Europe Central (39 page)

She was as delicious as the white Viazma gingerbread which they used to sell during Palm Week in old Petersburg, and she almost remembered the taste of it; thanks to her police file, I’m aware, as she would never be, that until she was three years old, and our Revolution ended Palm Week, her mother used to break off a piece and put it in her mouth. That is why sometimes when she was very happy she could almost taste gingerbread. I repeat: She was as delicious as white Viazma gingerbread and she didn’t even know it! Nor did so many others. No exegesis of her exists but mine. No matter what they say, she wasn’t blonde; she had dark hair. She died in 1975; I do agree with that. She was too modest to wear her Order of the Red Star very often. The apparatchiks for whom she interpreted failed to recognize her face if they passed her in the street. Her colleagues ignored her; her students never saw beyond her spectacles. Search the index of any Shostakovich biography (Khentova’s excepted) and you’ll find the meagerest references to her, never a photograph. And yet she was the most perfect of us all, as white and sweet as gingerbread! In Shostakovich’s illicit operas she was the flash of light in the troubled skies of chromatism.

It was R. L. Karmen who got her next. Born in the same antediluvian year as Shostakovich, he was the one who even in his youth had a habit of standing with his legs apart like a heavy old man, the one who summed up his lifelong role:
We were soldiers, armed with a camera.
Unlike Shostakovich, his disposition was fundamentally cheerful, forward-looking. A laughing man dances, clutching at the bottles on a rope ladder, while an accordionist gazes lovingly up at him; thus runs one famous sequence of the movie “Volga-Volga,” which derives from Comrade Stalin’s favorite musical; more than one of us, particularly women, have compared Roman Karmen to that laughing man. Auntie Olga down the hall used to tell me that something about his likeness, which occasionally appeared in
Izvestiya,
used to make her feel
resolute.
(For good reason, she dropped dead of liver failure in 1964.) Karmen really must be considered an outstanding example of our successful Soviet man. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1942, 1947 and then again in 1952. Oh, he knew how to smile and laugh!

That smile of his, and the equanimity with which he agreed to commence, abandon or alter his projects as we suggested, gave rise to the supposition (highly beneficial to his career) that he accepted his place in a world whose cinema is as blandly necessary as the long petrol hoses entering the shiny square hoods of cars.

Roman Karmen has been called a great artist. And was he? In the year 2002, when I telephoned the University of Chicago film expert Yuri Tsivian, the following verdict came down:
He’s, well, let’s say he’s an official classic, but he’s not remembered as a great filmmaker. If he filmed the surrender at Stalingrad, that wasn’t because he was a great artist, but because he was a trusted official. He was brave and reliable, but not anyone I would admire.

Poor Karmen! And yet, what if Professor Tsivian were wrong? For that matter, even if he were right, how was Karmen supposed to act? All we can do in this life is our best. And if we believe in ourselves, if our best pleases us, haven’t we followed the correct line? And who’s to say that cinema isn’t gasoline? I know a lady who decides which movie to see as a result not of the subject matter but of which time is most convenient for her. Somebody’s got to pump her gas. Somebody’s got to defend her mind.
We were soldiers, armed with a camera.

Aged not quite fifteen, he arrived in Moscow in the same year that Lenin suffered his first two strokes and Comrade Stalin became General Secretary of our Party. His most treasured possession was the camera bequeathed to him by his martyred father.

He sent photographs to
Ogonyok
magazine, and received his first press card in 1923, when we find him interviewing Vassil Kolarov, the Bulgarian hero. In his anxiety and inexperience he used too much magnesium oxide; the flash filled the room with black smoke. The negative was blank, so he went back to Kolarov’s hotel in the morning. Perhaps it was his smile, perhaps his honesty or simply his desperation. In any event, the young photojournalist succeeded in getting both picture and caption published. For years he was haunted by the ironic gentleness of Kolarov when he granted the youth another chance. With his customary readiness to reveal himself, he told this embarrassing story to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who laughed lightly. For some reason all his embarrassment flooded back; he couldn’t understand why; he’d issued this anecdote so many times that it was scarcely new-minted; it was not until he was old that he understood not only why the tale humiliated him before her, but also what had brought it out of him in the first place: her gentleness, oh, her gentleness.

He photographed Lenin’s corpse lying in state, and captured many emotion-laden scenes, but the full power of images first impressed itself upon the young Roman Karmen later on in that same year, 1924, when he passed by an exhibition of German art arranged by Otto Nagel. Amidst the other flotsam hung “The Sacrifice” by Käthe Kollwitz. How can I describe this woodcut? The mother’s black cloak is open to reveal her breasts as she offers up her baby to death.

In the same folio, which was called “War,” Karmen, stunned and riveted, saw “The Parents,” a black woodcut of a man mourning, supporting the hand in which his face is buried upon the back of his wife, who mourns in his lap; this couple comprise a dark mass of mourning, silhouetted against a white background and their outlines printed negatively in white.

These two prints moved him to tears. But when, now scanning the walls almost ferociously in his determination to find every scrap of paper by this artist, he discovered “Hunger,” which would become leaf number two of most versions of her great “Proletariat” folio of 1925, the emotion which overcame him was
anger—
anger against an order which made people suffer in this way. And how strange it was that he was moved! For he had known hunger himself; and his father had suffered at the hands of the White Guards. This was the moment when he understood that the representation of reality can be more real than reality itself.

I’ve seen a photograph of Karmen in a cocked sailor’s hat, smiling sweetly, his white teeth peeking up around one edge of that accordion-like instrument his father left him; it is 1926, and he stands before a banner for the cause of the German workers. A moment before the picture was taken, he had just praised Kollwitz’s “Hunger” once again.

In 1927, when an exhibition specifically of the works of K. Kollwitz took place in Moscow, Karmen succeeded in photographing the artist, but by then she excited him somewhat less. He was living across the street from a billboard designed by Rodchenko; it advertised macaroni for Mosselprom. He used to study this billboard every day. It seemed to him that in this image every element was perfectly synchronized. Rodchenko not only conveyed information, he also
defamiliarized
it in the manner of the Russian Formalists (who had not yet been ruled alien to our Soviet culture). Furthermore, without in any way distracting us from his mission of selling macaroni, Rodchenko added whimsicality, even humor—a quality which our dear friend K. Kollwitz lacked.

At the end of the decade we find him in every periodical from
Prozhektor
to
Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia
to Mayakovsky’s
Lef.
He’d begun with a still camera, but it was really
motion
which seduced him. Rodchenko would have been content to photograph a single shorthaired Moscow athlete whose Red Star badge proclaimed her
READY FOR WORK AND DEFENSE;
Roman Karmen showed us walls of athletes’ legs actually flashing beneath icons to Lenin and Stalin on Red Square!

He captured Dmitrov, Gorki, Alexei Tolstoy, the interplanetary enthusiast-theoretician Tsiolkovsky and even the first American Ambassador, William Bullitt. In his inspirational films of this period, long tables of children bow over their studies; smokestacks vomit blackness above banner-hung posters, Mongolian-looking men in their autonomous folk costumes blow abnormally long horns which resemble the smokestacks.

Thanks to the benevolence of our Soviet state, he’d succeeded in attending the State School of Photography in the malachite-columned hall of the former Yar Restaurant. Among his talents was the supernatural one of meeting all the people he needed to meet, and avoiding the unwholesome. Eisenstein himself is said to have gazed upon him brightly, all the while clutching a briefcase in his armpit. But a canniness entirely alien to, for instance, Shostakovich, kept the young man from accepting too many blessings from this god whom one would have thought to be eternally anchored to his pedestal. Instead, he became a protégé of the rival Pudovkin. He became friends with L. O. Arnshtam, who’d left Meyerhold’s theater at the last possible moment; in ’37, when Meyerhold and his wife
disappeared,
Arnshtam not only didn’t get taken but kept right on making movies for Lenfilm! He and Karmen were inseparable.

From Dziga Vertov, who was already suspect on account of the formalism in his “Man with the Movie Camera,” Karmen kept personally clear, although he is known to have seen a number of the man’s newsreels. This scrupulous neutrality undoubtedly served him well in his later years, when he taught at the All-Union State College of Cinematography.

In the cutting room, even the scratches on film leaders enthralled him, wiggling past his eyes like the light-streaks of Moscow trams in the night. Soon we began to associate him with the neoclassical pillared facade of Lenfilm Studio in Leningrad. One catalogue gushes:
Unusual angles, the most incredible positioning of the camera, the play of light and shade, compositions—it was all new, unheard of and unique.
The curator had evidently never heard of Rodchenko.

In 1930, when his future with Elena was as tiny as a bomb which is still far overhead and he hadn’t even graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography, Vladimir Yerofeyev invited him to be assistant cameraman on our first Soviet sound film, “Far Away in Asia.” And so far away in Asia we find him, in collaboration with the renowned and slender Edward Tissé, recording the Kara-Kum expedition. Our new Soviet trucks will pass the test! The temperature reaches one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Karmen films the last drink of water. Here’s a photograph of Karmen on a camel’s back, with a turbaned guide behind him; he’s wasting no time; he’s filming!

In China, wading a river with his cine-camera lashed to another camel’s back; in the ice-covered rigging of the
Sedov
with his camera clutched against the breast of his parka; in besieged Leningrad, leaning over the hood of a ruined truck to establish his position; with his camera at his eye in a New York penthouse; panning the Kino-Eye across a long S-shaped column of captured French soldiers in Vietnam; that was how he would spend his life. A film every year and often more! Simonov remembers him as always working, even bandaged, sick or exhausted, no matter what his mood or how dangerous the conditions.

He sincerely tried to film not only the essence, but the hope. When he produced his sound newsreels about the exemplary shock workers Nikita Izotop and Ivan Gudov, Gudov he filmed at his lathe; Izotop he filmed trying to study geometry. Did Izotop become a geometer? Not exactly. But thanks to his dedicated productivity he’d won the chance to try, as he never would have under capitalism. Now any worker had that chance. This is what Karmen wished to show us. Can such a strategy be called “art”? Roman Karmen didn’t care. He was no formalist, not he!

In 1933 he made a film called “Parade on Red Square in Moscow.” In 1938, he made “Mayday.” In 1948 and 1952 he made two films each of which was called “Mayday on Red Square.” No one can say he neglected the home front.

In 1938-39 we find Karmen shooting the newsreel series “Embattled China,” his sheepskin collar opened, his sheepskin hat high on his forehead so as not to occlude visibility, aiming a cine camera which curiously resembled a metal butterfly or perhaps the wind-up key of a clock at a burning tower. He repeatedly advised his colleagues to
link all points in any temporal order,
a credo which he had long since forgotten that he’d derived from Vertov. But no harm done! After this bow to dynamism, Karmen invariably linked all points in the order A., B., C. More impressive than the arrangement of points is the undisputed fact that the film team traveled twenty-five thousand kilometers. Upon his return, he wrote
A Year in China,
which—measure of his industriousness—he both started and finished in November 1939. This book achieved immediate publication. Its author was accepted into the Soviet Writers’ Union.

2

In 1936 he lay flat on his back during an Italian air raid and filmed straight upwards, with Ethiopian women and children dying all around him. He was always lucky, if you want to call it that. The resulting documentary, “Abyssinia,” undercut and embarrassed the Fascists. Almost immediately he began to film the twenty-two installments of our newsreel “On the Events in Spain.”

I’ve been told that it happened like this: Karmen wrote a personal letter to Comrade Stalin, took it himself to the guards at the Kremlin gates, and waited a week—it’s like some old parable!—and then he and his fellow cameraman Boris Makaseyev got called to Central Board of Cinematography. Next morning they were both on a plane to Madrid. Roman Karmen had all the luck! On the same day, Shostakovich trembled at home in Leningrad, waiting to be arrested . . .

Two Panzertroopers with cocked berets roll toward Madrid, the great gun between them pointing up at the sky. Somehow, Roman Karmen is hiding in a trench and filming them! In the words of K. Simonov:
As we watched the films sent in by Karmen from far off Spain, we young poets were consumed with a burning envy of that man we did not know, that man with the camera who was now on the front line of the fight against Fascism.