The Oxford History of World Cinema (64 page)

feeling.PAOLO CHERCHI USAISELECT FILMOGRAPHY Trädgårdsmästeren (The

Gardener) ( 1912); Ingeborg Holm ( 1913); Judaspengar (Judas Money / Traitor's

Reward) ( 1915); Terje Vigen (A Man there Was) ( 1917); Tösen från Stormyrtorpet (The

Girl from Stormy Croft / The Woman He Chose) ( 1917); Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru

(The Outlaw and his Wife) ( 1918); Ingmarssönerna I-II (The Sons of Ingmar) ( 1919);

Klostret I Sendomir (The Monastery of Sendomir / The Secret of the Monastery) ( 1920);

Mästerman (Master Samuel) ( 1920); Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage / The Stroke of

Midnight) ( 1921); Name the Man ( 1924); He Who Gets Slapped ( 1924); The Scarlet

Letter ( 1927); The Divine Woman ( 1928); The Wind ( 1928); A Lady to Love / Die

Sehnsucht jeder Frau ( 1930); Markurells i Wadköping (The Markurells of Wadköping)

( 1931); Under the Red Robe ( 1937)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forslund, Bengt ( 1980), Victor Sjöström: His Life and Work.

Jeanne. René and Ford, Charles ( 1963), Victor jöström.

Roud, Richard (ed.) ( 1980), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: Pense, Hans ( 1969),

Seastrom and Stiller in Hollywood.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia

YURI TSIVIAN

Original as it may seem in style and subject-matter, film production in Russia started as

an offshoot of international trade. Because neither cameras nor film stock were

manufactured in Russia in the 1910s, Russian production companies developed in a very

different way from the major film companies in the west. Rather than being a corollary of

the equipment industry, national filmmaking in Russia was actuated by importers (in the

first place), distributors, and (in rare cases) theatre owners.

With the notable exception of the ex-photographer Alexander Drankov, the importer was

the key to the first production companies in Russia. The importer was a gobetween

linking foreign film producers and local exhibitors; the more companies an importer was

able to enlist, the more chances he had to launch his own production. Alexander

Khanzhonkov's production company started as a small commission agency selling films

and projection equipment manufactured by Théophile Pathé, Urban, Hepworth, Bioscope,

and Itala Film. Companies like Gaumont (until 1909), Warwick, Ambrosio, Nordisk, and

Vitagraph were represented by Pavel Thiemann, another powerful figure in the pre-

revolutionary film industry. Because it took a lot of travelling between Russia and the

exporting countries, the share of early American films on the Russian market was

relatively small. Pathé-Frères preferred to send their own representatives engaged in

equipment sales (from 1904), laboratory services, or production ( 1908-13). Gaumont

followed Pathé's example, but on a more modest scale.

Around 1906-7, film theatres in Moscow and St Petersburg started renting used prints to

the provinces, and the system of importers purchasing films from production companies

to resell to exhibitors began to be replaced. Specialized distribution agencies in Moscow

supplied prints to the city's theatres and regional agencies. Each regional agency

controlled several provinces, known as their 'distribution district' (prokatnyi rayon),

renting prints to local cinemas.

Incidentally or otherwise, the first home-produced films appeared when the distribution

system was fully established on the Russian film market. Combining production with

distribution in this way was the only hope of success for a film-producing company in

Russia in the 1910s. A vertically semi-integrated system allowed Russian studios to invest

the money they earned from distributing foreign films into native productions-a system

that would be used, with variable success, by the stock-holding company Sovkino in the

mid-1920s.

STRATEGIES

Two types of strategy -- disruptive and competitive -- were employed by studios

competing for the Russian market. Disruption (sryv), was a notorious gimmick whereby a

competitor's production was undermined by a cheaper (and sloppier) version of the same

subject (story, title) released earlier or on the same day. Borrowed from the theatre

entrepreneur F. Korsh (who used the method to rob competitors' first productions of their

novelty value), disruption was systematically employed in the film industry by financially

insecure companies like Drankov or Perski in order to tempt regional renting agencies

with a low-price alternative to Khanzhonkov's or Pathé's hits. This policy achieved little

beyond hectic production races and a pervasive atmosphere of paranoid secrecy. Distinct

from disruption, a strategy of competition (developed by studios with solid financial

backing: first Khanzhonkov, Pathé-Frères, Thiemann, and Reinhardt, later Yermoliev and

Kharitonov) consisted of promoting the idea of 'quality pictures' and turning a

recognizable studio style into a marketable value.

STYLE

In terms of style, Russian pre-revolutionary film-making falls into two periods, before

and after 1913. From 1908 and the first Russian-made movie (Drankov's Stenka Razin)

until 1913, the two main competitors were Khanzhonkov & Co. and Pathé-Frères.

However, in 1913 all foreign production in Russia was curtailed, and the exiting PathÉ

lent support to the rising studios of Thiemann & Reinhardt and Yermoliev. Promptly

followed by Khanzhonkov, they began redefining old standards of quality by creating

(and selling) films in the so-called 'Russian style'.

From its very beginning, early Russian film-making was marked by dependence on non-

cinematic culture. This can be explained partly by the belated start of Russian production.

Because the first Russian film, Stenka Razin, was made in the same year as L'Assassinat

du Duc de Guise ('The assassination of the Duc de Guise'), Russian film skipped the

entire period of tricks and chases which formed the basis of all other key national

cinemas, and started by trying to match the success of the film d'art.

Aside from forays into the sensationalist Grand Guignol style internationally practised in

European cinema in 1908-10 (and up to 1913 in Russia), film d'art style exercised

complete sway over the first period of Russian filmmaking. This tendency coincided with

(and was maintained by) the foreign policy of PathÉ-Frères, which, as Richard Abel has

suggested, was to produce culturally specific art pictures, mainly historical costume

dLmas and ethnographic pictures from peasant life. Because the Moscow production

department of Pathé was primarily concerned with the international market, the cultural

specificity of their films usually boiled down to touches of local colour: reportedly, no

one was able to talk the Pathé director Kai Hansen out of having a de rigueur samovar in

every frame, even in a film set in the sixteenth century, or having actors taking low

'boyard bows' instead of hat tipping in modern dramas. Khanzhonkov on the other hand

aimed its product at the domestic market, boasting cultural and ethnic authenticity in the

form of screen versions of Russian classical literature, directed by the studio's leading

director Pyotr Chardynin. The literary orientation of Khanzhonkov's style was the trump

card in their game against Pathé, to which the latter responded with live tableaux staged

after famous Russian paintings.

From 1911 the influence of the film d'art style on Russian film-making began to wane.

With Pathé and Gaumont production removed from the Russian scene, Russian

filmmaking found itself under the influence of the Danish and Italian salon melodrama.

The scene of action shifted from past to present and from the countryside to the city;

serious costume drama gave way to sophisticated melodrama with a decadent flavour. The

shift was epitomized by Vladimir Gardin's and Yakov Protazanov's 5,000-metre-long

(about three hours) hit The Keys to Happiness ( 1913), which pushed into prominence

Thiemann & Reinhardt, a studio hitherto overshadowed by Khanzhonkov and Pathé-

Frères. This film introduced a characteristic pause-pause-pause manner of acting (initially

called 'the braking school', later known simply as 'Russian style'), originally conceived as

a cinematic counterpart to Stanislavsky's method used on stage. This acting technique

soon evolved into a specific melancholy mood that is particularly pervasive in Yevgeny

Bauer's films shot for the Khanzhonkov Company.

The First World War, which closed so many borders to film imports, was the golden age

of the Russian film industry. Never before or since have Russian productions so

dominated the Russian film market. During 1914-16 an introverted, slow manner was

consciously cultivated. by Russian directors and formulated by the trade press as a

national aesthetic credo. The style was crystallized at Yermoliev's studio, which

developed typical characters -the femme fatale, the victimized woman, the neurotic man

-- and a typical mise-en-scène -- the motionless tableau with each character deep in

thought. The tableau image became more important than the development of the plot.

'Psychological' mannerisms and slow action became obsolete in the radical change

Russian film-making style was to undergo after 1917. In tune with the more general

process of cultural reorientation taking place in Soviet Russia, the notion of a well-made

plot (syuzhet) and rapid narrative became important in literature and film. The age of Lev

Kuleshov with his accelerated editing and obsessive action was heralded by Engineer

Prait's Project ( 1918) -- a film reflecting not so much changes in Russian society as

filmmakers' reaction to the past decade of film production.

PERSONALITIES

The best years of private production in Russia ( 1914-19) were marked by the increasing

role of film fandom. Initially promoted as local counterparts of foreign stars ('our

Psilander' Vladimir Maximov, or Vera Kholodnaya as 'Bertini of the North'), Russian

names were soon found to be winning over the public. This led to fresh strategies in

studio competition: some new studios emerged (like Kharitonov's) built entirely around

enticing stars with established reputations. Alongside the trade journals, fan magazines

started to appear. One titled Pegas, financed by Khanzhonkov and shaped like the 'thick'

literary magazines, regularly offered aesthetic discussions of cinema as art and the

contribution of individual film-makers. Thus the concept of a 'film director' with his or

her individual career was formed. Pyotr Chardynin had the reputation of an 'actor's

director'; after quitting Khanzhonkov's company for Kharitonov's in 1916 (with several

major actors joining him), Chardynin directed an all-star boxoffice hit The Tale of my

Dearest Love ( 1918), which saw a number of successful rereleases well into the Soviet

era. Yakov Protazanov was acclaimed for The Queen of Spades ( 1916), whose elaborate

costumes and set design imitated Alexander Benois's drawings; his reputation as 'high art

director' was confirmed by the success of Father Sergius ( 1918). Though less known

among the general public, the 'wizard' of animated insects Ladislas Starewitch was the

film-maker most in demand by the studios. However, among Russian directors he was the

only one who managed to preserve partial independence; he had a small studio of his own

and a free hand in his choice of subjects. In the eyes of their Soviet successors their pre-

revolutionary reputations turned directors into 'bourgeois specialists' (spetsy). With the

notable exception of the protean Protazanov, not one of them was able to make a

comparable career in the new Russia.

Bibliography

Ginzburg, Semion ( 1963), Kinematografiya dorevolyutsionnoy Rossii ('The cinema of

pre-revolutionary Russia').

Hansen, Miriam ( 1992), "Deadly Scenarios: Narrative Perspective and Sexual Politics in

Pre-revolutionary Russian Film".

Leyda, Jay ( 1960), Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film.

Likhachev, Boris ( 1926), Kino v Rossii.

Cherchi Paolo Usai, Codelli, Lorenzo, Montanaro, Carlo, and Rob David inson (eds.)

( 1989), Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 19081919.

Tsivian, Yuri ( 1989), "Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema".

Yevgeny Bauer (1867-1917)

Singed Wings ( 1915)

Regarded in Russia in the 1910s as his country's most important film-maker, only to be