Mr. Eisentein meets Mr. Gance

This semester, as I am of an age where I can take University classes for free, I am taking a course in Russian film history. It is a marvelous course taught by a master instructor, which makes it a joyous experience for me. This is my fifth free film class. Four of them have covered a history from beginning to present: general film history-in two parts over two semesters, documentary film history, and this one. The great thing about the total film histories is that I get to see lots of silent films.

I am developing quite a passion for silent films. I’ve talked about some of the other ones I’ve seen in another blog entry (An Interesting Movie), and there are many great, accessible American, German, French, Scandinavian, and Japanese silent films. But I knew nothing about the Russian silent film tradition before taking this class.

The main text of the class is A History of Russian Cinema, by Birgit Beumers. I’m not sure of this, but this appears to be a volume that could supplement (or supplant) Jay Leyda’s classic Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film as the go to source for the beginner in the topic. There is usually a chapter a week of reading in the Beumers book. Most of the film histories I’ve read intersperse the political, social, and economic background of the history with discussions and partial deconstructions of representative films of the time. And that is my problem. Since I always have a laptop close by when I read, and since most of the films discussed are not readily available (unless I want to wait for inter-library loans), I enter titles into Youtube, just to see what might be out there.  I have found that Youtube is an incredible film resource. There is more there than you can imagine. Yes, much of it is copyright violation, but that’s their problem, not mine. I just know that if I find something, I need to watch it, because it may not be there tomorrow.

And so the first week’s reading, about the beginnings of pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, were designed to get me ready to watch and discuss the first film on the syllabus, Jacov Protazonov’s Father Sergius (1917--click on cc for English subtitles--found November 2018). I never did find a proper copy of that on Youtube, but I barely got to it at all. I had to watch it on a dvd in the library as I couldn’t make the full screen showing. Father Sergius is a Tolstoy novella which the instructor assigned so that we would understand the difficulties of filming what is basically a psychological story. And it is an amazing film. Russian pre-revolutionary cinema was highly theatrical, very rich, with long takes and great depth of shots that showed everything going on at the same time, as opposed to the editing techniques pioneered by American films. It’s a very lyrical, almost poetic cinema. Beautiful to watch.

But on my way to Father Sergius, I learned about the origins of Russian cinema, and there, at Youtube, were those origins:  three very early and very short classics. They are all melodramas and they all have unhappy endings, a hallmark of early Russian film.

StenkaRazin (Vladimir Romashkov-1908--click on cc for English subtitles), the first Russian film, 

Princess Tarakanova (Kai Hansen and Andre Maitre-1910), 

Rusalka (Vasili Goncharov-1910)

Once I found them, my reading ended for  a while.

My reading really got hamstrung that first week when Beumers started talking about Yevgeni Bauer  (master of the early Russian melodrama) and Wlasdyslaw Starewicz (one of the earliest of animators in any cinema) and-via a non-Beumers inspired detour through Youtube- his connection to Emile Cohl, a French animator whose work inspired Starewicz’. Well, I spent a whole Saturday watching amazing Strarewicz stop motion (especially The Cameraman's Revenge) insect and puppet animation, early Cohl animation,  and Bauer melodramas (all of which had unhappy endings) (selected films have English subtitles--for the ones that don't have hard subtitles, try settings--the gear--subtitiles). They are all right there on Youtube. You need only type in the directors’ names to get the films. What an education. All I knew about Russian film was Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Tarkovsky. 

The second week was easier, as we concentrated on the first great theorist of Russian cinema, LevKuleshov and viewed his famous satire The Amazing Adventures of Mr. West in theLand of the Bolsheviks (1924). Kuleshov theorized about the power of editing in cinema, how it is the most powerful aspect of cinema, more powerful than story or acting. You can see it unfold in Mr. West on Youtube. Lots of fun. In addition to the text, we were asked to read about 100 pages from Kuleshov’s writing. Understanding Kuleshov is, for me, like trying to understand cricket or rugby from reading books about either sport. Incomprehensible until you actually see the theory in action. Then everything instantly makes sense. And while Beumers wrote about a lot of other Kuleshov films, hardly any can be found on Youtube, or anywhere else I looked. So I kept up with the reading that week.

The third week was Eisenstein. A chapter in the text about early revolutionary Soviet cinema and about 50 pages of Eisenstein theory. Eisenstein was a prolific writer. I didn’t understand any of it until I watched the assigned film, Strike (1924). The instructor wanted us to watch Strike because Battleship Potemkin (click on cc: for English subtitles) is so well known as to be almost a cliché. Strike for me was more powerful than Potemkin. Eisenstein uses editing didactically (intellectual montage or, as he called it, “montage of attraction”). He uses it in Strike to teach good Marxist dialectical lessons about the nature of Capitalism and Socialism. What a concept for a Hollywood film addict.  Film art can be motivated by something other than money. Eisenstein is one of the most written about directors in the history of cinema, and the way he made films has reverberated down the decades.  But the cool thing for me was that Eisenstein, in his early films, seems completely and unabashedly Marxist, the class struggle at the center of his cinema. There are no individuals in Strike, only collectives. Very much a tonic from most Hollywood films, which epitomize the cult of the individual.  I watched Strike on the big screen at the assigned “Lab” time, but there was so much, and it went so fast (it impressed me as almost muscular, the film had tremendous dynamic energy). So I went home, dialed up Youtube, and watched it again. I could see more the second time. An amazing film coming out of an industry wrecked by part I of the Thirty Years War and then the Civil War and invasion, hobbling on a destroyed infrastructure in a country in ruins, attacked from inside and out, as are most revolutions.

This week is Pudovkin. The film for this week is Deserter (1934) and is an early example of a Soviet sound film. Pudovkin adds sound to the montage. It’s at Youtube and I started watching it but then stopped to do the reading for the week. Tonight I was going to finish the reading but, of course, was delayed by two other films Beumers talked about, Protazanov’s (he emigrated after the Revolution, as did many other cinema artists, but then came back) Aelita (1924), a sci-fi film and New Babylon ((click on cc: for English subtitles) (Grigory Kozintzev andLeonid Trauberg -1929). Aelita is great fun, Marxism meets the Queen of Mars, but New Babylon  is quite something else. An amazing film about the Paris Commune. Very didactic. Very much in the dialectical montage tradition. Extremely polished, like many other of the great silent films that were produced in America and Europe between 1925-1930, when sound snuffed out (tragically, I think) a great art form. Both are at Youtube. New Babylon knocked my socks off.

So the films I’m seeing that are not assigned are at least as good and sometimes better than the films that are assigned. And I’m afraid I’ll never get caught up on the reading. But I’m getting quite an education. Discovering the depth, scope, and beauty of Russian-Soviet film is a wonderful experience. All thanks to Youtube and a great instructor.

Which leads me to one other point about great silent film. While reading all the theory about editing and montage from Kuleshov and Eisenstein, I got to thinking about the fact that I’d seen this stuff before. But where? D.W. Griffith does some of it, especially in Intolerance (1916), but the  master was Abel Gance, the great French film director of the late teens and 1920s. Gance is most famous for Napoleon (1927), but he actually was doing the things Eisenstein, Kuleshov and Pudovkin were doing years before them. Two essential films for anyone interested in the silent film art are J’accuse (no English subtitles (1919) and La Roue (TheWheel)--Kristin Thompson, "illustrated" commentary. J’accuse is available and watchable at Youtube, but La Roue, (no longer available at Youtube, is unwatchable. So I bit the bullet and bought the dvd from Flicker Alley. Its four hours of complete magic which I have no intention of trying to watch in one setting. In the first twenty minutes there are tricks of editing and montage that are decades ahead of their time. I wonder if the Russian directors saw these films.  Gance, for the most part, used these techniques to evoke very different emotions than the Russian directors, as you’ll quickly see if you watch.  La Roue, from what I have seen so far and read about (Kevin Brownlow, in his magnificent The Parade’s Gone By…, devotes a whole chapter to Gance) is one of the most amazing films, silent or otherwise, ever made.

So I’m really glad I took the course, but I may never catch up on the reading.