The Big Screen (12 page)

Kuleshov seems to have been a naturally inventive, humorous young man. For instance, his 1924 satire,
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
, is a playful delight, full of jokes about Western foolishness over the Bolshevik enterprise. But that strain of comedy struggled to become a Russian tradition. The theoretical emphasis on editing, and what the Soviets would call montage, led to papers, books, and course curricula. And it had the effect of turning the shot (that basic element of film) into a still, as opposed to pieces of movie (things in which movement or duration were vital). Similarly, shots made for montage tended to isolate figures (their function smothered their vitality), whereas there is a potential in film for people being together in the shot, related by space.

Pudovkin followed that line of thought. After a few short films, he embarked on a deliberate trilogy—
Mother
(1926),
The End of St. Petersburg
(1927), and
Storm over Asia
(1928). These are humane dramas of the Revolution, utterly worthy yet heavy-handed, and with so predictable an emotional slant that they are not easy to sympathize with today. Nothing really happens in the films beyond the execution of an idea; there is more ideology and example than immediacy. There is great spectacle and there is often a burnished Russian light that owes something to the primitive laboratory work in that country. (There is a harsh sensuality in Soviet black and white that is very compelling.) The rigorous reliance on montage, though, the linkage (a key word in the theoretical disputes), is usually related to people and their desires. Pudovkin is trying to identify human stories; it is just that the structures of duty in the revolutionary narrative are always tending to simplify them.

The bickering over schemes of montage, among friendly rivals and co-revolutionaries, seems comic nowadays, but fervent. In a 1929 essay, “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein gives a concise account of the disputes:

In practice, Eisenstein devoted much of several books to this argument, and he was bright enough to employ physics and cell structure as illustrations. But he seldom mentioned story. In addition, while friends say that Eisenstein was mercurial and amusing in person, and driven by the principles of montage in his writing as if they were part of the Five-Year Plan, the humor does not often hit the page or his screen. Moreover, the undoubted pathos of Pudovkin's films still works, despite a regret in the viewer that all his people have been made subordinate to the historic argument and the ideology. If you share that feeling, you should sneak a look at Pudovkin's eighteen-minute
Chess Fever
, made in 1925, in advance of his features.

Chess Fever
is an endearing screwball comedy. A young man is obsessed with chess, so that it is ruining his relationship with a girl. His clothes are checkered like a chess board. He sees chess problems everywhere. The girl grows wistful—it is akin to Howard Hawks's
Bringing Up Baby
(1938) with its quest for “fun.” She leaves him and instead charms José Raúl Capablanca, the Cuban world champion (1921–27), in town for a chess tournament. Capablanca looks like a worldly Valentino cut with Irving Thalberg. He is so suave and self-sufficient; you can smell his cigar smoke and cologne. But in the face of his girl's cunning Russo-Cuban defense, the young man is reformed and reunited with her. (Maybe in foreplay he still favors the knight's move.) I don't mean to overvalue
Chess Fever
, but I want to insist on its surrender to comic incident, ironic narrative, and ordinary silliness. It is shorter than
Storm over Asia
, but it works better because of its greater sense of life and human vagary.

This matter of “still working for us” is not trivial or incidental: the cast-iron gravity and political portentousness in Pudovkin's features need to be set beside almost exact contemporaries—
Sunrise
, Carl Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc
, Victor Sjöström's
The Wind
, movies in which the screen comes alive with human uncertainty, transience, and a grasp of cinematic potential that exceeds the ideological textbooks by Pudovkin and Eisenstein. On-screen, saving the world (or crushing it) usually means less than the kind of glance that feels seconds passing like a breeze on your cheek. One could add to that list Dziga Vertov's
The Man with a Movie Camera
, the most lyrical optics-mad of all the Soviet films and the least apologetic in opting for movie over life and the Revolution's heaven.

Dziga Vertov was an invented name: it means “spinning top” and shows the man's love of mechanics, play, and perpetual motion, and his instinct for the movies as a machine that might transform reality. His real name was Denis Kaufman, and he was born in Bia
ystok, Poland, in 1896. Though trained in music, he entered the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute in 1916 to study perception. This was far from the show business path to the movies that operated in so many other countries. Kaufman was a kind of scientist as well as a painter in light and emotion. He was a bit of Picasso and a lot of Pavlov. But he was a Soviet at the moment of revolution, so he easily adopted the credo that film could save the world, bind the disparate Soviet republics together, and make manifest the ideology and practice of communism. He was crazy, but touched by genius.

On the one hand, Vertov fell in love with the notion of film as a source of documentary record and inspired information. He thus became part of the film committee's drive for newsreel, which led to the famous kino trains. A train set out to cross the vast country. As it went, it had camera crews film what they saw. As the train moved on, a compartment was the site where this material was developed and then cut together to make a newsreel—using all the lessons of montage being formulated by Kuleshov. Then, at the next stop, a few hundred miles down the line, another compartment served as a theater, to be filled with citizens who could see how the new state and their neighbors were working. It sounds marvelous, and some of Vertov's work was as beautiful and exalted as the best constructivist designs. But modern art does not always fill the bellies or the anxious minds of peasants and kulaks. They are like the chain gang on which Preston Sturges's director (in the person of Joel McCrea) finds himself in
Sullivan's Travels
(1942): they will settle for a little relief.

Dziga Vertov filled the 1920s with newsreels, documentaries, and sheer footage of astonishing beauty and wit and convinced himself that all of this was to promote and accelerate the immaculate Communist plans, no matter that the real Soviet Union was being beset by the ugly compromises of a revolution making its way. So he fell out of favor and helped crystallize the growing Party dismay over “formalist” tendencies that were ignoring “social realism” (albeit a realism constantly burdened with propaganda). So Vertov's passion for documentary—the unblemished record, the unprejudiced observation—was betrayed by his own brilliance as much as by Party-line brutalism. When Lenin had identified film as vital to the Revolution, he believed in impartial truth for maybe a day. But as Stalin took over, the truthfulness of film was twisted out of all recognition. A film, it was clear, could mean whatever the state wanted it to mean. In which case, that volatility had to be under state control.

Some innocent audiences see
The Man with a Movie Camera
as characteristic of the young Vertov and the younger Revolution. But it was made in 1929, close to the end of his working life, and it came about not from an official state commission but as Vertov wandered away from official attention. Much of it was shot in Kiev and Odessa. For a moment, Vertov was free, and it is our good fortune that the film escaped intervention or state destruction. It is a tribute to the idealized figure of the cameraman, advancing with his camera and tripod, filming in the most extreme positions with cheerful aplomb, and delivering to the editor a catalogue of what the camera can do. And by then Vertov was blissfully resigned to his trusted spinning top as a compendium of trickery. So he exposes that falsehood in the beauty and the thrill of being depicted.
The Man with a Movie Camera
is far from an endorsement of film's evenhanded way with reality. It takes orgasmic delight in the confusion of the real and the cinematic. A heart beats within it that says art is so much more important and useless than cockamamie claims for political salvation. As it was, Vertov lived on until 1954, in a merciful obscurity oddly indicative of the strange exile enjoyed by one of his greatest successors, Jean-Luc Godard, who wearied of being a conventional filmmaker and withdrew to his own Swiss laboratory finally aware that the world had declined to be saved, in part because film itself had done so much to spread a new alienation. People ready once to remake the world would instead gaze at screens as an alternative. It is a key transaction of the medium, the more profound for being inadvertent. A state of film had eclipsed state film.

The totality of Dziga Vertov's work is still not widely known, in part because its beauty is monotonous but also because its topics—the incidents of revolutionary history—are now as obscure as they are fraudulent. All too often, Vertov was documenting official lies. Still, his career is a vivid demonstration of the conflict between formal excellence and propagandistic meanings in state film. Vertov might receive more attention if we did not have Sergei Eisenstein to study.

And Eisenstein is not just a significant artist; he is the hero in his own melodrama—a role that would become nearly compulsory in the lives of filmmakers. Fortunately, his legacy as a human being is more interesting than his films.

Eisenstein was born in Riga, in Latvia, in 1898, and he deserves to be regarded as among the most diversely talented and broadly educated of all filmmakers. He was the son of a civil engineer and architect, a man he adored. It was a comfortable family, and the boy traveled a good deal: in 1906, in Paris, he saw his first film, a piece by Georges Méliès. He loved to look through his father's photograph albums, and he developed a precocious talent as an artist, often in the form of grotesque caricatures. But the likelihood remains (and is substantiated by sketchbooks exhibited in recent years) that Eisenstein could have been a graphic artist of the highest order. That skill, or talent, was shared with Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, and we should not underestimate the impact of drawing (or storyboarding) on early films. Of course, its greatest exponent would be a kid from the Midwest just three years younger than Eisenstein yet far more sweeping in discarding reality. His name was Walt Disney.

But there was no end to the young Eisenstein's appetite: he graduated from high school in Riga, and went on to study architecture in Petrograd. But when he joined the army, he found his facility in languages. And after all that he went into the theater, at first to do sets and costumes, but then to take a growing interest in direction, under the tutelage of Vsevelod Meyerhold. There's no doubt that the first step on Eisenstein's part toward montage was in seeing how experimental theater could be self-interrupting, putting incongruities together (what he called “collisions”) to jostle audience preconceptions. So, almost in advance of Communist needs, Eisenstein was possessed by an urge to reorganize human perception. This was as much Picasso-like as it was prompted by Lenin.

Suppose he had left the Soviet Union on any of the occasions that offered. Suppose he had become a Parisian, rather freer to indulge his Jewishness and his gayness. He might have become a famous painter or stage director—yet all his formal ability lacked was a touch of narrative sensibility. He made up for that, or tried to, by dedicated intellectual enquiry and a capacity for discussing theory. And so it was after early short films and the shooting of material to be used in stage productions (sometimes at the Proletkult Workers' Theatre), and assisting on re-editing Fritz Lang's
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler
for showing in Russia, that in the summer of 1924 (he was a year older than Orson Welles at the time of
Citizen Kane
) he made his first film,
Strike
, like a kid demon scoring goals at soccer.

Years later Eisenstein would say that
Strike
(1925) was like so many first films, “bristly and pugnacious,” the way he was at the time. Let's add “beautiful” and head over heels in love with its own medium. You can say that
Strike
is grief-stricken for the fate of its heroes, the strikers. But you don't feel too much grief amid all the exuberance of making a picture, and putting it up.
Strike
feels like an unbroken screening of a spectacular lecture-demonstration by a group of agitprop players bowled over by the fun of what they are doing. There are horrible scenes—an infant dropped to its death by a policeman on horseback; the ritual beating up of a striker; the pell-mell heap of dead bodies—but at every step, we feel the coup of its achievement and the flourish with which it's delivered. When the baby is dangled over an abyss at the workers' tenements, Eisenstein and his great cameraman Eduard Tisse revel in the depth and the light of the shot. When the strike leader is brutalized, the beating is staged as a kind of dance number. And in the field of corpses, you can't miss the marvel of all those extras and Eisenstein, with a megaphone, urging them, “Be still! Be quiet! Don't anyone move!” Some of the corpses are smiling! They all seem to be playing a game at a picnic. And you wish you could have been there.