paradise Zamyatin satirized in his novel We, which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the Benefactor. Zamyatin's novel was the inspiration of George Orwell's 1984.⁷²

Thanks to the influence of Meyerhold, two great artists were brought into the orbit of the cinema. One was Dmitry Shostakovich, who worked at Meyerhold's theatre from 1928 to 1929, during which time, influenced no doubt by its production of The Government Inspector, he composed his Gogolian opera The Nose (1930). In his student

days, between 1924 and 1926, Shostakovich had worked as a piano accompanist for silent movies at the Bright Reel cinema on Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad.⁷³ It set the pattern for his life - composing for the cinema to earn some extra money and keep himself out of trouble (in total he would score the music for over thirty films).⁷⁴

Writing for the screen had a major influence on Shostakovich's composing style, as it did on the whole Soviet music school.⁷⁵ The big film sound of the Soviet orchestra and the need for tuneful melodies to appeal to the masses are obvious enough. No composer in the twentieth century wrote more symphonies than Shostakovich; none wrote better tunes than Prokofiev - in both cases certainly an effect of writing for the cinema. Films using montage, in particular, demanded new techniques of musical composition to reflect their polyphonic dramaturgy. They required a new rhythmic treatment and faster harmonic shifts to deal with their constant cross-cutting between the frames,* the sharp joins between the scenes, and to highlight the associations between themes and visual images. These cinematic qualities are discernible in many of Shostakovich's works - notably the music for The Nose and his Third ('May Day') Symphony (1930), with its fast-paced montage of musical tableaux. Shostakovich once explained that in writing his film music he did not follow the standard Western principle of illustration or accompaniment, but sought rather to connect a series of sequences with one musical idea - so that in this sense it was the music which revealed the 'essence and the idea of the film'.⁷⁶ The music was to be an added element of the montage. This ideal was best expressed in Shostakovich's first film score, for The New Babylon (1929), a cinematic reconstruction of the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune in 1871. As its director Kozintsev explained, the purpose of the music was not just to reflect or illustrate the action but to take an active part in it by communicating to the audience the film's underlying emotions.⁷⁷

Meyerhold's other new recruit to the cinema was the poet Maya-kovsky, who wrote some thirteen film scenarios and (a man of

* Soviet films that used montage had a far higher number of different shots (in October, for example, there were 3,200 shots) compared to the average (around 600) in conventional Hollywood films during the 1920s.

extraordinary looks) starred in several films as well. Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had been close friends since before the war. They shared the same far-left outlook on politics and theatre which found expression in their partnership on Mystery Bouffe. Mayakovsky played the part of the 'Person of the Future' - a proletarian deus ex machina who appeared on stage hanging from the ceiling - in the first (1918) production of his play. It was, he said, referring to himself and Meyerhold, 'our revolution in poetry and theatre. The mystery is the greatness of the action - the bouffe the laughter in it.'⁷⁸ Mayakovsky spread his talents wide: to his poetry and his work in theatre and the cinema, he added journalism, writing radio songs and satires, drawing cartoons with brief captions for the lubok-like propaganda posters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and creating advertising jingles for state stores and slogans for the banners which appeared on every street. His poetry was immersed in politics, even his intimate love lyrics to his mistress Lily Brik, and a good deal of his best-known verse, like the allegory 150,000,000 (1921), a Soviet parody of the bylina, which tells the story of the battle between Ivan, the leader of the 150 million Russian workers, and the Western capitalist villain Woodrow Wilson, was agitational. Mayakovsky's terse, iconoclastic style was tailor-made for political effect in a country such as Russia where the lubok and chastushka (a simple, often bawdy, rhyming song) had real roots in the mass consciousness, and he imitated both these literary forms.

Forward, my country,

move on faster! Get on with it,

sweep away the antiquated junk! Stronger, my commune,

strike at the enemy, Make it die out,

that monster, the old way of life.⁷⁹

Mayakovsky embraced revolution as a quickening of time. He longed to sweep away the clutter of the past, the 'petty-bourgeois' domesticity of the 'old way of life' (byt), and to replace it with a higher

and more spiritual existence (bytie).* The battle against byt was at the heart of the Russian revolutionary urge to establish a more communistic way of life.⁸⁰ Mayakovsky hated byt. He hated all routine. He hated all the banal objects in the 'cosy home': the samovar, the rubber plant, the portrait of Marx in its little frame, the cat lying on old copies of Izvestiia, the ornamental china on the mantelpiece, the singing canaries.

From the wall Marx watches and watches

And suddenly

Opening his mouth wide,

He starts howling:

The Revolution is tangled up in philistine threads

More terrible than Wrangelf is philistine byt

Better

To tear off the canaries' heads -

So communism

Won't be struck down by canaries.⁸¹

In much of his writing Mayakovsky talked of his desire to escape this humdrum world of material things ('it will turn us all into philis-tines') and to fly away, like a figure from Chagall, to a higher spiritual realm. This is the theme of his long poem Pro eto (About This) (1923), written in the form of a love song to Lily Brik, with whom he was living, on and off, in Petersburg and Moscow in a menage a trois with her husband, the left-wing poet and critic Osip Brik. In his autobiography Mayakovsky records that he wrote the poem 'about our way of life in general but based on personal material'. He said it was a poem 'about byt, and by this I mean a way of life which has not changed at all and which is our greatest enemy'.⁸²Pro eto chronicles Mayakovsky's response to a two-month separation imposed by Lily Brik in December 1922. In it, the hero, a poet living all alone in his

* The word byt ('way of life') derived from the verb byvat', meaning to happen or take plat e. But from the nineteenth century, bytie took on the positive idea of 'meaningful existence' which became central to the Russian intellectual tradition, while byt became increasingly associated with the negative aspects of the 'old' way of life. + Leader of the White armies in southern Russia during the civil war.

29. Alexander Rodchenko: illustration from Mayakovsky's Pro eto (1923)

tiny room while his lover Lily carries on with her busy social and domestic life, dreams about a poem he wrote before 1917 in which a Christ-like figure, a purer version of his later self, prepares for the coming revolution. The despairing hero threatens to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Neva river: his love for Lily compli-

cates his own crisis of identity, because in his imagination she is tied to the 'petty-bourgeois' byt of Russia in the NEP, which has diverted him from the ascetic path of the true revolutionary. This betrayal leads to a dramatic staging of the narrator's crucifixion, which then gives way to the redemptive vision of a future communist Utopia, where love is no longer personal or bodily in form but a higher form of brotherhood. At the climax of the poem the narrator catapults himself a thousand years into the future, to a world of communal love, where he pleads with a chemist to bring him back to life:

Resurrect me -

I want to live my share! Where love will not be - a servant of marriages,

lust,

money. Damning the bed,

arising from the couch, love will stride through the universe.⁸³