Introduction
Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin has fared comparatively and
curiously badly in the annals of Soviet ﬁlm history, in spite of the fame
and reputation enjoyed by his major works of the 1920s and early
1930s, at home and abroad.
In spite of his artistic status but also, paradoxically, as a consequence
of this popular success: as early as 1928 the avant-garde in Russia was
accusing Pudovkin of betraying the principles which it had entrusted
to him and of descending to outright commercialism; in the West, the
indictment that Pudovkin had disappointed the hopes previously
invested in him came later. According to Babitsky and Rimberg,
‘Kuleshov never relinquished his artistic credo and always opposed
the idea that the cinema should serve a narrow propaganda function,
whereas Pudovkin devoted his great talent wholly to the service of
the Party’.1
Indeed, Pudovkin was judged and found wanting not
only in particular ﬁlms but also by the supposedly retrogressive trend
which they announced to critics attached to a notion of a Soviet state
productive of work that could be readily identiﬁed as revolutionary
both in form and content. Winifred Ellerman (writing in the 1920s in
Britain), Le´on Moussinac (in France) and Vlada Petric´ (reporting, in
retrospect, American opinion of a similar date), recount that what
was most valued artistically in Soviet ﬁlm screened abroad was its
divergence from the home-grown product, even to the extent that
silent and black and white ﬁlms from Russia were preferred by arthouse
audiences well into the 1930s.2
Eugene Lyons, an American in
Moscow, commented in 1935 that:
There is little question that Russia is in advance of Hollywood and
most other places in the theory of ﬁlm art, in strikingly original and
effective photography – above all, in making pictures socially signiﬁcant
rather than merely amusing and ornamental. But the
general level of its picture output has been steadily declining instead
of rising.3
At one stage Pudovkin’s work appeared to embrace a new and
promising trend, distinct from the mainstream Hollywood product;
later it failed to satisfy the expectation that it would continue to change
and failed to mark progress by differentiating itself clearly from precedent
or in relation to whatever was happening elsewhere. Pudovkin’s
practice and especially his writing became increasingly conservative.
Pudovkin’s oeuvre has similarly proved unwieldy and unrewarding
to ﬁlm historians determined to map consistent traces of current work
and thinking in past practice and theory. This arguably modernist
position tends also to estimate the available evidence in so far as it can
be deemed to match, herald or approach current modes. Strangely, as
the supposed Russian Grifﬁth (an appellation suggested already by
Eisenstein and a comparison made by Piotrovsky) Pudovkin has also
been placed by his theoretical technique alongside the dominant Hollywood
tradition, and then has equally been found not to sit comfortably
in the place allotted to him. Certainly, much of Pudovkin’s writing in
the 1920s invites such a classiﬁcation, and certainly his concern with
clarity and economy of means is highly reminiscent of American
technical manuals of the teens.4
Noe¨l Burch has astutely observed a
number of points at which this is contradicted in Pudovkin’s concurrent
ﬁlm practice. Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom hint at a favourable
and fruitful way of regarding this divergence, I think, when they
conclude that inconsistencies in the spatial editing pattern ‘appear to
have been used deliberately’.5
It is the deliberateness with which such
patterns are interrupted, the licence that Pudovkin allows himself and
the particular choices that he makes in each individual case which
continue to warrant his being considered experimental. Fundamentally,
it seems to me, he is searching in each ﬁlm to achieve a particular
effect, to which end he may attempt something new or may resort to
the tried and trusted (as codiﬁed in 1926 in Kinostsenarii and Kinorezhisser
i kinomaterial); at best, Pudovkin’s means are economical and
purposeful.
Pudovkin himself has proved equally exasperating. Georges Sadoul’s
accusation of naivete´, made at a safe distance in time and space from
viii Vsevolod Pudovkin
Stalin’s dictatorship, is presumably prompted not only by his opinion of
Pudovkin’s collaboration with the regime, in his production of
compliant ﬁlms in which Sadoul found little artistic merit. Pudovkin
acted also as something of an ambassador for his country; the artistic
esteem in which the classic work of the 1920s stood later was opportunistically
recognised by the Soviet authorities as endorsing Pudovkin’s
respectability and stature as their spokesman abroad, and he duly participated
in peace congresses and cultural missions on their behalf. The
British scientist Waddington met Pudovkin in 1951 and was amazed at
his spirited defence of the biologist Lysenko, who was then regarded in
the West as thoroughly disreputable and a charlatan.6
Ironically,
although Pudovkin throughout the years voiced publicly his belief in
artistic freedom, he was also quick to recognise and to establish
himself in a politically expedient position. Certainly, Pudovkin was
prepared to repudiate his previous preoccupations, formed in response
to a discarded agenda, to denounce himself and the work of erstwhile
colleagues. Pudovkin was consistently politically compliant, but the
politics of the Soviet Union shifted such that communist and socialist
correspondents in the West (such as Sadoul) found that their sympathies
lay increasingly with those dissidents whose voices were silenced
rather than with those who continued to work for the Soviet state.
The lack of ease with which Pudovkin can be accommodated may
account for the partiality of treatment that his work has received: any
sustained investigation on either front can but acknowledge the
theoretically dissatisfying vicissitudes of the writing and the qualitative
unevenness of the ﬁlms. Monographs by Barthe´le´my Amengual,
Stefano Masi and Guido Aristarco devote themselves to the exemplary
works of Pudovkin’s heroic period (The Mother, The End of St.
Petersburg and Storm over Asia) as do Karaganov and Glagoleva.7
Iezuitov’s biography of 1937 provides a good discussion of the work
thus far and is the basis for Mariamov’s 1951 publication, the
prevailing tone of which is amply given by the 1954 German translation
Pudowkin: Kampf und Vollendung [Pudovkin: Struggle and
Achievement].8
Peter Dart (Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, 1974)
acknowledges Pudovkin’s earlier apprenticeship with Vladimir Gardin
but says nothing of the work itself, appends a translation from the
later writings but gives little space to the later ﬁlms. There are
occasional references to both periods in the reminiscences collected
together by Jean and Luda Schnitzer (Poudovkine, 1968), by Nina
Introduction ix
Glagoleva (Slovo o Pudovkine, 1968) and by Tatiana Zapasnik and Adi
Petrovich (O sebe i svoikh ﬁl’makh, 1975 and Pudovkin: v vospominaniiakh
sovremennikov, 1989).
My research has drawn upon these secondary materials, in addition
to Pudovkin’s own writings in books and journals. It is based upon
material in VGIK (the State School of Cinematography), in Gosﬁlmofond,
in the Muzei Kino, in RGALI (the Russian State Archive for
Arts and Literature) and in the State Library (formerly Lenin Library,
Moscow). The journals consulted actively endeavoured to construct
debates around particular themes: discussion of The Mechanics of the
Brain, in Sovetskoe kino 1, is accompanied by items concerning similar
scientiﬁc subjects; Sovetskoe kino 7, collects together reviews of
Barnet’s Moscow in October, Shub’s Ten Years, Eisenstein’s October and
Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg. But, in contrast to Eisenstein,
Pudovkin was increasingly unwilling to commit himself to a distinct
theoretical position. In addition I have consulted various memoirs
and articles written by his colleagues (Baranovskaia, Inkizhinov,
Zarkhi and especially Golovnia) and Eisenstein’s account of their
differences of opinion. Much of Pudovkin’s writing is theoretically not
well considered. Pudovkin, unlike Eisenstein, seemingly was not a
good apologist for his own work, nor is he comfortable with theoretical
writing for its own sake. Pudovkin participates in current debates
but rarely, unlike Eisenstein, initiates them himself. Pudovkin’s contribution
resides more in his ﬁlms than in the commentary offered
alongside them or in any theoretical explanation or interpretation
volunteered. Regarding Pudovkin’s writing as a whole it does not
command the overall cohesion or articulation or intellectual scope of
that of Eisenstein and has failed to attract similar extensive and rigorously
probing subsequent engagement. Furthermore, Eisenstein can
more readily be seen to adhere to avant-garde principles, consistently
re-formulating a theory of montage, that which 1920s theory had
estimated as the quintessence of ﬁlm art. In contrast, Pudovkin
becomes increasingly concerned with the art of acting, that which
1920s theory ﬁrmly consigned to the theatrical ﬁlm-making of the
past. However, it is my belief that his apparent renunciation, in
theory, of avant-garde tenets was already presaged in his working
practice. For Pudovkin, theory and theorising occupied a much less
signiﬁcant place in his practice and procedure than they did for Eisenstein;
Pudovkin was more inclined to be pragmatic and utilitarian,
x Vsevolod Pudovkin
Eisenstein (even while denouncing it as idle indulgence in others) was
given to idealistic speculation.
I am making a deliberate and pointed distinction here between
Pudovkin’s ‘writings’ and what may purport to be his ‘theory’ at any
given time. One of the purposes of the following project is to investigate
whether the writing does indeed ever constitute theory and, more
generally, in the pursuit of this project, to question what criteria are
thereby applied. I am concerned broadly with the place of Soviet
cinema (Soviet and cinema) in a particular intellectual tradition and
secondly with Pudovkin’s immediate context, as both ﬁlm-maker and
commentator. The second chapter discusses The Mechanics of the Brain
and the status of physiology before and after the Revolution. Discussion
of Storm over Asia (The Heir to Genghis Khan) marks the extension
to ﬁlm of a scientistic philosophy. The ﬁnal chapter endeavours to
summarise the bases of the supposed controversy between Eisenstein
and Pudovkin, setting this in a climate of heated polemicising and
questioning their respective use of scientiﬁc examplars.
Pudovkin in Context
Until comparatively recently, Soviet cinema has been broached as a
clearly deﬁned ‘school’, conducted by a small number of monolithic
directors, politically committed to the Revolution, producing canonical
masterworks exemplifying well-honed tomes of written theory. Eisenstein
and Pudovkin have been yoked together as ‘revolutionary’ ﬁlmmakers
by dint of their historical coincidence, at the expense of further
discussion of the disagreements documented by Eisenstein himself (see
chapter eight, below) and by well-informed contemporaries (such as
Meyerhold) and by later biographers (such as Marie Seton).9
Nor has
there been much negotiation of the particular relevance of the term
‘revolutionary’. Grierson reiterates the familiar comparison of
Pudovkin with Grifﬁth, saying that, stylistically, he was no revolutionary
at all.10
Peter Kenez doubts the suitability of the appelation,
given their adherence to and conformity with the aspirations of the
new regime;11
Renato Poggioli doubts that such an association can
ever be more than provisional:
. . . every avant-garde movement, in one of its phases at least, aspires
to realise . . . the ideal of ‘tabula rasa’ which spilled over from the
Introduction xi
individual and artistic level to that of the collective life. There is the
reason why the coinciding of the ideology of a given avant-garde
movement and a given political party is only ﬂeeting and contingent
. . . identiﬁcation of artistic revolution with social revolution is now
no more than rhetorical . . . Sometimes it may, though ephemeral,
be sincere, a sentimental illusion . . . more often we are dealing with
an extremist pose or fashion.12
This complacent, generalising, commonplace Western view of a Soviet
avant-garde, as Brandon Taylor observes, extends across a range of
artistic activity:
The revival of modernism in Britain and America in post-war years
. . . coincided with a hardening of attitudes towards the Soviet
Union and posture of downright dismissal towards ‘ofﬁcial’ Soviet
culture of the authoritarian years of Stalin’s rule after 1932 . . . until
recently European and American scholars produced a ﬂood of publications
devoted to Soviet abstraction and ‘modernism’, linked to
utopian interpretations of the events of 1917.13
Boris Groys, from whom I am adopting the apparent oxymoron
‘Classic Avant-Garde’, offers a polemically revisionist thesis, countering
the received wisdom of a Great Break in all Russian culture marked by
the rise of Stalin:
The myth of the innocent avant-garde rests upon the view that totalitarian
art of the 1930s and 1940s is a simple return to the past, a
purely regressive reaction to the new art that was unintelligible to the
masses . . . I argue that the relevant distinctions arose not because the
avant-garde project was abandoned but because it underwent a radicalisation
that the avant-garde itself was unable to accomplish.14
But certainly, artists themselves (notably Mayakovsky) found a direct
correlation between the vanguardism advocated by Lenin for the
correct conduct of the revolution and the self-proclaiming avant-garde
in art.15
Poggioli notes the tendency of modern art to ‘express the
avant-garde as its own extreme or supreme moment’,16
but again ﬁnds
the assumption of an automatic connection between political and
artistic activity not only facile but doomed to disappointment: ‘. . . the
xii Vsevolod Pudovkin
hypothesis (really only an analogy or a symbol) that aesthetic radicalism
and social radicalism, revolutionaries in politics, are allied,
which empirically seems valid, is theoretically and historically
erroneous’.17
The sentimental view here characterised tends also I
would suggest, to seek analogies between ﬁlm and concurrent ‘ﬁne’ art
practice rather than anything more common in its appeal, although
distinctions are somewhat blurred by the fascination of certain high-art
forms of the 1920s with popular culture (circus, jazz, cinema itself) and
the genuine intentions of academically trained artists to serve the proletariat
through popular and readily accessible material (posters, industrial
design, textiles, photography and so forth).18
In the past decade there has been more exposure and discussion of
pre-Revolutionary cinema, for its own sake and as a means of
countering what Ian Christie has identiﬁed as ‘the still prevalent view
that Soviet cinema was borne ex-nihilo with the Revolution’.19
There
has also been a number of complementary studies, resurrecting for a
modern audience the popular cinema of the 1920s and its continuity
with its pre-Revolutionary precursors, especially acknowledging the
long service in the industry of certain personnel (such as Protazanov
and Gardin)20
. (see chapter one, below) These necessarily confront the
embarrassment of the avant-gardists that such state-sponsored ﬁlms as
Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin [Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925] had
been, at time of release, unpopular with the proletariat for whose beneﬁt
they were intended and proved, as even contemporary foreign supporters
observed, more popular abroad than with domestic audiences.21
These ﬁlms were nevertheless advertised as having enjoyed enormous
popularity as an enticement to future attendance.22
Indeed, the course
of state policy in the ﬁlm industry in the 1920s is explicable only in
terms of its admitting the failure of such ﬁlms as Potemkin to do good
box ofﬁce and compete successfully with the imported product. For
instance, The Battleship Potemkin was replaced within days of release in
Moscow by Fairbanks’ Robin Hood.23
Cinema playbills of the NEP
period (1921–1925) list an extraordinary range of ﬁlms being shown
alongside one another. In 1928, Viktor Shklovsky voices a view by then
generally and expediently acknowledged (see chapter six, below):
We still entertain the notion of the spectator as something contained
and yet universal. We are surprised when mounted police are
required to disperse the queues for Harry Piel; when the peasants of
Introduction xiii
Novosibirsk spent the night in town to see Peasant Women of Ryazan.
We are surprised by the ﬁnancial collapse of The Mother and The
End of St. Petersburg and by the total success of a Queen of Spades
made ten years ago.24
Conversely, Soviet silent ﬁlms continued to be popular with foreign arthouse
audiences well into the sound period, perhaps slightly because of
their ‘revolutionary’ aura. The ﬁlms of Eisenstein and Pudovkin were
dealt with differently, and differently abroad according to particular
censors’ sensitivities.25
Pudovkin is not conveniently contained by any of these given
parameters. While no less a ﬁgure than the critic Galvano della Volpe
would declare Pudovkin his ‘aesthetic paradigm in cinema’, Pudovkin’s
The Mother was nevertheless not as unimpressive commercially as
Shklovsky alleges.26
Richard Taylor suggests that the press reviews of
The Battleship Potemkin and The Mother indicate the qualities in his
work which equipped Pudovkin all the better to survive under Stalin.27
Pudovkin was increasingly isolated by the avant-gardists even amongst
his contemporaries, possibly lending substance to Moussinac’s 1928
analogical classiﬁcation: ‘Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov . . . one could
say, for the sake of discussion, that on the same line of activity Eisenstein
ﬁnds himself in the centre, Pudovkin on the right and Vertov on
the left’.28
Iutkevich says that even with Storm over Asia contempt for
his perceived abandonment and betrayal of ‘pure’ cinema was being
expressed (see also chapter ﬁve, below):
Pudovkin was deﬁnitely rejected and excommunicated by . . . a
group of theoreticians, partisans of montage cinema, ‘grand’ and
‘pure’. Storm over Asia was considered as regressive, contrary to the
general direction of cinema, submissive to its subject and to mere
chances of fortune, and other reprehensible things . . . there was a
conspiracy of silence around this ﬁlm.29
Many of Pudovkin’s contemporaries were ostracised, even eventually
driven into exile by Stalin’s rise to power and the concomitant restrictions
on artistic freedom: even Boris Groys admits as much. Accusations
of formalism and modernism were then to become a code ‘for a
high intellectual level not suitable for propaganda purposes’.30
Pudovkin survived, continuing to direct ﬁlms almost to the last.
xiv Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pudovkin’s writings: Western approaches
Writing to Ralph Parker in 1958, Ivor Montagu says that ‘Film
Technique and Film Acting in the English-speaking world have been
reprinted again and again . . . because they have been the only simple
materials on deep fundamentals available. There is just as much
interest in them, as basic classics, as ever’.31
Even in the 1980s, Ivor
Montagu continued to argue for the ‘value to the present generation’ of
his translations of Pudovkin.32
According to Paul E. Burns, writing in
1981, ‘Pudovkin’s present reputation primarily derives from his theoretical
writings, which are straightforward and accessible’.33
If this claim
is to be accepted, it seems worth enquiring in what form his writings
were received in the West, to what extent this corresponds to their
original publication and whether the vicissitudes of his career as a
director are consistently represented in print.
Pudovkin’s ﬁrst article, ‘Time in Cinematography’, was written while
he was with the Kuleshov workshop and appeared in Kino in February
1923 (see chapter one, below).34
Mostly, Pudovkin applied himself to
subjects which were of popular concern and which were commonly
addressed elsewhere. In 1926 he published in Moscow The Film
Director and Film Material [Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial] and also The
Film Scenario [Kinostsenarii]. Both very slim, very small volumes
contributed to a ‘popular science’ series of some twenty titles, including
also Turkin’s The Cinema Actor and Gavriushin’s I Want to Work in
Cinema; forthcoming attractions included a couple of items by Osip
Brik, also a History of Cinema and Cinema City and the Work of the Film
Studio in America. Neither of Pudovkin’s 1926 publications were
illustrated or referenced. Ivor Montagu translated and amalgamated
them under the title Film Technique. Pudovkin gave the project his
blessing:
Your proposal to translate my book into English pleased me
greatly. I consider it of the utmost urgency to draw together ideas,
in order that cinema workers of all countries may stand with one
another in close alliance. Not many important and interesting
thoughts emerge during the course of work, just for want of such a
union. In so far as my book demonstrates the main theoretical
principles I will look forward especially to the appearance of the
book in English.35
Introduction xv
Throughout the 1920s, Pudovkin gave academy lectures at home and
abroad and produced articles for newspapers and periodicals: Kino;
Sovetskoe kino; Kino-gazeta; Sovetskii ekran; Kino-zhurnal ARK; Kino i
kul’tura. A selection of these were incorporated into the 1935 and later
editions of Film Technique and, as a matter of courtesy, Montagu
continued to send Pudovkin a share of the royalties.36
By the early 1930s, Pudovkin’s writings for domestic and foreign
consumption accommodate the shift in emphasis urged by the state.
Articles in Experimental Cinema denounce the preoccupation of Soviet
directors in earlier years with montage at the expense of all else,
notably plot and character development.37
In 1934, Pudovkin’s The
Actor in Film [Akter v ﬁl’me] was published in Leningrad with an introduction
by Iezuitov (see chapter six, below). Pudovkin is praised for his
warmth and sincerity towards people and to the cause of the working
class. Iezuitov, remembering his ﬁrst encounter with Pudovkin in The
Mother, hotly contests accusations from the intelligentsia, expressed in
scholarly journals, that Pudovkin’s ﬁlms serve a bourgeois ideology, are
merely schematic and lacking in dialectic.38
The book’s illustrations
include Pudovkin in his roles in Kuleshov’s The Death Ray [Luch
smerti, 1925] and Otsep’s The Living Corpse [Zhivoi trup, 1929], of
Nikolai Batalov and Vera Baranovskaia in The Mother and Valeri Inkizhinov
in Storm over Asia.39
Pudovkin cautioned Montagu before he
embarked upon the translation:
I must warn you that this book has been done peculiarly. It has not
been written but dictated, therefore I am very much afraid that it
lacks the requisite continuity and line. Some questions have been set
in the beginning and not solved, simply because I had forgotten
about them towards the end of my speech . . . at all cost when publishing
the book make mention that it has not been WRITTEN
BUT TAKEN DOWN from my speeches in the Academy . . . write
to me about all the unclarities which you will come across when
translating (e.g. you probably do not know what the meaning of the
‘rehearsal period of Kuleshov’ is etc.). I shall send you at once the
necessary ampliﬁcations and explanations. If a special foreword is
necessary for the English edition I shall also write this.40
There is little new personal development in Pudovkin’s later writing,
nor does he make an innovative contribution to a general debate (see
xvi Vsevolod Pudovkin
chapter seven, below). Much he seemingly arrives at second-hand: for
instance, writing in Iskusstvo kino in 1938, Pudovkin acknowledges the
usefulness of Rudolph Bode’s system of gymnastics (which Eisenstein
had discussed in 1924 and included in his curriculum) and of Delsarte
(familiar to all erstwhile pupils of Gardin and Kuleshov and, similarly,
a ﬁlm school staple).41
(see chapter one, below) His later articles tend
to harp upon a single, safe theme: ‘Realism, Naturalism and Stanislavsky’s
‘‘System’’ ’, [‘Realizm, naturalizm i ‘‘sistema’’ Stanislavskogo’,
1939]; ‘Stanislavsky’s Idea and Cinema’ [‘Idei Stanislavskogo i kino’,
1948]; an introduction to Aleinikov’s book The Paths of Soviet Cinema
and the Moscow Art Theatre [Puti sovetskogo kino i MKhAT, 1946] and
‘The Actor’s Work in Cinema and Stanislavsky’s ‘‘System’’ ’ [‘Rabota
aktera v kino i ‘‘sistema’’ Stanislavskogo’, 1952].42
Pudovkin continued
to publish articles into the 1940s and 1950s, allowing his name to be
attached to proselytising state publications intent upon the promotion
of current Soviet ﬁlm practice elsewhere and the denunciation of
bourgeois formalism. In Soviet Films: Principal Stages of Development
(1951), he declares that:
. . . the ﬁrst works of Kuleshov idealised American detective ﬁlms
with their empty and only superﬁcial dynamics . . . FEKS . . . expected
to produce cinema actors and ﬁlms which ﬁrst of all would
strike spectators by the unusualness of their affected form. Young
Eisenstein produced . . . The Strike ﬁlled with mere formal tricks.
Instead of showing a serious and important stage in the history of
the Russian labour movement, the formalistic freaks of the author
led spectators away from real life, confused and sometimes distorted
the link of the ﬁlm with actual historical reality.43
Meanwhile, Ivor Montagu’s original translation of Film Technique and
Film Acting was pirated and published without his permission in the
United States. The USSR was not party to international copyright
agreements, making it possible for material to be taken without
consent. Montagu intended a new edition as a counter-attack, to which
Pudovkin provisionally agreed; he could have proceeded in the absence
of Pudovkin’s authorisation but felt ‘morally bound not to do so’.
Pudovkin is very interested to bring out an edition but only in the
following form. With a new critical preface by himself or by himself
Introduction xvii
and myself jointly; possibly adding an essay he has written on the
history of Soviet ﬁlm and . . . delivered as a speech a short while
ago; and possibly the iconography brought up to date . . . It is my
feeling, though, that he will not get down to the critical preface and
notes side of the work until he is pressed.44
In subsequent years, Montagu and Herbert Marshall continued to
badger Pudovkin into producing the new material, which was in turn
repeatedly promised. Montagu’s despatch of 27 June 1952 runs as
follows:
Dear Vsevolod Illarionovich
I am writing to send you what has almost become an annually
repeated letter of reproach.
You promised me some time ago that you would write a new
preface for the famous work ‘Pudovkin on Film Technique’, written
to apply to silent days, placing it in perspective; and you said that
until you had written this preface you did not wish it to be re-
printed.
When last we met I told you, and it is still the case, that there is
great interest in this book all over the world. This is not because
people are under any illusion that the book is the last word on ﬁlm
art as it is understood today, or in its realist application, but as a
classic of silent cinema and therefore part of the complete storehouse
of culture with which all intending students should make
themselves familiar.
I am constantly being pressed to allow a reprint and up to now have
always had to refuse because waiting for the preface which you promised.
The result is that the Americans, after vainly trying to get
our permission, have already stolen the book and published their
own reprint without any beneﬁt to us and destroyed part of the
market for any revised authorised edition which we might eventually
publish.
This cannot be helped, but I am reminded of the situation by the fact
that I have today received a request from Japan to be allowed to
publish a translation and have once again to give the reply that this
cannot be allowed . . . But is it not possible for you to turn out even if
only just a little brief introduction, that will enable us to take control
of all these proposals once again? Our failure to do so does not act as
xviii Vsevolod Pudovkin
a dam to the ﬂood of editions, only diverts them into unauthorised
forms . . .45
Eventually, in 1955, a new selection of Pudovkin’s writings was
published posthumously in the Soviet Union and Ivor Montagu asked
for advice as to its potential merit in translation.46
His old friend Sergei
Nolbandov was not encouraging:
Here is my general opinion. Frankly I was disappointed. There is
nothing new or exciting from a ﬁlm technique point of view. A great
deal is polemical, on the defensive, public self-criticism which
sounds a little false and is in a way rather unpleasant. So is the selfjustiﬁcation.
The style is rather turgid and pompous, studded with
‘educated long words’ and often loaded with pious political orthodoxy.
This was of course absent in Pudovkin’s earlier work. In many
instances you will ﬁnd political statements in the approved manner
. . . ‘Towards the Communist Target’ – high faluting and pompous;
‘How I became a ﬁlm director’ – which unfortunately tells very little
of ‘how’ – I would recommend a foreword . . . On the whole I do
not feel that any of this material, except Pudovkin’s radically
changed views on ‘typage’ and professional acting (versus the Stanislavsky
system) and his more interesting and developed theories of
montage would add any lustre to the old edition. There is a general
aura of fossilisation over the whole thing. It may be that his elephantine
style and heavy humour just get me down. I was rather
bored.47
The edition under discussion was out of print by 1960. Currently, the
most complete collections of Pudovkin’s writings are available only in
Russian: The Collected Works [Sobranie sochinenii, 1974–1977] edited
by Karaganov with Zapasnik and Petrovich; the second volume of this,
About Myself and My Films [O sebe i svoikh ﬁl’makh, 1975], edited by
Zapasnik and Petrovich, is partly available in German as Time in CloseUp
[Die Zeit in Grossaufnahme, 1983].
For leftist ﬁlm-makers and artists of the 1920s, producing works of
theory was a required corollary to practice. More crucially, theory was
required in order that things could be made and made effective (see
chapter eight, below). Mayakovsky stated the ground rules of his own
practice, more craft perhaps than art:
Introduction xix
Poetry is a manufacture. A very difﬁcult, very complex kind, but a
manufacture.
Instruction in poetical work doesn’t consist in the study of already
ﬁxed and delimited models of poetical works, but a study of the
procedures of manufacture, a study that helps us to make new
things.48
Through their writings they entered into ﬁerce debate with one
another (for instance, the damning by Mayakovsky in Kino and by
others of Eisenstein’s depiction of Lenin in October) and with
commentators abroad. The journals construct debates around particular
themes. Discussion of The Mechanics of the Brain in Sovetskoe
kino 1 is accompanied by items concerning similar scientiﬁc subjects
(see chapter two, below); Sovetskoe kino 7 collects together reviews of
Barnet’s Moscow in October, Shub’s Ten Years, Eisenstein’s October and
Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg. Petrov’s What the Cinema Actor
Needs to Know (1926) and likewise Pudovkin’s The Actor in Film
(1934) address themselves to the need to familiarise oneself with the
whole collective ﬁlm-making process. Kuleshov dedicates his The Art
of the Cinema (1929) to cinema audiences, executives and ﬁlmmakers,
seeking to engender a discussion between these parties and
to engage a larger public in the issues raised.49
Pudovkin speaks of
the need for a popular audience to be schooled in ﬁlm-watching as
it is becoming in literature. However, even in the journal articles,
Pudovkin’s early writing adopts a measured form and lacks the
predominant political thrust and angry polemicising which characterises
the self-styled manifestos of the period. He never presumes
for himself or for his practice an exclusive prerogative on correct-
ness:
The ﬁlm is yet young and the wealth of its methods is not yet
extensive; for this reason it is possible to indicate temporary limitations
without necessarily attributing to them the permanence and
inﬂexibility of laws.
Everything said here regarding simple methods of taking shots has
certainly only information value. What particular method of shooting
is to be used, only his own taste and his own ﬁner feelings can
tell the scenarist. Here are no rules; the ﬁeld for new invention and
combination is wide.50
xx Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pudovkin’s writing is tempered and qualiﬁed by the recognition of the
potential in ﬁlm yet to be discovered: Dziga Vertov sets the tone
against which I am casting Pudovkin:
WE call ourselves Cine-Eyes as distinct from cinematographers: that
ﬂock of junk-dealers who do rather well peddling their rags . . . WE
declare the old ﬁlms, the romantic, the theatricalised etc., to be
leprous.51
This haranguing of the reader was not conﬁned to ﬁlm criticism.
‘Everyone who feels himself capable of doing so’, jibes Zamiatin, ‘is
required to compose treatises, epic poems, manifestos, odes or other
compositions dealing with the beauty and grandeur of One State’.52
However, privileged by its comparative youth, its popular and transnational
appeal and its documentary attachment to contemporary events
as they happened, ﬁlm was credited with particular effect and impetus.
Much of early ﬁlm theory, in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, is
concerned with establishing the equal status of ﬁlm with the ancient
arts (Caciotto, Canudo, Arnheim, Harms, Lindsay et. al.) and also
with delineating its distinct parameters. Although Kuleshov, Pudovkin
and Eisenstein elect to practise montage differently, true to type as a
Soviet ‘school’, in the 1920s at least, they agree that editing is the
technique by which ﬁlm distinguishes itself. Pudovkin stresses also the
nature of its material base, the substance which the artist/director
handles and crafts in the editing process:
. . . the active raw material for the ﬁlm director is those pieces of
celluloid on which, from various view points, the separate movements
have been shot.53
This emphasis on the materiality of ﬁlm and its origins in photography
placed its claims qua art in an arguable position, amply articulated by
the various polemicising factions. The cameraman Vladimir Nilsen
reports the unanimity with which the congress of ‘Russian Artists and
Amateurs of Art’ in 1894 disqualiﬁed photography’s artistic ambitions:
‘Photography may serve as a simple substitute but not as an independent
means of artistic creation’.54
Photography was rejected as a
merely mechanical record. Pudovkin implicitly responds to the extension
of this dismissal to ﬁlm. In The Film Director and Film Material, he
Introduction xxi
stresses the distance in the relationship between the fabricated product
(the ﬁlm) and its various subjects in nature, the happening of real
events in real space and real time: ‘To show something as everyone
sees it is to have accomplished nothing’.55
Pudovkin prioritises editing
as the process of synthesis and transformation of material required in
order that ﬁlm should attain accreditation as art, but also acknowledges
that the most basic element of ﬁlm, the individual camera set-up,
is fundamentally analytical, selective and estranged from natural
perception:
Normal human vision can embrace a little less than 180º of surrounding
space . . . the ﬁeld of the lens is considerably less . . .
already the director begins to leave behind the normal apprehension
of real space . . . picks out from it only a part . . . Not only does the
small view angle set bounds to the space in which the action develops
both in height and in width but . . . the depth of the space
picked out is also limited.56
In this straightforward acknowledgement of the formal implications for
ﬁlm imposed by the camera’s technical properties, Pudovkin at once
marks himself out from the cultish commentaries of many of his
contemporaries. The camera and camera lens appear as a frequent
motif on ﬁlm posters, often superimposed on a bespectacled or naked
eye (for instance, the posters by Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers
for Vertov, and the Stenbergs’ poster for Ruttmann’s Berlin [Germany,
1927].57
Anatoli Golovnia, Pudovkin’s cameraman, was photographed
framed by a lens for Lily Brik’s Eye of Glass [1929]. ‘I am the CineEye’,
proclaimed Vertov:
I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as
only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from
human immobility. I am in constant motion. I approach objects
and move away from them I creep up to them I clamber over them
I move alongside the muzzle of a running horse. I tear into a
crowd at full tilt I ﬂee before ﬂeeing soldiers I turn over on my
back I rise with aeroplanes I fall and rise with falling and rising
bodies . . . Freed from any obligation to 16–17 frames a second,
freed from any restraints of time and space I juxtapose any points
in the universe regardless of where I ﬁxed them. My path leads
xxii Vsevolod Pudovkin
towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I can thus
decipher a world that you do not know.58
The recurrence of the image asserts the primacy of the camera as an
instrument of vision itself, but also asserts the camera-derived image as
the product of a machine, and, as such. an object of veneration. Vertov,
like Mayakovsky, urged that material be drawn from the street,
constantly mobile and constantly changing.59
Vertov argued that, by
recording life as it was, by making ﬁlms of fact rather than of
constructed ﬁction, he was closer to an authentic view of the world
and that this authenticity constituted an art more appropriate to a
revolutionary society. Indeed, Vertov was with extraordinary alacrity
and facility simply turning the old academicians’ objection to photography
on its head: the mechanical, documentary functions which had
hitherto denied its artistic status were now pronounced its crowning
glory.
Pudovkin’s ﬁlms: Western approaches
Devotees of Pudovkin’s ﬁlms, as of his writing from the Heroic Age of
Soviet Cinema, have, for the most part, disparaged his later work for
its want of inventiveness and the apparent willingness to comply
with an orthodox cultural and ideological agenda. However, the spirit
with which Pudovkin launched himself into the early experiments with
montage and ‘close-ups in time’ is not entirely lost: the French critic
Pierre Billard was sufﬁciently generous to ﬁnd something worthwhile
amidst the routine dreams of tractors in The Harvest [Vozvrashchenie
Vasiliia Bortnikova, 1952], praising it for its adventurous use of
colour.60
During the war, Suvorov (1941) was praised in some unlikely
quarters in the Allied Nations, for its portrayal of an historic Russian
victory against Austria.61
Nakhimov won Pudovkin a prize at the 1947
Venice Festival for his direction of crowd scenes. Meanwhile, Georges
Sadoul, like Nolbandov, accuses Pudovkin of naivete´, intending, I
think, his style and temperament and his complicity with the state.62
Dmitri and Vladimir Shlapentokh say that Pudovkin was sufﬁciently
astute to supply Dukelsky, head of Soviet cinema from 1938, ‘with new
‘‘evidence’’ of the criminal activity of the previous leadership. At the
same time, as a good friend, he tried to exploit this discussion in favour
of his colleagues by suggesting that they were also victims of ‘‘enemies
Introduction xxiii
of the people’’ who controlled cinematography. In this way he was able
to protect both himself and his friends’;63
but the Shlapentokhs hold
Pudovkin signiﬁcantly accountable, though certainly not alone, in the
denunciation under Stalin of himself and former colleagues. It is
beyond the scope of the present enquiry to attempt to estimate the
sincerity of Pudovkin’s service after the so-called Great Break, or, for
that matter, to question his original adherence to the ideological and
cultural ideals of the 1920s. Gabrilovich probably comes near to a truth
by which I, at least, am persuaded: ‘In order to understand so many of
the puzzles, secrets and absurdities of our complicated life, it is necessary
to comprehend most of all, the real signiﬁcance of fear’. Gabrilovich
places himself, along with Eisenstein, amongst those who
managed to glorify reality ‘but with various reservations and innuendoes’.
Eisenstein, for instance, sought an ‘expert’ opinion from Stalin
as to the exact length of Ivan the Terrible’s beard.64
Nor was Pudovkin,
although managing to continue to work, exempt from criticism from
ofﬁcials and onetime colleagues: Rotha, writing in 1951, reports the
criticisms levelled at Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko ‘for
the pursuit of barren intellectualism’;65
certainly there was much
wrangling with the censors over The Deserter and the actor Mikhail
Bleiman says that he well remembers Pudovkin pleading his case ‘in
the blue room’.66
Life is Very Good was drastically re-worked; Suvorov
was the subject of a letter to the director from Stalin himself and was
publically viliﬁed67
(see chapter six, below).
Pudovkin’s The Actor in Film and the journal articles of the early
1930s appear already to endorse what had by then become ofﬁcial
doctrine. It may be that Pudovkin was prepared to compromise the
previous theoretical principles in order to survive but I should like to
suggest that the ease with which he seemingly acclimatised himself to a
revival of ‘psychologism’ in ﬁlm was equally presaged in his direction
in the 1920s of The Mother and Storm over Asia and in his performance
in The Living Corpse: that is to say, the writing expressed a practice in
which he already felt comfortable. In his portrayal of the unloved and
unloving husband Theodore, Pudovkin adopts a minimalist style: the
slow lowering and raising of the eyes as a gesture of resignation; the
merest hint of a shrug of the shoulders to indicate the tedium and indifference
with which he now meets the world and accepts the sole
prospect for his own redemption.
Peter Dart’s monograph, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory (1974),
xxiv Vsevolod Pudovkin
takes it for granted that the selected writings of Pudovkin under consideration
constitute a work of theory. There is no discussion of what
might be usefully deemed a ﬁlm theory nor yet what might be
construed as theory per se. Given that Pudovkin is frequently tagged
‘the Russian Grifﬁth’, there lacks any consideration on Dart’s part that
Pudovkin’s chief purpose may have been no more than to codify and
lend testimony to techniques which he judged had proved themselves
already efﬁcacious elsewhere. Pudovkin’s The Film Scenario and The
Film Director and Film Material appeared shortly after the premier of
The Mother; The Actor in Film appeared after the much delayed completion
of A Simple Case (Life is Very Good) and The Deserter and refers
also to the performance in The Living Corpse. Both Pudovkin and Eisenstein
quote practical work in which they have been engaged in order to
illustrate and clarify the argument presented. Pudovkin frequently
refers to his experiences on set with Doller, Golovnia, Baranovskaia,
Batalov, Inkizhinov, Zarkhi and others. He is willing to share credit
and says that ideas could be volunteered by any one of them, to be
taken up by the group. Indeed I venture to suggest that, for the most
part, Pudovkin’s writing would be better represented as a collection of
workshop ‘receipts’. In comparison to Eisenstein, Pudovkin’s output of
theoretical material was not large, and unlike Eisenstein, he seemed to
lack the temperament (or the stomach) for theoretical writing for its
own sake (see chapter eight, below). While Pudovkin later balked at
Montagu’s request for new material, perhaps restrained by a reluctance
to fall foul unwittingly of the authorities, and conﬁned himself to the
repetition of safe and pious platitudes, Eisenstein continued ever to
elaborate and revise the theoretical basis of ﬁlms he would not live to
realise; Eisenstein seemingly enjoyed theoretical endeavour as a distinct
enterprise.
In conclusion to his 1974 thesis, Peter Dart conveniently invokes
Bazin’s preference for depth of ﬁeld and the expansive, uninterrupted
spaciousness of full-focussed shots as more cinematic than the
fragmented analysis necessary for montage; he draws from Bazin
the moral that such means are inherently less intentional on the part of
the director, more democratically involving of the spectator. Dart sets
up Bazin in opposition to the Soviet ‘school’, whose ﬁlmic methods
he then facilely suggests are concomitant in their marked intentionality
with a dictatorship over the ﬁlm audience and the wider public.
‘According to Bazin’, says Dart, ‘montage as used by Kuleshov,
Introduction xxv
Eisenstein or Pudovkin, ‘‘did not give us the event, it alluded to it’’ ’.68
However I ﬁnd the assumption made by Dart of a direct correlation
between methods and political context (‘Pudovkin’s ﬁlm theory is’, he
declares, ‘well-suited to the ends of socialist-realism’) unconvincing
both as a general thesis and in the particular circumstances of Soviet
ﬁlm in the 1920s and early 1930s. Also I ﬁnd the suggestion that Bazin
was himself hostile to, or unappreciative of, early Soviet achievements
in ﬁlm misplaced and erroneous. Bazin distinguishes between two
broad and opposing trends:
. . . those directors who put their faith in the image and those who
put their faith in reality. By ‘image’ I here mean, very broadly
speaking, everything that the representation on the screen adds to
the object there represented. This is a complex inheritance but it can
be reduced essentially to two categories: those that relate to the
plastics of the image and those that relate to the resources of
montage, which, after all, is simply the ordering of images in time.69
Bazin praises the image of the stone lions (while wrongly accrediting
this to The End of St. Petersburg) as ‘a symbol of the aroused masses’
and lauds Eisenstein: ‘Maybe it does not really matter if Russian
painting is second rate providing Russia gives us ﬁrst rate cinema.
Eisenstein is her Tintoretto’.70
But Bazin generally values the development
of a cinema of reality, marked by a number of formal traits:
Well-used, shooting in depth is not just a more economical, but a
simpler, and at the same time a more subtle way of getting the most
out of a scene. In addition to affecting the structure of ﬁlm language,
it also affects the relationships of the minds of the spectators
to the image, and in consequence it inﬂuences the interpretation of
the spectacle . . . in general terms:
1) . . . depth of focus brings the spectator in closer relation with the
image than he is with the reality. Therefore it is correct to say that,
independently of the contents of the image, its structure is more rea-
listic;
2) . . . it implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on
the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his
part to the action in progress. While analytical montage only calls
for him to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along
xxvi Vsevolod Pudovkin
smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should
see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal
choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of
the image in part derives.
3) From the two preceding propositions, which belong to the realm
of psychology, there follows a third which may be described as
metaphysical. In analysing reality, montage presupposes of its very
nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. Some other form
of analysis is undoubtedly possible but then it would be another
ﬁlm. In short, montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of
expression. Kuleshov’s experiment proves this ‘per absurdum’ in
giving on each occasion a precise meaning to the expression on a
face, the ambiguity of which alone makes the three successively
exclusive expressions possible.71
When Bazin proceeds to a discussion of the particular cinema which
he values most highly (the Italian School of the Liberation), he again
posits a notion of reality in which he requires the director to place his
faith: ‘Is not neo-realism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily
a style of ﬁlm-making? Then as to the style itself, is it not essentially
a form of self-effacement before reality?’; ‘I am prepared to see
the fundamental humanism of the current Italian ﬁlms as their chief
merit. They offer an opportunity to savour, before time ﬁnally runs out
on us, a revolutionary ﬂavour in which terror has yet no part’.72
However, in as much as Bazin’s predisposition for reality over image
inclines him towards a particular subject matter as direct source, he
ﬁnds the true precursor of Paisa`, as a ﬁlm and as an event, in the
Soviet ‘school’ and especially in The Battleship Potemkin:
Was it not from the outset their search for realism that characterised
the Russian ﬁlms of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko as
revolutionary both in art and politics, in contrast to the expressionist
aestheticism of the German ﬁlms and Hollywood’s mawkish star
worship?73
Bazin’s view of the afﬁnity between Pudovkin and neo-realism is apparently
endorsed by the Italians themselves. Zavattini comments:
‘Pudovkin for us, is not only a great director, Pudovkin for us is
cinematography’; Umberto Barbaro adds: ‘Pudovkin’s creative work
Introduction xxvii
brings together, into an harmonious and uniﬁed whole, a profoundly
humane perception of humanity, both theoretically and artistically’.74
Consequently, it may be not just a reappraisal of Pudovkin that is
now required, but also an examination of the received canon in which
he has habitually found himself placed.
Notes
1
Paul Babitsky and John Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry, New York 1955, p. 122
2
see Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), Film Problems of Soviet Russia, Territet 1928; Le´on
Moussinac, Le Cine´ma sovie´tique, Paris 1929; Vlada Petric´, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in
the U.S.A.’, Ph.D., N.Y. U, 1973
3
Eugene Lyons, Modern Moscow, London 1935, p. 252
4
see, for instance, Epes Winthrop Sargent, The Technique of the Photoplay, New York 1913;
H. A. Phillips, The Photodrama, New York 1914; Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures,
London 1912
5
Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, Preface to Film, London 1954, p. 70
6
C. H. Waddington report, Sight and Sound, 17.68 (1951), p. 159
7
Barthe´le´my Amengual, V.I. Poudovkine, Lyon 1968; Stefano Masi, V.I. Pudovkin,
Florence 1985; Guido Aristarco, ‘Teoria di Pudovkin’, Bianco e Nero 9.5 (1948); Nina
Glagoleva, Mat’, Moscow 1975
8
N. Iezuitov, Pudovkin: Puti tvorchestva, Moscow 1937; A. Mariamov, Pudovkin, Moscow
1951 and Pudowkin: Kampf und Vollendung, Berlin 1954
9
Marie Seton, Eisenstein, London 1952, p. 92: Eisenstein and Pudovkin would stay up
late into the night arguing; ‘each bought a dog and gave the poor beast the name of his
rival. Pudovkin taught his dog, Eisenstein, to beg for titbits, while Eisenstein shouted at
his dog, Pudovkin, to make it obey him’; see also RGALI 2060/1/161, letter from Marie
Seton to Pudovkin 8 September 1949: ‘Do you remember how I insisted that [Eisenstein]
was a wonderful person and you were skeptical . . ..’
10
Forsyth Hardy, ed. Grierson on Documentary [1946], London 1979, pp. 24: ‘Do not
believe it if people tell you we have only to go to the Russians for our guide. The
Russians are naturally on the same job as ourselves and more deliberately and with less
patience of the reactionary and sentimental Poets-in-Blazers who take the honours of art
in our own country. But, looking at the core of the problem, what in fact have they given
us? Pudovkin is only Grifﬁth in Revolutionary garb with the sensation of a Revolutionary
victory by arms to balance the Ride of the Klansmen and the other fake climaxes of
Grifﬁthian cinema’.
11
Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, Cambridge 1992, p. 51
12
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge MA 1968, p.96
13
Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks II, London 1992, p.xvi
14
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, Princeton 1992, p. 8; see also ‘The Birth of
Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde’, Hans Gu¨nther, ed. The
Culture of the Stalin Period, London 1990
15
V.I. Lenin, ‘Dogmatism and ‘‘Freedom of Criticism’’ ’, What is to be Done? [1902],
trans. Robert Service, Harmondsworth 1988, p. 92
xxviii Vsevolod Pudovkin
16
Poggioli, p. 81
17
Poggioli, p. 95; see also Daniel Herwitz, ‘Constructivism’s Utopian Game with
Theory’, Making Theory/Constructing Art, Chicago 1993
18
see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, London 1986, also Paris-Moscou, Paris
1979 and Berlin-Moskva/Moskau-Berlin, Berlin 1995
19
the IAMHIST conference ‘Russian and Soviet Cinema: Continuity and Change’ (see
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2.2 [1991]), the publication of Yuri Tsivian
and Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Witnesses, London 1986, Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in
Russia and its Cultural Reception, London 1994 and Denise J. Youngblood, The Magic
Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia 1908-1918, Madison 1999, as also the BFI video series
‘Russian Pioneers’, have gone some way towards correcting this misapprehension
20
Ian Christie and Julian Graffy, Protazanov, London 1993
21
Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), p. 30
22
Kristin Thompson, ‘Government Policies and Practical Necessities’, Anna Lawton, ed.
The Red Screen, London 1992 and Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, Cambridge
1992
23
Vale´rie Posener, ‘Comment Douglas Fairbanks et Igor Illinski se dispute`rent a` cause de
Mary Pickford’, Franc¸ois Albera, Vers une the´orie de l’acteur, Lausanne 1990, p. 70
24
Viktor Shklovskii, ‘K voprosu ob izuchenii zritelia’, Sovetskii ekran 50, 11 December
1928, p. 6; he is referring to The Siren, starring Harry Piel, Olga Preobrazhenskaia’s 1927
Peasant Women of Riazan (notorious for representing country life and the peasantry as if
the revolution had not taken place) and Protazanov’s 1916 adaptation of Pushkin’s The
Queen of Spades
25
for instance, the ﬁlms of both Eisenstein and Pudovkin were barred from public screens
in Britain and prompted parliamentary questions; in the Netherlands, Ansje van
Beusekom tells me, Pudovkin’s humanitarian appeal was considered more insidiously
subversive and potentially dangerous than Eisenstein’s overt propagandising; (for reception
in the Netherlands, see also Paul Overy, De Stijl, London 1991, p.33)
26
qu. Stefano Masi, V.I.Pudovkin, Florence 1985, p. 127
27
Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, Cambridge 1979, p.
90
28
Moussinac, p. 147
29
Iutkevich, interviewed by Luda and Jean Schnitzer, Poudovkine, Paris 1966, p. 159
30
Dmitri and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, New York 1993, p. 28
31
IMC/BFI/SM item 101
32
IMC/BFI/SM item 97
33
Paul E. Burns, ‘Pudovkin’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 19.2 (1981) p. 70
34
Pudovkin, ‘Vremia v kinematografe’, SS I, pp. 87-89
35
IMC/BFI/SM item 89, letter from Pudovkin, 7 December 1928
36
IMC/BFI/SM item 101, letter from Montagu to his solicitor, 14 July 1954
37
Pudovkin, ‘Film Direction and Film Manuscript’, Experimental Cinema 1.1 and 1.2
(1930)
38
Nikolai Iezuitov, Pudovkin, Moscow 1937, pp. 3–4
39
these illustrations appear also in the memorial edition of Film Technique and Film
Acting, London 1968
40
IMC/BFI/SM item 92, letter to Montagu, 10 January 1935
Introduction xxix
41
Pudovkin. ‘O vnutrennem i vneshnem v vospitanii aktera’, Iskusstvo kino 7, 1938, tr.
Richard Taylor, The Film Factory, London 1988, p.394; Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 57
42
for all these, see Pudovkin, ss, 1975-77
43
Pudovkin, Aleksandrov, Pirev, Soviet Films: Principal Stages of Development, Bombay
1951, p. 6; the Shlapentokhs, Soviet Cinematography, New York 1993, cast Pyr’ev as an
arch-chauvinist
44
IMC/BFI/SM item 101, letter 25 September 1949
45
IMC/BFI/SM item 101; see also RGALI 2060/1/150, letter 23 September 1951
46
Pudovkin, ed. A. Groshev, Izbrannye stat’i, Moscow 1955
47
IMC/BFI/SM item 101
48
Vladimir Maiakovskii, How are Verses Made?, tr. G.M. Hyde, Bristol 1990, p. 88;
Maiakovskii continues:
Innovation, innovation in materials and devices, is a sine qua non of every poetical
composition . . . To understand the social command accurately, a poet must be in the
middle of things and events. A knowledge of theoretical economics, a knowledge of
the realities of everyday life, an immersion in the scientiﬁc study of history are for the
poet, in the very fundamentals of his work, more important than scholarly textbooks
by idealist professors who worship the past.
49
Lev Kuleshov, ‘The Art of the Cinema’, in Ronald Levaco, ed. Kuleshov on Film,
London 1974, p. 42
50
Pudovkin, ‘Stsenarii: tema’ and ‘Priemy obrabotki materiala: montazh stroiashchii’,
Kinostsenarii, SS I, pp. 56 and 69
51
FF, p. 69, from Kino-Fot 1, 25–31, 1922
52
Evgenii Zamiatin, We, tr, C. Brown, Harmondsworth 1993, p. 3
53
Pudovkin,’Metod kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 97
54
Vladimir Nilsen, Cinema as a Graphic Art, London 1936, p. 140; see also David Elliott,
Photography in Russia 1840-1940, London 1992, p. 51, re the use of paintings as models for
early photographs.
55
Pudovkin, ‘Material kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 100
56
Pudovkin, ‘Rezhisser i operator: operator i apparat’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p.
123
57
see Mildred Constantine, Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters, London 1974 and Susan
Pack, Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde, Berlin 1995
58
FF, p. 93, originally Lef 3 (1923); Vertov here identiﬁes himself with an apparatus
seemingly detached from an operator; elsewhere in the ﬁlm journals there are features
devoted to intrepid cameramen (including Kaufman) creeping, clambering, rising and
falling with camera
59
Maikovskii, How are Verses Made?, p. 88
60
Pierre Billard in Cahiers du Cine´ma 55.1, 1954 qu. in Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Poudovkine,
Paris 1966, p. 169; on Vasilii Bortnikov, Pudovkin’s adaptation of Nikoleva’s novel
Harvest, see Vance Kepley Jr, ‘Pudovkin, Socialist Realism and the Classical Hollywood
Style’ in the Journal of Film and Video 47.4, 1995-96, pp. 3–16
61
in 1944, Ivor Montagu supplied Pudovkin with research material from the Victoria and
Albert Museum and elsewhere for Nakhimov and sent him the appreciative British reviews
xxx Vsevolod Pudovkin
(including one from The Lady, no less) for Suvorov; RGALI 2060/1/151, letter 28
February 1944: ‘Suvorov everyone here liked very much . . . You have made in this ﬁlm . . .
an historical classic which really does what all such classics succeed in doing, that is
creating a reality so vivid that it even replaces history itself in the imagination of the
beholder. One cannot read about Suvorov, after seeing the ﬁlm, without seeing in every
line of his doings and battles the characters depicted on the screen’; see also Pudovkin’s
letter to Montagu, SS III, p. 276.
62
Georges Sadoul, Recherches sovie´tiques: Cine´ma, Paris 1956, pref.; signiﬁcantly, this
remark is made after Stalin’s death at a time when the Left in France is undergoing its
own de-Stalinisation
63
Dmitri and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, New York 1993, p. 28
64
Shlapentokhs, p. 24
65
Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now, London 1951, p. 566
66
Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Poudovkine, Paris 1966, p. 176 and Tatiana Zapasnik and Adi
Petrovich, Pudovkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, Moscow 1989, p. 214
67
Shlapentokhs, p. 57; see also Babitsky and Rimberg., The Soviet Film Industry, New
York 1955 and Leyda, Kino, London 1960
68
Peter Dart, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York 1974, p. 155: Bazin here speaks
of Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Gance and not of Pudovkin (see Qu’est-ce-que-le cine´ma? I,
Paris 1958, p. 133). Dart concludes, p. 156, that ‘Pudovkin’s ﬁlm theory is well-suited to
the ends of socialist realism’. To the contrary, the period of ‘socialist realism’ under
Stalin’s control saw a rejection of the type of montage which Dart associates with ‘intentionality’.
Consequently I am suspicious of Dart’s reading of Bazin and of his understanding
of periodic changes in Soviet ﬁlm and in Pudovkin’s contribution.
69
Andre´ Bazin, What is Cinema? I, tr Gray, Berkeley 1967, p. 24
70
Bazin, What is Cinema? I, p. 12
71
Bazin, What is Cinema? I, p. 35
72
Bazin, What is Cinema? I, p. 29 and II, p. 21
73
Bazin, What is Cinema? II, p. 16
74
Nina Glagoleva, Slovo o Pudovkine, Moscow 1968, p. 3; see also Mark Zak, Rasskaz o
Pudovkine, Moscow 1970
Introduction xxxi
1. The old regime and the new:
from Hammer and Sickle to Chess
Fever
In his 1951 essay ‘How I Became a Film Director’, Pudovkin outlines a
basic autobiography: he was born in Penza in 1893 and in his youth his
interests included painting, music and theatre.1
In 1910 he entered
Moscow University to study physical chemistry then in 1914 volunteered
for service in the artillery. His enthusiasm for cinema, he says
elsewhere, dates from his ﬁrst encounter with Grifﬁth’s Intolerance
[USA, 1916] in 1920. This same year, Pudovkin was introduced to
Vladimir Gardin by the actress and later director Olga Preobrazhenskaia.
Gardin recalls how Lodia [Pudovkin], from the start, was
animated by questions of ﬁlm process and technique, just at the time
when he himself was attempting to formulate a preliminary theory of
ﬁlm montage, and especially of rhythm.2
Pudovkin became a student
of the ﬁrst state ﬁlm school, a pupil of the old regime (Gardin) and the
new (Kuleshov).3
During this time he worked on Perestiani’s 1920 agitﬁlm
In the Days of Struggle [V dni borbi], in which he played the part of
a commandant in the Red Army and on which he collaborated with
Feofan Shipulinsky.
Neither in this late essay nor in his major writings of the ‘20s does
Pudovkin have much to say about his apprenticeship with Gardin,
although he does mention in passing the ﬁlms on which they worked
together: The Iron Heel [Zheleznaia piatka, 1919], in which Preobrazhenskaia
acted; Sickle and Hammer [Serp i molot, 1921], in which
Pudovkin again acted and worked as assistant director of Shipulinsky’s
scenario; Locksmith and Chancellor [Slesar’ i kantsler, 1923], co-written
with Gardin and with Preobrazhenskaia as assistant director and
Hunger . . . Hunger . . . Hunger [Golod . . . golod . . . golod, 1921] on which
he and Gardin shared responsibility for the scenario and its direction.
Here Pudovkin met Eisenstein’s future cameraman, Eduard Tisse;
Natan Zarkhi, Pudovkin’s scenarist for The Mother, The End of St. Petersburg
and, in part, for Victory [Pobeda, 1938], also wrote the scenario for
Gardin’s 1924 The Golobins’ Estate [Osobniak Golubinykh].4
Although
Pudovkin tends to underplay the the inﬂuence of Gardin on his work,
Hammer and Sickle is notable for the parallel editing in the ﬁnal reel
(Pudovkin, as the husband, returning home as his wife ﬁghts off an
attempted rape, the husband arriving in the nick of time and hitting her
attacker with an axe), especially in comparison with the end sequences
of The Mother; as in the war parade in The End of St. Petersburg, the little
girl, the mother and the old man return to the village alone; as in The
Mechanics of the Brain, a mask is used to draw attention to a particular
element within a larger frame. But in 1922, Pudovkin joined Kuleshov’s
workshop and it is this experience to which The Film Scenario and The
Film Director and Film Material more often refer.
Iezuitov, writing in 1940, claims that Gardin (himself a theatretrained
actor) endorsed the practice of Stanislavsky:
Heralding a new psychology and physiology, Gardin pursued a
course of strict experiment, conﬁrming the teaching of Konstantin
Stanislavsky. ‘Supporting the emotion (the dominant) during the
spoken reaction . . . there is the modulation of the given characteristic
emotional colouring, the symbolic given condition of the hero,
which does not shade the meaning of his words but nevertheless
relegates them into second place’5
Certainly, it was not opportune for Pudovkin to associate himself in the
early 1920s with a tendency then regarded as regressive. Later, of
course, Pudovkin proclaimed that Stanislavskian principles were most
fully realised in cinema.
In later years it then became expedient for Pudovkin to denounce
the early work of Kuleshov as ‘[idealising] American detective ﬁlms
with their empty and only superﬁcial dynamics’. Even in the mid ‘20s,
in the spirit of healthy debate, he complains of the pacing of The Extraordinary
Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks [Neobychainiye
prikliucheniia Mistera Vesta v strane bol’shevikov, 1924]: ‘the
dynamically saturated earlier reels are easy to look at and grip the
2 Vsevolod Pudovkin
spectator with ever-increasing excitement. But, after the end of the third
reel, where the cowboy’s adventures came to an unexpected end, the
spectator experiences a natural reaction, and the continuation, in spite
of the excellent directorial treatment, is watched with much diminished
interest’.6
However, for the most part, Pudovkin is full of praise for his
mentor, even after his return to work with conventional actors. In 1929
Pudovkin appeared as a fakir in Kuleshov’s ﬁlm The Gay Canary and
jointly prefaced Kuleshov’s book The Art of the Cinema: ‘We made
ﬁlms; Kuleshov made Cinema’.7
Certainly Kuleshov sought to distance
himself from the old cinema of Gardin, especially his Film d’Art
literary adaptations (see chapter three, below). He sought to legitimise
a theory of montage on the basis of his original observations of
audience reactions and an appeal to popularity with an exemplary
statistical mean: ‘The public in cheaper theatres, less eductated, much
rougher and more spontaneous, was not as neurotic and therefore
reacted much more directly to the effect of action and entertainment
on the screen’.8
He noticed that American ﬁlms affected audiences
most and therefore adopted these as an object of study. It was
remarked that it was action within and between frames which
conspicuously characterised American cinema. It was action also
which most markedly distinguished this cinema from the static staging
of pre-Revolutionary cinema. Ofﬁcial interest in the cinema, as an
industry, extended to the collection and collation of statistics of ﬁlm
reception and receipts, as an instrument of instruction (comparable
with radio) and to the monitoring in model conditions of the effects of
various ﬁlms directed at children. In its very ﬁrst issue, Sovetskoe kino
exhorted personnel to respond to the needs of the countryside.9
In spite
of Kuleshov’s optimistic appeal to public preference it was readily
demonstrable popular disaffection for much of the avant-garde product
which prompted changes in ofﬁcial policy.10
Kuleshov’s self-confessed but somewhat ironic enthusiasm for things
American is evinced also in the collection of archetypal poses which
appear to quote from a general precedent: for instance, Khokhlova and
Pudovkin ‘doing’ the ‘We’ll build a new tomorrow’ shot; Khokhlova
and Pudovkin, framed by the iris as a sunset, ‘doing’ the ‘happy ever
after’ shot, Khokhlova smiling broadly, leaning back with her arms
bent but tilted forwards, the backs of her hands perched on her waist.
Frequently the attitudes are reminiscent of a ‘photo roman’ or a comic
strip: there is a ‘detective’ ﬁgure in a trilby and herringbone coat with
The old regime and the new 3
upright collar, dark glasses with a polo-necked jumper pulled up to the
ears. There is a sense of these serving as a catalogue (akin to Delsarte’s
inventory), assembled and rehearsed for future reference.
An enthusiasm for the metaphorical and utopian notion of a scientiﬁc
laboratory in which the new society was to be developed was
heralded in 1920s nomenclature: Kuleshov worked in a workshop
(equating the activity with manual labour), frequently termed his
laboratory.11
This romanticising of science is evident also in such ﬁlms
as Protazanov’s Aelita and Kuleshov’s The Death Ray and Engineer
Prait’s Project. The image he hopes to evoke is of a team collectively
dedicating their experimental endeavour towards a common, social
good. Kuleshov lists as experiments the various preparatory episodes,
tasks and exercises undertaken by the group, sometimes later incorporated
into a ﬁnished ﬁlm. The laboratory also worked as a collective in
a real sense, sharing and exchanging responsibilities. As part of the
collective, Pudovkin worked as designer, scenarist, assistant director
and actor-model [naturshchik]. In his 1924 article for Kinogazeta, ‘On
the method of work on The Death Ray’, Pudovkin tells how Kuleshov
devised a particular procedure of rehearsal, with the intention of
economising on time. Generally, he says, in Russia and in the West, it
proves unaccaptable to rehearse every detail, even every sequence, with
the result that scenes are constrained by production costs and one is
obliged to compromise. Scenes involving groups of people were
carefully choreographed in advance, standing Pudovkin in good stead
for his later work on the workers’ demonstrations in The Mother and
The Deserter, even on the epic Admiral Nakhimov. Kuleshov delegated to
four experienced workshop assistants to work on a single scene or
model with the other members of the collective.12
Certainly, it seems
from photographs in the Kuleshov archive that Pudovkin once
rehearsed the part of Mr. West (subsequently taken by Podobed),
complete with Harold Lloyd’s trademark round spectacles, although
eventually appearing as Zhban.13
Such a practice, one might suggest,
distances itself from the absolute identiﬁcation of an individual with a
speciﬁc character (see chapter six, below, for comparison).
Pudovkin and the Kuleshov Experiment
Le´on Moussinac, in Le Cine´ma sovie´tique (1928), says that abstract
experimental cinema as it was known in Paris and Berlin (Richter,
4 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Eggeling, Delluc, Dulac et al.) was not considered relevant by Soviet
ﬁlm-makers to the practical urgencies and necessities of the Revolution.
Indeed, much of Kuleshov’s experimentation was prompted by
mundane constraint as much as by a fervent spirit of enquiry. Kuleshov
made ‘ﬁlms on paper’ in the absence of stock. He blocked and
performed a ‘ﬁlm without ﬁlm’ in which actors’ movements before a
ﬁxed camera, and the duration of those movements, corresponded
exactly to their envisaged ﬁxing on ﬁlm.14
Kuleshov suggested that this
would avoid the waste of re-takes and of cutting between multiple
camera positions and that it would also encourage the sponsorship of
ﬁlms by giving potential ﬁnanciers a very clear idea of the ﬁnal product
to which they were being invited to commit themselves. However,
Pudovkin remarks on the very limited applicability of the procedure, its
failure to match the demands of scenarios covering a variety of
locations and a large cast. It was conﬁned to orthogonal framing.
Sometimes, Kuleshov’s experiments serve no purpose other than to
summarise current procedure and to demonstrate the adequacy of the
‘new’ medium to realise phenomena evinced in other forms elsewhere.
Kuleshov nevertheless declares the phenomena themselves to be
uniquely novel in cinema. By means of the engagement of imagination,
as much as by editorial intervention, montage renders ﬁlm a creative
and not merely an imitative art. The assemblage of depictions of
features from a number of women to render an impression of a unitary
ideal is at least as old as Zeuxis. Kuleshov and Zeuxis follow a similar
procedure, deviating from the mere imitation of nature, the difference
is that Zeuxis organises his parts into a simultaneous objective whole
whereas Kuleshov offers them successively.15
The over-emphasis in the 1920s on montage, later to be censured,
was surely prompted in no small part by this compunction to afﬁrm
artistic status for ﬁlm. However, even in the 1920s Pudovkin seems to
deal in the theoretical currency without being consistently tied to it in
practice. Whereas Kuleshov can tend towards the apprehension of
fragmentation as the end product in the spectator, Pudovkin is often
more intent upon accomplishing summation and synthesis. The constituent
shots of Kuleshov’s experiments seem static and self-contained:
for instance, the 1921 sequence in which Khokhlova and a man meet;
a close-up of a handshake; she points; he looks. But such experiments
were deliberately staged to test a particular hypothesis and are not
extracted from a larger scenario. The conclusion I think, is twofold:
The old regime and the new 5
that a conceptual event can be broken down (differentiated) into a
logical sequence and that the concept can be constructed (integrated)
from individual pieces shot in isolation. For Eisenstein, the concept
often does not arise before this integration, there is no previous
referent (see chapter seven, below). Bazin narrowly construes the
concept as a pro-ﬁlmic event to which montage can only allude, and
requires that the differentiation process be effaced by a subsequent
integration. In the interests of economy, Kuleshov endeavoured to ﬁnd
the minimum number of shots in which the integration can be
effected; for Kuleshov this minimum is the optimum. Minima were
necessitated by strict economic constraints; but the notion of economy
was also scientistically and aesthetically appealing.16
The proof of
Kuleshov’s hypothetical ‘created geography’ and ‘created woman’
resides in the necessary synthesis being effected in the spectator’s
imagination, the synthesis which Pudovkin says ought to be actively
assisted by movement forging a transition from, for example, a long
shot cut to a close-up.17
It is to Pudovkin, as Kuleshov’s assistant, that subsequent ﬁlm theorists
have turned for an account of the most famous of the experiments
and the supposed derivation of the Kuleshov ‘effect’. Sometimes the
experiment is described incorrectly, sometimes it is incorrectly ascribed
to Pudovkin himself.18
Generally, the ‘effect’ is quoted as tacitly
proven, as if the experiment itself was impervious or no longer worthy
of interrogation. Ironically, directors to whom use of the ‘effect’ (as a
cinematic device) is credited have sometimes denied knowledge of the
experiment (Bresson, for instance).19
Here follows Pudovkin’s account,
delivered in a lecture in London in 1929:
Kuleshov and I made an interesting experiment. We took from
some ﬁlm or other several close-ups of the well-known Russian
actor, Mozzhukhin [Mosjoukine]. We chose close-ups which were
static and which did not express any feeling at all: quiet close-ups.
We joined these close-ups, which were all similar, with other bits of
ﬁlm in three different combinations. In the ﬁrst combination the
close-up of Mozzhukhin was immediately followed by a shot of a
plate of soup standing on a table. It was obvious and certain that
Mozzhukhin was looking at this soup. In the second combination
the face of Mozzhukhin was joined to shots showing a cofﬁn in
which lay a dead woman. In the third the close-up was followed by
6 Vsevolod Pudovkin
a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear. When we
showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been
let into the secret the result was terriﬁc. The public raved about the
acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his
mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep
sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the
light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we
knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.20
Pudovkin left the workshop in 1925 to direct his own material. In The
Art of Cinema Kuleshov provides an account at variance with that of
his assistant. It could be the account of an entirely separate
encounter:
We had an argument about whether montage could have some
effect on the actor’s display of emotions. There were those who
asserted that this factor could not be altered by montage. We had a
dispute with a certain famous actor to whom we said:
Imagine this scene: a man, sitting in jail for a long time, is starving
because he is not given anything to eat; he is brought a plate
of soup, is delighted by it and gulps it down. Imagine another
scene: a man in jail is given food, fed well, full to capacity but he
longs for his freedom, for the sight of birds, the sunlight, houses,
clouds. A door is opened for him. He is led out onto the street
and he sees birds, clouds, sunlight and houses and is extremely
pleased by the sight. And so, we asked the actor: will the face
reacting to the soup and the face reacting to the sun appear the
same on ﬁlm or not? We were answered disdainfully: it is clear to
anyone that the reaction to the soup and the reaction to freedom
will be totally different. Then we shot these two sequences and
regardless of how I transposed those shots and how they were
examined, no one was able to perceive any difference in the face
of this actor, in spite of the fact that his performance in each shot
was absolutely different. With correct montage, even if one takes
the performance of an actor directed at something quite different,
it will still reach the viewer in the way intended by the editor
because the viewer himself will complete the sequence and see
that which is suggested to him by montage.
The old regime and the new 7
Kuleshov goes on to describe a scene from Razumny’s Brigade
Commander Ivanov [Kombrig Ivanov, 1923]:
I saw this scene I think, in a ﬁlm by Razumny: a priest’s house,
with a portrait of Nicholas II hanging on the wall; the village is
taken by the Red Army, the frightened priest turns the portrait over
and on the reverse side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin.
However, this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin is not
smiling. But that spot in the ﬁlm was so funny and it was so
uproariously received by the public, that I, myself, scrutinising the
portrait several times, saw the portrait of Lenin as smiling! . . . The
montage was so edited that we involuntarily imbued a serious face
with a changed expression characteristic of that playful moment. In
other words, the work of the actor was altered by means of
montage. In this way, montage had a colossal inﬂuence on the effect
of the material. It became apparent that it was possible to change
the actor’s work, his movements, his very behaviour, in either one
direction or another, through montage.21
The claim that these experiments conclusively prove anything seems to
me highly spurious. Even Pudovkin offers the disclaimer that ‘the
combination of various pieces in one or another order is not sufﬁcient’
and suggests that different lengths of ﬁlm in combination yield different
phenomenological and emotional effects on the spectator. The experiments
are unsatisafactory by any scientiﬁc criteria and seemingly
produce results which, if not entirely contradictory, are at least not
simultaneously sustainable.
Pudovkin urged caution upon those who would seek to extrapolate a
general theory from isolated examples of Kuleshov’s studio practice,
however interesting they may be in themselves. ‘What is theory? It is
experience codiﬁed . . . Pavlov conducted thousands of experiments
minutely controlled and studied’.22
Amongst the characteristics of
Pavlov’s research which rendered it an exemplary model to his fellow
scientists were the length of time for which his team worked with particular
subjects, the detailed and independent analysis of individual
idiosyncracies (allowing a single aberrant instance to jettison a hitherto
established theory) and insistence on the exact deﬁnition of terms (see
chapter two, below). Set against this paradigm, the Kuleshov experiment
(or experiments). make a poor showing. To how many people
8 Vsevolod Pudovkin
did Kuleshov show the ﬁlm or ﬁlms and how was the audience constituted?
As Yuri Tsivian observes, the notion of the experiment casts its
audience as an uninitiated tabula rasa, but the most basic conventions
of story reading, that is to say, an established customary handling of
pictorial or written text, predisposes the spectator to project one image
forwards on to the next: amongst Kuleshov’s contemporaries, Eikhenbaum
and Shipulinsky were not alone in making such an observation.
Tsivian suggests that classic conventions of shot/reverse shot editing
were by the 1920s thoroughly naturalised in the Soviet audience.23
Similarly familiar was the facial close-up as used by D. W. Grifﬁth, as
a prelude to the exhibition of the object contemplated. A desire to read
a causal relationship between images may proscribe the option of
ﬁnding a contiguous pairing void of meaning. Surely, the desire of the
spectator to make sense of the ‘new woman’ assembly (the body of
Nata Vachnadze with the face of Alexandra Khokhlova) and the
priority inherently given to a particular interpretation are equally operative
as the fact of temporal linkage of the parts. Elsewhere, Pudovkin
noted that juxtapositions were susceptible of different interpretations
according to the ordering of the sequence.24
Be´la Bala´zs says that the
face in close-up has a peculiar effect on the viewer, who sees it as pure
physiognomy, abstracted from a spatial context.25
The use of the famous actor raises additional objections. Mozzhukhin
was well known and lauded in the pre-war cinema for his ‘full’
style, his formidable gaze and mesmerising intensity, the concentrated
static internalisation of emotion. ‘The stare works in reverse, offering a
window into the protagonist’s (usually) tortured psyche . . . the
audience is invited to imagine what has gone before and within: a sign
of subjectivity’.26
This seems remote from the use of blank models, in
themselves supposedly of no signiﬁcance, mannequins on which the
director by choice or necessity hangs a chosen meaning by the conjunction
with external material. This, however, is the sense in which the
experiment is commonly invoked. Pudovkin himself contrived such a
passively psychologised performance in Otsep’s The Living Corpse,
where it makes a stark contrast with the animated expressiveness of his
‘gypsy’ co-star, Nata Vachnadze. In spite of Kuleshov’s contention that
‘in either one direction or another’ it was possible to change the actor’s
work, as the accounts stand they appear to demonstrate distinct
phenomena: 1) subject to his own qualiﬁcation, Pudovkin shows that a
particular facial arrangement of the actor Mozzhukhin in close-up was
The old regime and the new 9
Fedia (Pudovkin) and the . . .
Gypsy in The Living Corpse
10 Vsevolod Pudovkin
retrospectively perceived and interpreted differently according to the
different proceeding images; 2) Kuleshov says that the effect of editing
particular images can overrule an actor’s effective performance,
included as an image in that sequence (endorsing his claim elsewhere
that, in cinema, the editor held the prerogative); 3) Kuleshov says the
general ambiance of a sequence, which he does not attach to any particular
object or image in that sequence, was able to invade his perception
of a particular image; he seems to interpret the picture of Lenin as
acting in the sequence as if it were a picture of an actor, an objective
equation of actor as ‘ﬁlmic material’ which, also, he makes elsewhere.
The single common conclusion here seems to be that images in ﬁlm
are not viewed objectively, in isolation. Such apprehensions are not
unique to ﬁlm. Darwin too had observed in his 1872 Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals, that ‘. . . if from the nature of the circumstances
we expect to see any expression, we readily imagine its
presence’.27
Kuleshov and the training of the model actor
There is broad agreement between Gardin, Kuleshov and Pudovkin
that an actor’s training in the new society should differ appreciably
from that under the old. Kuleshov and Pudovkin maintain that ﬁlm,
speciﬁcally, requires different skills. The new actor needs must work on
himself before he embarks upon his role, even if the example as to
what constitutes this work will differ according to the school in which
he is trained. There is agreement on the preparatory training of the
body as the tool of the actor.
Under Kuleshov, the actor’s mastery of his body is a positive attribute;
indeed, its acquisition is a fundamental task which precedes any
role. This can be set against a broader urge towards physical ﬁtness
and expertise as necessary skills of the ‘new man’ and ‘new woman’ in
the building of Soviet society. Marchand and Weinstein, reporting in
1927, include acrobatics in the curriculum of the Leningrad Film
School and Trauberg’s directors’ course, reprted by Moussinac,
included such one-to-one sports as fencing and boxing.28
Such sports,
traditional to stage training, enhance deportment and balance and
sharpen reﬂexes. Kuleshov and Inkizhinov boast of Barnet’s talents in
the workshop being nurtured by his previous training as a boxer;
Chistiakov, who worked frequently with Pudovkin, similarly came to
The old regime and the new 11
the workshop from athletics (see chapters three, four, ﬁve, six). The
workshop archive includes photographs of Inkizhinov rehearsing with
Barnet, with Khokhlova and with Barnet and Pudovkin.
The circus was admired as a display of physical skill and agility in its
performers as much as in its formal organisation, as a succession of
such ‘turns’. Such journals as Kino, teatr, sport (1923) endeavoured to
cover all these activities equally, as spectacle. Members of Kuleshov’s
workshop performed their own stunts: he gives an account of a hazardous
four-storey leap by Pudovkin.29
Under Kuleshov, physical malleability
is required of the actor in order that he can with ease undertake
any move set by the director. For Kuleshov (theoretically) the actor is
not an artist; the actor is subservient to the creative prerogative of the
director (single or collective) assembling the montage pieces and
thereby to the requirement of ‘optimal organisation’ of shot for quick
and easy apprehension by the cinema audience; the actor is no more
and no less than a moving ‘shot sign’, equivalent in communicative
status to the prop ‘curiosity’. A character can, indeed, be reduced to an
essential sign, an isolated typical gesture (for instance, Zhban’s ﬁngercrooking
in Mr. West). Khokhlova, as the Princess, is photographed
sitting, hands separate and lifted and parallel to the picture plane,
Zhban’s ﬁnger crooking (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West . . .)
12 Vsevolod Pudovkin
ﬁngers splayed; Podobed, as Mr. West, stands with his arms bent,
hands lifted but dropped limply at the wrist (almost like the paws of a
begging dog anticipating a reward). The photographs of antagonistic
pairs of attitudes, posed on the roof against white sky, seem intent
upon demonstrating and delineating the shapes adopted with utmost
clarity, as much as adding to dramatic tension. The shot is framed, the
action is blocked and the workshop actor’s body is trained to achieve
graphic clarity, simplicity and economy of expression.30
In 1926,
Pudovkin reiterates the lesson learnt from his erstwhile master: ‘the . . .
requirement, conditioned by the basic character itself of ﬁlmic
spectacle, will probably exist forever: the necessity for clarity’.31
There is much in Kuleshov’s exposition which is reminiscent of
Meyerhold’s exercises in biomechanics. Indeed, the personnel of both
collectives at one time worked in adjacent studios. Meyerhold similarly
differentiates exercises involving actors by themselves (‘drawing the
bow’) and together (‘the leap onto the chest’) into a series of basic
moves. However, there seems to be a fundamental discrepancy between
Kuleshov and Meyerhold as to the relationship between the actor’s
ability to sign bodily a particular emotion effectively to an audience
and the concomitant sensation of that emotion. Kuleshov, with Eisenstein,
insisted that ‘the work of ﬁlm actors be so constructed that it
comprises the sum of organic movement with ‘‘reliving’’ held to a
minimum’, appearing to hold with Diderot that the actor does not
personally experience that which he conveys externally.32
Stanislavsky
held that ‘reliving’ the rediscovery of emotion within the memory of
his own experience, was crucial to the actor’s art. The actor was to
summon forth his memory to pre-empt convention (see chapter six,
below). According to Meyerhold, there existed a reciprocal and
reﬂexive relation between the physical exercise and the psychological
state, as though the experience which caused an expression equally
could be effected in the actor in the undertaking of the prescribed
posture.33
There are sources for the system in Taylorism, in William
James, in Pavlov and even in Darwin, especially in the composition of
the reﬂex: as sensation (initial withdrawal, refusal of action); cerebration;
tendency to action. ‘Meyerhold was able to . . . [cause the actor]
to automatically experience an entire gamut of emotions due to a
constantly changing arrangement of his musclature. This would also
enable the actor to precisely establish the relationship between his
physical appearance and his own inner nervous feelings’.34
The old regime and the new 13
In The Art of Cinema, Kuleshov wrote that he preferred the
movements of the real life stevedore loading sacks to those of any actor
(Kamerny, Meyerholdian or Moscow Art Theatre).35
It was something
of a contemporary commonplace to celebrate in manual labour an
aesthetic as much as a social value. The repetition of a given activity
reduces the movement to an essential and typical standard denominator,
to the least expenditure of physical effort required to accomplish
the task.36
The paring of human energy ﬁts the individual into the
general industrial equation, minimising time and motion maximises
productivity. ‘The Table of Hours, it turns each one of us . . . into a sixwheeled
epic hero . . .’, crows Zamiatin. ‘No doubt about it, that Taylor
was the genius of antiquity’.37
Gastev, Taylor’s prominent and zealous
Soviet acolyte, used photography in his laboratory to analyse the
component parts of simple tasks (for instance, swinging a hammer).
Any task, says Kuleshov, in terms derived from Taylor, can be rendered
as a labour process.38
Huntley Carter’s 1924 survey of Soviet theatre
and cinema is fancifully illustrated with stylised paper-cut ﬁgures,
supposedly demonstrating ‘Taylorised Gesture’, with the size of angle
annotated between body and limb. In practice it seems that Meyerhold’s
biomechanical exercises were subject to individual variation and re-
interpretation.39
Kuleshov employs a relativity of performance styles to comic effect
in Mr. West. To suggest, as does Lindley Hanlon, that Kuleshov’s group
overact, is to miss the point.40
Mr. West himself is played as an inge´nu,
with child-like mannerisms like dropped-jaw gawping. His naivete´ is
underscored by his inability to recognise in the ostentatious pretence of
Zhban, the Princess and their cronies, the falsity of their story.
Assuming that Mr. West sees what the audience sees simultaneously,
one is amused that he could be so readily duped by the frenetic lipbiting
and popping eye-balls of the Princess (played by the famously
odd Alexandra Khokhlova), yet one appreciates also that Mr. West’s
credulity when confronted by ‘The Barbarian horde’ has been anticipated
in his reading of the inﬂamatory catalogue of Soviet types.41
At
the end of the ﬁlm, Mr. West encounters the real Soviets: Trotsky, the
Red Army and the ‘leather-jacketed ofﬁcer with the Mauser at his
hip’.42
A similar contrast of style is employed to comic effect in Pudovkin’s
Chess Fever [Shakhmatnaia goriachka, 1925] and to dramatic effect
in The Living Corpse.
In the training schedule, the ‘labour processes’ correspond to unit
14 Vsevolod Pudovkin
tasks (sitting down at a table, opening a door). Only in the third year of
Trauberg’s curriculum were students allowed to progress to composite
tasks and complete scenes.43
For Kuleshov, the typical action is arrived
at through improvisation, as though pre-thought spontaneity can shortcut
the unthinking evolution of the stevedore’s sack-lugging. This is
preferred to inherited convention, but once the typical action is settled
upon in rehearsal its repetition in performance is ﬁxed. For Stanislavsky,
on the other hand, it was a function of the living actor that he
be free to act spontaneously. Mikhail Iampolsky has made much of the
inﬂuence of the French stage theoretician Delsarte on pre- and postRevolutionary
directors, quoting Anna Zemtsova (aka Anna Lee) in an
article testifying to a close familiarity with his writings as translated by
Count Volkonsky.44
Delsartism is listed as a subject of study at the
Leningrad school and was familiar to Eisenstein. Gardin illustrates
how Delsarte’s catalogue of facial pattern can be translated to speciﬁc
shots.45
Kuleshov insists that Delsarte’s usefulness does not extend
beyond ‘an inventory of the possible changes in the human mechanism’
and that it cannot be regarded as a method of acting.46
In practice, one
of the most wonderful things about the wonderfully odd Khokhlova is
her ability to strike a succession of distinct expressions and poses:
Mr. West (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West . . .)
The old regime and the new 15
witness, for instance, her performance in Mr. West, By the Law and The
Female Journalist. But Kuleshov inherits none of Delsarte’s cabalism,
nor his manic tripartite classiﬁcations (constitutional, passional and
habitual gestures; Thought, Sensation, Emotion; Goodness, Beauty,
Truth) nor his attachment to classical notions of beauty at the expense
of the authentic expression of emotion.
Pudovkin and Kuleshov are also broadly in agreement in their rejection
of the theatrical staging popular under the ancien re´gime. They
hold in contempt the artiﬁciality of its painted back-cloths and its
exhaustive clutter of knick-knackery. Kuleshov stresses the careful selection
of objects, but this concern is directed less towards the stage
business enacted by an individual than towards the fast and clear signification
to the audience of character or setting within a general schema.
Sometimes, as in the female journalist’s ofﬁce or the ‘prison’ cell in
which Mr. West is incarcerated, the setting is indicated by cast
shadows. A workshop photograph for The Death Ray shows Khokhlova
sitting bolt upright in bed with her arms lifted in surrender; a gunman
stands at the foot of the bed but he casts a clear shadow on the wall
directly above her. Here again, the minimum required to achieve the
desired effect is to be preferred.
Kuleshov cites such prop ‘curiosities’ as the coat hanger in a vase and
glass elephant supplied by Rodchenko for The Female Journalist; in Mr.
West the same table seemingly appears on several occasions, variously
Gardin shot patterns, a` la Delsarte
16 Vsevolod Pudovkin
accompanied by a low-slung washing line with washing (Zhban’s
garret) or a telephone and post-card size stars and stripes (the American
Embassy); the sets for Engineer Prait’s Project are similarly pared down
and spartan, the backgrounds deliberately and graphically ﬂattened.
Kuleshov praises the example of the ‘new’ theatre to foreground or
oversize signiﬁcant objects, and sometimes uses paint or cloth to deliberately
minimise or diffuse variation in a background in order to clearly
delineate and to focus attention on the object proper.47
Sometimes the
preparatory story boards show the use of frames within the frame
(doorways, archways, spaces between buildings) as a means of concentrating
attention. In ‘The Method of Work on The Death Ray’,
Pudovkin speaks of the workshop searching for cheap materials with
which to cover large surfaces and of their rejection of carpets and
decorative prints (the old system) in favour of grey paper. Pudovkin sets
Lebedev’s desk in The End of St. Petersburg far back from the camera,
the conspicuous expanse of polished parquet ﬂooring in the foreground
and the ofﬁces beyond conveying a sense of the industrialist’s extensive
command over property. With the advent of montage and the close-up
cutaway, props and settings acquire a signiﬁcance equivalent to that of
performers: literally and metaphorically they can be made to ﬁgure as
largely in the imagination. It is in this sense that, for Eisenstein, the
dispute between actor and non-actor becomes pointless and that, for
Arnheim, the stage prop can be said to perform as an actor.48
Kuleshov,
and especially Pudovkin, recognise that, with the advent of cinema,
expression is no longer signiﬁed by the actor alone, the emotion can be
conveyed and stirred by montage of a number of elements between and
within shots as much as by an actor’s performance.
In practice, Kuleshov did not work with stevedores but with a close
group of professionals: Pudovkin, Fogel, Barnet, Podobed, Khokhlova.
Pudovkin worked again with Fogel on Chess Fever, with Barnet on
Storm over Asia and with Barnet and Podobed on The Living Corpse.
However, Kuleshov chooses not to make much of their familiarity with
one another as a basis for sound collective work: their shared interests
are represented theoretically as professional rather than personal. In
practice, Pudovkin worked as a director with actors from a variety of
backgrounds (Batalov had been used by Protazanov for Aelita;
Baranovskaia came from MKhAT, Inkizhinov came via the Kuleshov
workshop and, from 1916, tutor in biomechanics with Meyerhold).
However, Pudovkin says that his own training left him feeling
The old regime and the new 17
ill-equipped initially to create the necessary rapport with artists
themselves trained with Stanislavsky. Endorsing Baranovskaia’s reservations,
he later claims that he discovered the System through his
acquaintance with these artists as an effective means of establishing
trust between themselves:
On what could one base this conﬁdence? . . . I still looked at actors
from a formalist point of view, entirely externally . . . How could I
reach the intelligence and the heart of those whom I had to direct,
whom I had to direct, whom I had to guide in the creation of characters
which still existed only in my imagination. How to ﬁnd a
common language?49
Pudovkin says that the idea of ‘recollected emotion’ was born in him in
his creative work with these actors. He advocates Stanislavsky as a
means of drawing the reality of the everyday and ordinary into the
artiﬁcial construction of the ﬁlm and ﬁlming practice. Pudovkin
invokes spontaneity or the quasi-subconcious as a route to an act
which will prove effective and affecting on screen:
In the ﬁlm Storm over Asia I wanted to have a crowd of Mongols
looking with rapture on a precious fur. I engaged a Chinese
conjuror and photographed the faces of the Mongols watching him
. . . Once I spent endless time and effort trying to obtain a good
natured smile . . . when I photographed [a mongol’s] face smiling at
a joke I made, he had been ﬁrmly convinced that the shooting was
over.50
Chess Fever and ﬁlmic syntax
In the midst of the trials and tribulations of making The Mechanics of
the Brain, Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky directed the short
comedy Chess Fever.51
This follows the example of the use of footage
of Kalinin in Give to the Poor, Take from the Rich (1924) and Mr.
West’s incorporation of Trotsky and the Red Army parade, where
Kuleshov niftily employs binoculars to legitimise the shift in scale.
Like Komarov’s The Kiss of Mary Pickford [Potselui Meri Pikford,
1927], constructed from sequences documenting the actual visit to
Moscow of Pickford and Fairbanks in 1926, in Chess Fever, location
18 Vsevolod Pudovkin
footage of the 1925 Moscow Chess tournament is edited into the
story, showing the participants Capablanca, Gru¨feld, Torre´, Spielman
and others.52
‘Every photograph of the masters’, says the reviewer in
Sovetskoe kino, ‘shows us a moment in the course of play’.
Capablanca, occasionally looking nervously to camera, was
persuaded to appear in the ﬁlm as a performing ‘type’ (the ‘type’,
that is, of Capablanca himself), alongside Anna Zemtsova. ‘By the
editing together of the pictures he meets the heroine, befriends her
and initiates her enthusiasm for Chess’. Sovetskoe kino was appreciative
of this highly proﬁtable and successful ﬁlm, which in Moscow
and Leningrad equalled the best foreign hits:
The general enthusiasm for Chess is making itself felt in cinema . . .
The comedy is pieced together as a parody of a newspaper story . . .
ordinary everyday matches acquire exaggerated scale: caricatures
of the policeman, the cabman, of the chemist, the public at the
tournament and others are wittily portrayed . . . There is much
humorous incident, much movement, the material forwarded pointedly
by the serial story form.53
In addition, it seems to me, the ﬁlm serves as something of a satire on
Mr. Trotsky (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West . . .)
The old regime and the new 19
pre-Revolutionary ﬁlms which took Chess as a theme or motif: I am
thinking of The Game of Life [Shakhmaty zhizni] (a star vehicle for the
stupendous Vera Kholodnaia) and The Game of Love [Shakhmaty
liubvi] (an exotic comedy), even the play on words, The Shah and the
Mother to the King [Shakh i mat’ koroliu], ‘an amazing picture’.54
The
presence of the veteran director Iakov Protazanov (as the chemist) and
of Konstantin Eggert (as the sinister Chess-shop owner) in ‘caricature’
cameo roles in Chess Fever, further points to such an intention on the
part of Shpikovsky and Pudovkin.
However, my main concern here is the extent to which the ﬁlm uses
the ‘results’ of the Kuleshov experiments to render a number of visual
gags, precisely relying for their effect on the tacit acceptance by the
viewer of ‘naturalised’ conventions of editing. As Shipulinsky, too,
remarked in 1919:
The procedure of viewing and perceiving ﬁlm works on the principle
of exchanging images which appear for a moment on screen and
are immediately associated with those which have just disappeared
so that the viewer’s imagination is the very factor which gives new
meaning to the moving objects on the screen.55
Although Pudovkin speaks hypothetically in The Film Scenario (1926)
of the correspondence of the editing of shots with the ‘natural’ [estestvennyi]
‘transference of attention of an imaginary observer (who, in the
end, is represented by the spectator)’,56
Pudovkin is aware, along with
Eikhenbaum, and indeed Bazin, that the means whereby such a
natural transference is effected in cinema is no more than an artiﬁce, a
style or convention and that other means equally lie at the disposal of
the director:
Once we begin to speak about ﬁlm styles and about shot composition,
that much-talked-about ‘naturalism’ can be seen to represent
only one of many possible styles, a style which is in no way less
conventional than the others . . . naturalism in cinema is no less
conventional than literary or theatrical naturalism.57
In Chess Fever, Pudovkin makes an entertaining play on such a convention,
the hypothesis of creative geography tested by Kuleshov. After
the establishing shots of the Moscow tournament, in which
20 Vsevolod Pudovkin
competitors are shown facing each other either side of the board, we
are introduced to another scene by a series of close-ups: a jacket
sleeved hand moves the white pieces; from the opposite direction, a
hand in a shirt cuff moves the black; the camera pulls back to reveal
Fogel, as Galadrev, playing one piece then moving to the other side to
play the next. Later, this hapless husband to be goes to his ﬁance´e,
Verochka, to beg her forgiveness for forgetting the hour of their
wedding. Zemtsova turns away from him, angrily casting the cloth
which she has held to her fevered brow into her lap, but slowly, in
close up, we see her face change: her eyes lift heavenwards and she
smiles. Then we are returned to a midshot and Fogel, on his knees at
her feet, is playing Chess with a miniature set of pieces on a checked
handkerchief on the ﬂoor.
It seems to me that this playfulness of Pudovkin, his mastery of
received method such that he can make light of it, heralds the subsequent
experiments of The Mother, The End of St. Petersburg and Storm
over Asia. Arnheim, Orrom, Kepley and Burch note Pudovkin’s deviation
from syntactical rules governing the spatial and temporal orientation
of the ﬁlm spectator, some of which Pudovkin appears to
endorse himself provisionally in The Film Scenario and The Film
Director and Film Material; Dart says that this damages the required
spectatorial ‘identiﬁcation’ with the ﬁlm.58
In practice, while
Pudovkin adheres consistently and rigorously to a certain set of
working procedures, formal construction is governed by expedience
and a particular context within the ﬁlm. Pudovkin wills a particular
interpretation of an image by its position in a sequence; images may
be introduced in an apparently narrative sequence which grounds
them in the diegesis, then are subsequently interspersed as individual
frames in later montage sequences in which they ﬁgure metaphorically,
as a momentary tendentious reminder of a larger synthesis (the
‘supra artistic concept’, perhaps). A shot of a factory worker,
collapsed from exhaustion, is established early in The End of St. Petersburg
and then recurs; a soldier dying agonisingly slowly in the mud of
the trenches is cut successsively into the stock-market sequence, the
frenetic activity as prices rise (‘both sides are satisﬁed’); the single
silhouette of St. Isaac’s dome is used to locate parallel action in St.
Petersburg alongside the trenches. Pudovkin creates a unique realm
which does not of necessity refer to a context of real space and time;
the ﬁlm provides its own context in which a particular image is
The old regime and the new 21
crucial. Pudovkin’s images, certainly before Storm, are rarely simply
decorative. As Tarkovsky says: ‘The straightforward narrative cannot
contain the pressure of ideas awakened by the story, the necessity
arises to work not in the prosaic, plot-centred form but in the
‘‘compositional’’ poetic form’.59
Mayakovsky declares that, for the poet, the creation of neologisms is
no less than obligatory and that syntactical rules exist to be broken: ‘A
poet is a person who creates these very rules . . . A mathematician is a
man who establishes, enlarges and develops mathematical rules, a man
who introduces new concepts into mathematical knowledge’60
(see
chapter seven, below). But Mayakovsky is equally dismissive of the
‘free’ verse and of art for art’s sake:
I make this stipulation: establishing rules is not in itself the aim of
poetry, otherwise the poet turns into a scholastic exercising his
powers in formulating rules for non-existent or useless things and
propositions . . . A proposition which demands formulation
demands rules, is thrust upon us by life. Methods of formulation,
the aim of rules, are deﬁned by factors of class and the needs of
our struggle.61
The deviation of Pudovkin’s practice from standard logical syntax (to
which he adheres closely in The Mechanics of the Brain) is in some
measure exonerable as (or even demonstrative of ) poetic licence:
The ﬁlm is yet young and the wealth of its methods is not yet extensive;
for this reason it is possible to indicate temporary limitations
without necessarily attributing to them the permanence and inﬂexibility
of laws.
Everything said here regarding simple methods of taking shots
has certainly only information value. What particular method of
shooting is to be used, only his own taste and his own ﬁner feelings
can tell the scenarist. Here are no rules; the ﬁeld for new invention
and combination is wide.62
In The End of St. Petersburg and The Mother, and less successfully in A
Simple Case, Pudovkin rhythmically repeats images in order to underscore
a particular meaning quite apart from the immediately contiguous
diegetic context; these shots are not routinely interpolated into a
22 Vsevolod Pudovkin
standard pattern of editing, rather the particular rhythm and syntax of
the ﬁlm is constructed out of them.
1920s ﬁlm theory declared its own formulations of the relationship
between the spectator and the director, between the screen and the
camera. An attempt was made to incorporate formal positions
concerned with the peculiar material and apparatus of ﬁlm with the
perceptual and conceptual effect upon the spectator. Kuleshov posits a
formal equation in which the supposed experience of the viewer
informs the the direction of the scene (see chapter seven, below). For
Kuleshov, the frame retains its substantive presence: ‘Imagine the
screen as a blank white rectangle to be ﬁlled . . .’.63
Kuleshov hypothesises
a geometric grid, ‘a pyramid with its apex resting on the
camera’, along the axes of which the performed action is organised
for optimum ﬁgurative clarity. This equation serves separate scenes
rather than the transitions. Kuleshov says little of what is is conceptually
constructive in the formal conjunction of these pieces. Theoretically,
Eisenstein lays most emphasis on his own editing of the ﬁlm as
the moment at which it begins to exist and as that procedure in which
the greatest and most decisive effect is achieved on the spectator.
Eikhenbaum and Eisenstein argue that meaning is made in the
computation or ‘equilibration’ of neural fragments and that montage
correspondingly imitates this process, that the formal mechanism
maps onto the conceptual, activity occurs in juxtaposition (see chapter
six, below).
Pudovkin too asserts the construction of identity between spectatorship
and the making of the ﬁlm. The process begins for him with the
camera angle, his basic unit. Mechanically, the shot is less important
for Pudovkin as a photographic record than as a means of selecting
and isolating material (frame, focal length, length of shot, angle of
camera and angle of vision): THE CAMERA COMPELS THE
SPECTATOR TO SEE AS THE DIRECTOR WISHES.64
Theoretically,
Pudovkin aligns the act of viewing a projected ﬁlm with his
imagining and direction of scenes, already thematically dictated by
his scenario. The scenario is pragmatically subdivided in accordance
with the length of reels currently available and the customary number
of reels per feature. Shutko, writing in 1927, nicely appreciates this as
standard practice rather than decisively formulated:
. . . it is sometimes amusing to read of the idle experiments of
The old regime and the new 23
certain theorists who try to time such cinematic masterpieces as The
Tobacco Girl from Seville or The Spanish Dancer and who discover an
amazing regularity: each act lasts 11–12 minutes. Their theoretical
brains are already ticking over, a cinematurgic ‘law’ for the construction
of a section of a ﬁlm is ready to be born but it transpires
that this is all the result of the more or less constant length of each
reel and nothing else.65
Pudovkin uses diegetic movement in a single frame juxtaposed with
movement in the adjacent frame to ease logical or emotional coherence
to the succession of the fragments and uses montage movement to aid
the apprehension of his theme: in both direction of the parts and the
whole he observes his ‘psychological law’, ‘guiding the spectator’ (see
chapter two, below). Theoretically, Pudovkin allows little room for
ambiguity or divergence between himself and his audience, ‘despotically
leading’ his audience.
However, direction is for Pudovkin not an entirely unilateral process.
The director, he suggests, anticipates a potential viewer’s shift of attention
from one point of a supposed pro-ﬁlmic event to another, both in
space and in time. The director’s ‘despotism’ resides in his presuming
the expectation which he then obligingly satisﬁes. This shift, he
suggests, is ordained by the sequence in which attention would be
attracted were an event to be witnessed naturally. Here, however,
Pudovkin invites criticism, using as examples citations from scenarios
already conventionally, actively ordered into such a sequence. But
when Dart and Arnheim complain of inconsistency in practice
(sometimes there is no such referent pro-ﬁlmic event or an apparently
natural sequence is disrupted) they fall foul of a similar presumption,
criticising Pudovkin for contravening a convention which is an accessory
of the art, no more than provisional, usual but not natural in the
sense of essential to the medium, no more than occasionally expedient,
even if in practice this becomes a generally favoured option (see
chapter seven, below). The convention of identifying the camera with a
participatory role in the event is, for Pudovkin, subordinate to the task
of effecting in the spectator a particular theme. A common sense
analogy with literature seems useful here; Pudovkin takes the liberty
which is allowed the author, sometimes narrating action, sometimes
reporting dialogue, but in both capacities adopting a thematic point of
view.
24 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Notes
1 Pudovkin, ‘Kak ia stal rezhisserom’, SS II, p.33; Pudovkin’s early sketchbook,
reproduced by Tatiana Zapasnik in Die Zeit in Grossaufnahme, is now
held by the Muzei Kino, Moscow. Not unusually for an 18 year old boy,
Pudovkin was keen on drawing horses (but could not do fetlocks) and
large women in ﬂimsy blouses; his portrait/caricature sketches are the
most interesting items
2 V. R. Gardin, Vospominaniia, Moscow 1949, p. 192; Gardin in his memoirs
outlines the courses which he taught and proposed for the new State
School of Cinematography; Gardin maintained that montage should not
replace the portrayal of character psychology (a position to which Soviet
cinema in general returned in the 1930s)
3 Gardin was irked to ﬁnd himself ousted by the upstart Kuleshov and was
adamant that his was the ﬁrst proposal for the systematic teaching of ﬁlm:
see Vospominaniia, p.196
4 see RGALI 2003/1/36; 37; 38; 46, 47, 48, 49, 50.
5 Nikolai Iezuitov, Gardin XL let, Moscow 1940; p. 41; compare Pudovkin’s
1938 ‘O vnutrennem i vneshem v vospitanii aktera’
6 Pudovkin, ‘Siuzhetnoe oformlenie temy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 60
7 Pudovkin, Obolenskii, Komarov, Fogel’, ‘Predislovie k knige L. Kuleshova
‘‘Iskusstvo kino’’ ’, SS II, p. 358; even in 1934, Pudovkin valued the
training provided by Kuleshov’s schooling: Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, pp. 236–
237
8 Ronald Levaco, ed. Kuleshov on Film, Berkeley 1974, p. 45
9 ‘Kino i derevnia’ Sovetskoe kino 1, February 1926, pp. 14–15; this discussion
of cinema can be compared with the articles of Petrov, Katsigras and
others on the uses of radio in the countryside; see also Taylor and Christie,
eds. The Film Factory, pp. 299–305.
10 Viktor Shklovskii, ‘K voprosu ob izuchenii zritelia’ Sovetskii ekran 50, 11
December 1928, p. 6
11 see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Cambridge 1989 for a discussion
of the distance between science fantasy and reality; also Loren Graham,
ed. Science and the Soviet Social Order, London 1990
12 Pudovkin, ‘O metodakh raboty ‘‘Lucha smerti’’ ’, SS II, p. 41; Anatolii
Golovnia worked as Levitskii’s assistant on The Death Ray
13 RGALI 2679/1/162
14 Le´on Moussinac, Le Cine´ma sovie´tique, Paris 1928, p. 181
15 Panofsky gives sources for this story in Idea, New York 1968, p. 15
16 see Mikhail Iampolskii, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology
of the Actor’, IFF, p. 45 for details of the allocation of ﬁlm stock
for THE experiment itself
17 Pudovkin, ‘Organizatsiia ‘‘sluchainogo’’ materiala’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial,
SS I, pp. 108–109
18 see, for instance, Hitchcock’s reference in James Naremore, Acting in the
Cinema, p. 240 and the apparently mangled version given by Brunius in
The old regime and the new 25
Roger Manvell, ed. Experiment in the Film, London 1949, p. 62
19 Lindley Hanlon, Fragments: Bresson’s Film Style, London 1986, p. 213
20 Pudovkin, ‘Naturshchik vmesto aktera’, SS I, p. 182
21 Levaco, p. 54 and Lev Kuleshov, Selected Works, tr. Dmitri Agrachev and
Nina Belenkaia, Moscow 1987, p. 138; the Razumny ﬁlm was distributed
abroad as The Beauty and the Bolshevik.
22 Golovnia interview, Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Cinema in Revolution, tr. D.
Robinson, London 1973, p. 144
23 Yuri Tsivian, ‘Some Historical Footnotes to the Kuleshov Experiment’
[1986] Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Space Frame Narrative, London 1990, pp.
249–251
24 Pudovkin, ‘Montazh stroiashchii’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 71
25 Be´la Bala´zs, Theory of the Film, London 1952, p. 61
26 Ian Christie and Julian Graffy, Protazanov, London 1993, p. 20; see also V.
S. Lukhachev, Istoriia kino v Rossii 1896–1913, Leningrad 1927, p. 171 for a
wonderful (and I suspect touched-up) picture of Mozzhukin’s mesmerising
stare.
27 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872],
Chicago 1965, p. 12
28 Moussinac, p. 127; Rene´ Marchand and Pierre Weinstein, Le Cine´ma, Paris
1927, p. 159
29 Levaco, p. 173; see also James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society, Cambridge
1977, on the shift from physical culture in the ’20s to competitive sport in
the ’30s
30 Levaco, p. 58
31 Pudovkin, ‘Tema’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 57
32 Levaco, ed. p. 100; on the connections of ﬁlm with Meyerhold’s
practice see Osip Brik’s article and the illustrations of Igor Il’inskii in
The Forest in ‘Kino v teatre Meierkhol’da’, Sovetskii ekran 20, 18 May
1926, pp. 6–7
33 Be´atrice Picon-Vallin, Meyerhold, Paris 1990, p. 109
34 Mel Gordon, ‘Meyerhold’s Biomechanics’, Drama Review 18.3 (1974) p. 77
35 Levaco, p. 99
36 current research into repetitive strain injury (notably on ﬁshing trawlers, the
closest instance I could ﬁnd to stevedores) suggests that Kuleshov’s conﬁdence
was misplaced
37 Evgenii Zamiatin, We, tr. C. Brown, Harmonsworth 1993, pp. 13 and 34;
see also F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientiﬁc Management [1911], New
York 1947, p. 79, for instructions on how best to lay bricks; Taylor’s
example is not as good as it seems as softening the mortar could well mar
the stability of the wall . . .
38 Levaco, p. 56
39 Huntley Carter, The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia, London
1924, p. 277; see also proceedings of 1995 CPR ‘Past Masters’ conference
and Jo¨rg Bochow, Das Theater Meyerholds und die Biomechanik, Berlin
1997
26 Vsevolod Pudovkin
40 Hanlon, p. 213: ‘[Kuleshov’s] ﬁlms include very exaggerated performances’
41 see ‘However odd, Khokhlova!’, Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard
Taylor, London 1988, p. 71
42 for the recurrence of this ﬁgure as a new Soviet type see Geoffrey Hosking,
A History of the Soviet Union, London 1990, p. 86; it also appears as a
puppet in Sevzapkino’s N+N+N (1924); the Museum of the Revolution on
Tverskaia in Moscow has a good display of the actual article
43 Moussinac, p. 128; see also Viktor Shklovskii, ‘O rozhdenii i zhizni
‘‘FEKSov’’ ’ [1928], Za sorok let, Moscow 1965
44 IFF, p. 33; see also Franc¸ois Albera, ed. Vers une the´orie de l’acteur,
Lausanne 1990 and, for the continuing use by Khokhlova of Delsarte in
actor training, Vlada Petric´, ‘A subtextual reading of Kuleshov’s satire
‘‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the
Bolshevik’’ ’ in Andrew Horton, ed. Inside Soviet Film Satire, Cambridge
1993, p. 67. For Volkonskii’s thoughts on cinema see ‘O russkom ekrane’
[1928] reprinted in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 13, 1992
45 V. R. Gardin, Vospominaniia, Moscow 1949, pp. 201–203
46 Levaco, p. 107
47 Levaco, p. 73
48 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard Taylor, London 1988, p. 151;
Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, London 1958, p. 186
49 Pudovkin, ‘Rabota aktera v kino i ‘‘sistema’’ Stanislavskogo’ [1952],
Izbrannye stat’i, Moscow 1955, p. 217
50 Pudovkin, ‘Naturshchik vmesto aktera’, SS I, p. 183
51 Sovetskoe kino 1, February 1926, gives Shpikovskii as scenarist and codirector;
Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, Cambridge 1992,
p. 216, suspects that Chess Fever is in large part his work
52 see Denise J. Youngblood, ‘An ambivalent NEP satire of bourgeois aspirations’
in Horton, ed. pp. 48–58
53 Sovetskoe kino 1, February 1926, p.13; the article is delightfully designed
like a chequerboard, with alternating blocks of text and photographs of the
Chess grand masters
54 see Vestnik kinematograﬁi 123, 1917 and Kine-zhurnal 5-6 p. 110 and 11–16
p. 161, 1917
55 qu. Vlada Petric´, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in the USA’, Ph.D. thesis,
New York 1973, p. 95
56 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy obrabotki materiala’, Kinostenarii, SS I, p. 70
57 Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Cinema Stylistics’, ed. Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist
Film Theory, Michigan 1981, p. 67; for a useful discussion of this essay see
Paul Willemen, ‘Reﬂections on Eikhenbaum’s Concept of Internal Speech
in the Cinema’, Looks and Frictions, Bloomington 1994
58 Peter Dart, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York 1974, p. 110
59 Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky, London 1989, p. 101
60 Vladimir Maiakovskii, How are Verses Made?, tr. G. M. Hyde, Bristol 1990,
p. 49
61 Maiakovskii, How are Verses Made?, p. 44
The old regime and the new 27
62 Pudovkin, ‘Tema’ and ‘Prosteishie spetsial’nye priemy s’’emki’, Kinostsenarii,
SS I, pp. 56 and 69
63 Levaco, pp. 66 and 110
64 Pudovkin, ‘Apparat zastavliaet zritelia videt’ tak, kak etogo khochet
rezhisser’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 125
65 Kirill Shutko, preface to Boris Eikhenbaum, ed. Poetika kino [1927],
Richard Taylor, ed. Poetics of Cinema, Oxford 1982, p. 2
28 Vsevolod Pudovkin
2. Russian Physiology and
Pudovkin’s The Mechanics of the
Brain (The Behaviour of Animals
and Man)
It was not mere chance that the task of ﬁlming Pavlov’s new laboratory
was entrusted by Mezhrabpom-Rus to the relatively inexperienced
Pudovkin. Pudovkin trained as a chemist in his youth; supposedly a
colleague of Pavlov was sufﬁciently impressed by Pudovkin’s knowledge
to offer him a placement.1
According to his wife, Anna
Zemtsova, Pudovkin retained a zealous interest in science and scientiﬁc
innovation. She depicts him as something of a Renaissance polymath
and an eternal adolescent, always interested in things new.2
He hoped
to make a ﬁlm which would demonstrate and explain a great scientiﬁc
idea or principle. In retrospect it now seems that he came closer to
realising this aim with The Mechanics of the Brain [Mekhanika golovnogo
mozga (Povedenie zhivotnykh i cheloveka), 1925] than with the
Stalinist bio-pics devoted to Great Men of Science (the aviator
Zhukovsky) similar in tendency to his Great Men of History series of
the same period (General Nakhimov, Admiral Suvorov). Although The
Mechanics of the Brain includes an establishing shot of Pavlov’s Leningrad
laboratory, followed by a brief glimpse of academician Pavlov
himself, reading in his study, and even occasional accredited quotations,
the ﬁlm is more an exposition of the work than a paean to the
man.
Boris Babkin was a pupil of Pavlov who ﬂed the Soviet Union for
England then Canada. Corroborating the usual assumption of the pertinence
of Pavlov’s work, he says that:
Very soon after the accession of the Bolsheviks to power Pavlov’s
teachings on conditioned reﬂexes were recognised by them as
afﬁrming that the intellectual life of people can be radically reconstructed
and that a proletarian revolution worldwide would create a
new human society.3
However, this welding of Pavlov to Bolshevik interests occurred in spite
of his own protestations and that of scientiﬁc research in general. Nor
was Pavlov alone; many bourgeois intellectuals remained outside the
Party and Lunacharsky stalwartly defended their right to do so.4
Reﬂexology was taught also at the Communist Academy, but the inferiority
of its work to that of Pavlov’s Institute was widely acknowl-
edged.5
In 1921, Lenin himself had signed a decree safeguarding the
work and Pavlov personally. In 1922, he asked Lenin if he could take
his work abroad, but was refused permission.6
In September 1923, after
a brief foreign tour, he delivered a public lecture criticising Bolshevism
as he saw it and, speciﬁcally, Bukharin’s ABC of Communism. He
complained of the likely loss of life consequent on pursuing a
programme of world revolution in a world which did not want it; he
criticised the idea that ‘cultural intellectual production’ could be
assumed by the proletariat and applied to the furtherance of the class
war; he criticised the Party establishment for its intervention in the
appointment and expulsion of university staff and criticised Bolshevism
in general for being as prejudicial to the advancement of science as the
Orthodox Church had been hitherto under Tsarist protection:
Science and free criticism, these are synonymous . . . if you
acknowledge that Marxism and communism are not absolute truths,
that it is only a theory in which there may be a part of a truth, but
in which there is perhaps no truth, then you will look on all life
with freedom of view but not with such slavery.7
Bukharin took the attack sufﬁciently seriously to publish a reply. Given
the usefulness of Pavlov to the party’s agenda and given Bukharin’s
preference for the superiority of science over the arts, its tone is strangely
condescending:
. . . even the sun has spots. These spots have the tendency to increase
substantially when specialists of natural science begin to deal with
30 Vsevolod Pudovkin
things which they – I hope that the author of conditional reﬂexes
will forgive me – simply do not know.8
Admittedly, late in life, when Bukharin had long since fallen from
grace, Pavlov voiced patriotic support for the Soviet state and it may be
that he was by then genuinely persuaded of its cause. It may be that he
was thereby expressing gratitude for its benevolence towards his laboratory
and research, and for the personal privileges extended to himself
and his wife in times of hardship.9
It may be that he was afraid of
losing a guarantee of security. Certainly, Pavlov did not retain into the
1930s the high esteem which he had enjoyed previously. In the late
1940s and 1950s he was unequivocably rehabilitated to the ranks of
accepted national worthies and, perversely, inexperienced aspirant
scientists were discouraged from freely criticising his principal tenets.10
Theories of associative learning based on Pavlov’s conditioned reﬂex
(the thesis of stimulus-response) were of immediate service to the
Soviet programme of mass education. They were subsequently taken
up by Watson and Skinner and a whole generation of psychologists in
the United States.11
The suggestion that learning (as the acquisition of
habit) was a mechanical process independent of the prescriptions of
inheritance was commensurate with an ideology of egalitarianism and
with the internationalist thrust of early ’20s Soviet policy. The education
programme continued throughout the ’20s in apparent disregard of
Pavlov’s later work in typology which obliged him to admit, ultimately,
that some dogs were simply born more intelligent than others.12
n addition to the speciﬁc utility and convenience of Pavlovian
physiology to Bolshevism, in the promotion of a revolutionary
movement in society an earlier period of Russian history was invoked.
Sechenov, to whom Pavlov referred as ‘the father of Russian
physiology’ had been associated (and, like Pavlov, often against his
will) with Nihilist subversion and resistance to the metaphysics of
Orthodoxy and the Tsarist regime. Daniel P. Todes, in ‘From Radicalism
to Scientiﬁc Convention’, suggests that Pavlov’s allegiance to
Sechenov may even have been over-stated in the ofﬁcial record in order
to stress a convenient line of descent.13
Pavlov and Sechenov were
both heralded for their admission of women to their courses; their
laboratories were even idealistically construed as social models of
collective endeavour. Many adherents of Pavlov were physicians from
clinics concerned to treat illness by the best means possible. When his
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 31
news-sheet, The Contemporary, was banned from publishing Sechenov’s
overtly challenging Reﬂexes of the Brain (1863), Chernyshevsky
supported Sechenov in his campaign to have it published elsewhere. By
taking its title as its own, Lenin’s strategic pamphlet What is to be Done?
(1902) explicitly acknowledged and honoured the Chernyshevsky novel
of 1862, as did articles by Kuleshov dated 1923 and 1930. Sechenov
was deemed to be the original for Chernyshevsky’s Dr. Kirsanov and
also for the medical student Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Children:
‘All men are similar, in soul as well as in body . . . It is enough to
have one human specimen in order to judge all others . . . We know
more or less what causes physical ailments; and moral diseases are
caused by the wrong sort of education, by all the rubbish people’s
heads are stuffed with from childhood onwards, in short by the disordered
state of society. Reform society and there will be no dis-
eases’.14
Herzen’s relative ‘The Chemist’ is a similar social type.15
Not only was
physiology socially practicable and progressive (in medicine, in public
health, in education) but by citation of historic precedent, its leading
players could be rendered as causally inked to perceived political
progress also. The fact that physiology had aroused such strong opposition
from the old regime disposed towards its facile characterisation as
a fundamentally revolutionary force.16
The Mechanics of the Brain
demonstrates at considerable length the experiments with frogs for
which Sechenov was famous, as the basis for Pavlov’s enquiry into
higher nervous activity.
Pavlov’s personal importance to the Soviet state was further
enhanced by his enormous international standing. In 1904, Pavlov had
received a Nobel Prize for his work on the digestive system in dogs.
Thereafter, his laboratory attracted students from abroad, including
Anrep, who was responsible for the 1927 English translation of the
Lectures. Pavlovian psychology came to acquire a status equivalent to
that of schools developing contemporaneously from beginnings in
France, Austria, Germany and America. Pavlov’s scientiﬁc eminence
and respectability, the exemplary facilities with which the state
provided him and his colleagues, lent kudos (however spurious) to the
Soviet claim to be a modernising, science-led society. While the Soviet
state was conscious of its inferiority in so many other areas, in the new
32 Vsevolod Pudovkin
science of Physiological Psychology, it could congratulate itself on its
excellence. In spite of the Revolution, noted J. B. S. Haldane, the
conduct of ﬁne science in Russia continued.17
Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855) was acknowledged
by Sechenov to be inﬂuential in his own speculations into the activities
of reﬂexes in animal behaviour: Spencer straightforwardly linked
biology and socio-cultural evolution. Sechenov equally admired
Darwin (both The Origin of Species and The Expression of Emotions in
Man and Animals) for establishing grounds for the proposition that
behaviour in humans and animals could be commonly rooted and
activated by the instinct to survive. For Pavlov too, Darwin was fundamental:
‘Darwin must be counted as founder and instigator of the
contemporary comparative study of higher vital phenomena of animals
. . . the hypothesis of the origin of man from animals gave great
impetus to the study of higher phenomena of animal life . . . ’.18
However, Sechenov lacked the experimental techniques necessary to
test his theories scientiﬁcally. Pavlov took this as his immediate task
within the discipline of physiology. He confronted the inherited
dualistic anxieties (William James’ ‘leaking joints’) as far and only as
far as science would allow:
Pavlov viewed philosophy and science as complementary: the goal
of philosophy is to unveil the essence of natural phenomena; the
goal of science is to understand the functioning of the mechanisms
through which nature works. In examining the human brain . . .
science is not concerned with the ontological essence of the ‘physical’
and the ‘physiological’ but with the functions of the cerebral
cortex that are related to speciﬁc phases of consciousness . . . Pavlov
made no effort to reduce all physical phenomena to physiological
actions, even though his interest centred on establishing physiological
processes underlying given psychological phenomena.19
George Bernard Shaw’s criticism of Pavlov for denying ‘the existence
and authority of . . . any metaphysical factors in life whatsoever,
including purpose, intuition, inspiration and all religious and artistic
impulses’,20
is an entertaining tease, but, if taken seriously, unfounded
and unfair: Pavlov was simply endeavouring to pursue a scientiﬁc line
of enquiry as far as it could take him. When the hero of Zamiatin’s
dystopia We is subjected to the Bell (surely intended as a reference to
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 33
the reﬂex apparatus) to cure him of his illness (Imagination) he
condemns a distortion of Pavlov’s work which Pavlov himself would
never have defended.21
However resolutely Pavlov bound himself to
the constraints of laboratory practice and resisted the appellation of
psychologist he was nonetheless pressed into service. Psychology,
seeking to establish its own scientiﬁc credentials and to distance itself
from introspective psychologising, appropriated his name. At an international
conference celebrating a century of psychology in 1985, a
speaker invoked ‘Wundt, Pavlov and Freud’ as its ‘great founding
triumvirate’.22
Scientiﬁc ﬁlms in Russia
Scientiﬁc ﬁlms had been made before the revolution, in Russia and
elsewhere. Frederick A. Talbot’s Moving Pictures (1912) refers to ﬁlms
of microbes, ﬂowers, insects and polyps.23
Professor Voskresensky,
Pudovkin’s assistant on The Mechanics of the Brain, says that such ﬁlms
enjoyed enormous popularity with Russian audiences and that, before
the Revolution, the majority of these ﬁlms were imported. Voskresensky,
like Professor Tikhonov writing in Kino in 1922, ﬁnds that
German ﬁlms of natural science subjects merit particular mention.24
Similar ﬁlms, and ﬁlms about anatomy and public health and hygiene
continued to be made in Russia and distributed in the ’20s. For
instance, Sovetskii ekran includes a discussion of a ‘kul’turﬁl’ma’ about
the structure of the human eye and the care of eyesight. Other ﬁlms
addressed abortion and promoted the Soviet campaign against
alcoholism. Discussion of The Mechanics is accompanied by topics of
associated interest: Sovetskoe kino devotes an article to the attempts of
Mezhrabpom-Rus to popularise science. It gives The Sky and the Earth
and Alcohol and Health as ﬁlms in production and Problems of Nutrition
(to be directed by Boris Barnet) and Mother and Child (How to Tell
Children the Facts of Life) as under preparation. Modern Neuroses is listed
as a ﬁlm intended for Pudovkin, but this was unfortunately never
realised.25
Articles under the heading ‘How to make an educational
ﬁlm’ appear, for instance, in Sovetskoe kino, including the contribution
from Pudovkin, in Art-ekran and in Kino i kul’tura.26
Elsewhere it was
suggested that cinematography could be employed to render Einstein
comprehensible to a wider audience and German scientiﬁc ﬁlms
imported into Russia included The Theory of Relativity.27
34 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Scientiﬁc ﬁlms for a general audience were part of the wider Soviet
campaign to educate and inform a massive widespread population, a
high percentage of which was illiterate.28
Before the Revolution,
cinema-going had been an almost exclusively urban occupation. At
Lunacharsky’s instigation, the Commissariat of Enlightenment set up
specialist ﬁlm units: Mikhail Romm, trained with the Children’s Film
Unit, making ﬁlms and studying audience reception.29
A designated
studio for documentary ﬁlms, Kult’kino, was established in 1924 but its
disbanding in 1926 left Mezhrabpom-Rus the major producer in the
ﬁeld.30
The Commissariat levied taxes on cinema tickets in order that
funds could be re-directed towards the making of educational ﬁlms,
which, together with Mezhrabpom’s independent revenues, allowed it
to make geographical, topical and scientiﬁc documentaries. Under
Lenin’s cineﬁcation programme such ﬁlms were carried into the
regions, by boat, train and camel, with projectors powered by mobile
generators, or were shown in workers’ clubs, in schools, hospitals and
in factories, as cheaply as possible to make them accessible to all.31
Sometimes these were shown to the accompaniment of an explanatory
lecture. Often the screenings were fraught with practical difﬁculties:
projectors being liable to break down and there being poor knowledge
of maintenance; inexperienced projectionists showing ﬁlms at incorrect
speed and ﬁlms soon becomimg damaged by being exhibited on inadequate
equipment.32
In the major commercial cinemas in the larger
towns, a programme often billed a documentary ﬁlm as the ﬁrst item,
followed by a comedy short then the main feature. Such documentary
ﬁlms were generally released at a loss and no more than ten copies
were made. The Mechanics of the Brain was unusual for raising a proﬁt.33
The Mechanics of the Brain
The title of Pudovkin’s 1926 ﬁlm, The Mechanics of the Brain (The
Behaviour of Man and Animals), describes the research with which
Pavlov was immediately concerned and his particular physiological
contribution to psychology. The ﬁrst reel shows basic reﬂexes in
animals and reproduces Sechenov’s experiments with frogs; the second
reel shows the formation of conditioned reﬂexes in dogs and the
training of monkeys to respond to alternate colour stimulii; the third
reel shows the effect of damage to various parts of the human brain
and the performance of tasks by children at different ages.
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 35
Given the routine acknowledgement of the inﬂuence of Pavlov’s
theories on Soviet ﬁlm practice I ﬁnd it remarkable that this ﬁlm has
been very largely overlooked.34
It seems to me that a study of this ﬁlm
is useful as an indication of what was commonly understood of
Pavlov’s work, as an indication of how the ﬁlm camera might be
employed as an instrument of scientiﬁc exposition and as to how
Pudovkin constructed and construed a logical scenario adequate to this
task.
Moussinac mentions it in passing in Le Cine´ma sovie´tique (1928) as
exemplary of its kind and Bryher’s Film Problems of Soviet Russia
(1929) provides a fuller description of its content.35
Leyda’s Kino (ﬁrst
edition 1960) adds a brief commentary on the difﬁculties surrounding
its production. John Maddison, in his contribution to Manvell’s
Experiment in the Film (1949), regrets that few Soviet science ﬁlms
reach western audiences, but ﬁnds The Mechanics of the Brain still
worthy of attention.36
Catherine de la Roche (1948) cites a sound
ﬁlm made by Bazykin, The Physiology and Pathology of Nervous Activity,
which at least stands witness to a continuing interest in familiarising
an audience with Pavlov’s work, but nothing is said of its predecessor.
The cursory reference in Peter Dart’s monograph, Pudovkin’s Films and
Film Theory (1974), and his unsubstantiated claim that it ‘must be
regarded as the best scientiﬁc ﬁlm of the silent period’ is, I suggest,
lifted directly from Mariamov, as is much else.37
Mariamov in turn
quotes the 1937 appraisal by Iezuitov, but conveys little sense of
experiencing the ﬁlm ﬁrst-hand: ‘In the work on this ﬁlm Pudovkin
could satisfy his enthusiasm and partiality for philosophical analysis:
with the aid of his scientiﬁc understanding he could reach the very
core of his subject’.38
Paul Rotha claims, possibly extravagantly, that
the ‘key to Pudovkin’s direction lay plainly in The Mechanics of the
Brain, for it gave an exposition of the methods which he employs for
the selection of his visual images, based on an understanding of the
working of the human mind’.39
Anatoli Golovnia is unforthcoming in
his Light in the Art of the Cameraman [Svet v iskusstve operatora,
1945], but refers to The Mechanics of the Brain in his interview with
Jean and Luda Schnitzer as the ﬁlm with which his long-standing
partnership with Pudovkin was initiated.40
At the time, he wrote with
understandable exasperation about the technical problems of working
with children and animals, and suggested that in future such work be
undertaken by specialist personnel; little wonder that the opportunity
36 Vsevolod Pudovkin
to ﬁlm Chess Fever, in the midst of these difﬁculties, was welcomed
with glad relief:
The ﬁlm was composed from such models as mad men, idiots,
paralytics, a woman in childbirth, new-born infants and not newborn
. . . ordinary dogs and dogs without a brain; dissected frogs
and undissected frogs, monkeys, lions, bears, eagles, cows, horses,
hippopotami, crocodiles. And all this entire ensemble turns around,
ﬁdgets, runs off or separates out, seizes our operator or grasps onto
the camera.41
To these problems can be added, say Golovnia and Pudovkin, the
aggravations of lighting and ﬁlming in small spaces with multiple
camera positions, the time taken to move from one position to
another.42
Like The Mother, The End of St. Petersburg and Storm over Asia, The
Mechanics of the Brain was refused a licence for public screening on
release in Britain.43
However, it was shown privately to the Film
Society and to a meeting of the Neurological Section of the Royal
Society of Medicine, for which Montagu prepared English subtitles.
Unfortunately, the minutes do not record any opinion of the ﬁlm.44
Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), committed and gratefully acknowledged
supporter of the Soviet ﬁlm in Britain, extolled the didactic potential
of The Mechanics of the Brain: ‘Surely this could be admitted as a scientiﬁc
ﬁlm free of duty, for in the world of research and medicine at
least there ought to be no barriers’.45
Other members of the Film
Society found it thoroughly objectionable. Montagu does not relate
whether complaints were prompted by the pictorial content (mentally
retarded and syphilitic patients; a woman in childbirth) or by the
ideological thrust of the titles (‘All life, all culture is wholly made up
of reﬂexes . . . ’; ‘The study of conditioned reﬂexes serves as the basis
of materialist understanding of the behaviour of animals and man’).
Certainly this pictorial content did not meet the standard criteria of
the BBFC.46
A screening intended for the London Workers’ Society
consequently necessitated drastic cuts.47
I have yet to ﬁnd any mention of the ﬁlm in a biography of
Pavlov (Cuny, Gray, Joravsky, Vucinich), not even those written by
erstwhile students of Pavlov in the Leningrad laboratory in which
the ﬁlm was made (Babkin, Frolov).48
Pavlov himself, writing in the
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 37
1930s of his studies of sleep, recognises the usefulness of ﬁlm to
clinical science, but says nothing of his earlier collaboration with
Pudovkin:
It is a pity that cinematography appeared too late and could not be
utilised by us and our physiological laboratories. Had it been as
accessible then as it is now, all these phenomena could have been
very easily comprehended. We could now demonstrate them to you
in the space of ﬁfteen minutes and you would leave us with the
deep conviction that inhibition and sleep are one and the same
process. But while inhibition is a concentrated process, hypnosis
and sleep represent an inhibition which spreads over more or less
vast areas.49
There is later documentary footage of Pavlov at work in the Leningrad
laboratory in the Krasnogorsk archive.
Contradictory reports are to be found in other sources of Pavlov’s
reaction to the ﬁlm. Luda and Jean Schnitzer say that he approved the
result,50
whereas Jay Leyda says that he resisted the idea from the
outset and draws a comparison with Freud’s opposition to Pabst’s
stylised drama, Secrets of a Soul [Geheimnisse einer Seele, Germany
1926].51
Certainly, the Gosﬁlmofond copy of Pudovkin’s meticulous
shot list bears Pavlov’s signature. Mariamov and Fefer (regular contributor
to Sovetskii ekran and Sovetskoe kino on matters scientiﬁc) say that
Pavlov took no part in the ﬁlming and that the original scenario was
volunteered to Mezhrabpom-Rus, unsolicited, by Voskresenky (himself
a follower of Pavlov).52
Pudovkin says that Pavlov, ever cautious, was
originally reluctant to co-operate, fearful that popularisation was tantamount
to ‘vulgarisation’, but that he was eventually reconciled to the
project.53
Pavlov did not care for anything likely to disrupt the work of
his laboratory or his account thereof. In the preface to the ﬁrst Russian
edition of the Lectures, he records laconically a major interruption to
which they were subject:
Five years ago, when I was conﬁned to my bed for several months
on account of a serious fracture of the leg I prepared a general
review of all our investigations. Then the Revolution began. This, of
course, distracted my attention . . . Thus it happened that what I had
prepared was never printed.54
38 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pudovkin’s task on The Mechanics of the Brain was rendered yet more
difﬁcult by the fact that in 1925–6 many of Pavlov’s discoveries in conditioned
and unconditioned reﬂexes were yet to be published and that he
was therefore obliged to work from a collection of notes and addresses,
sometimes incoherent or contradictory. From this experience, Pudovkin
concludes, those engaged in the making of scientiﬁc ﬁlms needs must be
competent scientists themselves and not simply technicians. He praises
the work of his assistants on The Mechanics of the Brain.55
More broadly,
although physiology had been enormously fashionable in literary circles
from the nineteenth century onwards, it also seems worth noting the
absence of a tradition popularising eminent work in the ﬁeld and the
absence, perhaps, of a readership for such a genre.56
What I have gleaned of Pavlov’s methods and principles elsewhere
endorses Pudovkin’s representation of the reserve with which Pavlov
met The Mechanics of the Brain. It leads one to suspect that Pavlov
would be at least sceptical and more likely downright hostile to the
translation of his work to a medium with which he was not familiar
and was disposed to consider with distaste. It could well be that Pavlov,
the strict and particular physiologist, then regarded ﬁlm in general as a
trivialising medium, inappropriate to serious enquiry. Pavlov was wont
to change his mind (and his theories) as new evidence presented itself
in experiments: for instance, in the documented disputes with Bekhterev
and in his drastic amendment of the hypothetical Hippocratic model
originally adopted for his work in typology.57
Pavlov chose to publish
the Lectures on Conditioned Reﬂexes unrevised, close to the form in which
they had been delivered, in order that the methodical working through
of a problem could remain apparent:
As a result of continued experimentation some of the deductions
and interpretations . . . had to be considerably modiﬁed. However . . .
I intentionally allowed the chapters to remain as they left my hands
. . . incorporating in the later lectures the new material . . . In this
manner the reader is placed in a position to obtain a much clearer
idea of the natural growth of the subject.58
The ﬁxing of experiments on ﬁlm, especially experiments as yet unpublished
in more orthodox form, could be construed as presenting as
conclusive and irrevocable theory that which in actuality was no more
than work in progress. ‘Pavlov was critical of results obtained in the
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 39
laboratory and of theories that might be forwarded regarding them’,
says Babkin; ‘a theory was good if it could connect facts for six months
at least’.59
‘It was . . . my habit’, says Pavlov himself, ‘to lay aside a
written article in order to forget it, so that when I re-read it I could the
better note its shortcomings’.60
Pavlov was always (as was Freud) keen to stress his concern with the
normal functioning of the brain, albeit under laboratory conditions,
and took care to eliminate external variables which might disrupt the
constancy of the controlled model set-up: even a ﬂake of plaster falling
from the ceiling or a ﬂy in the room could distract a dog’s attention.
Pavlov’s laboratory (the Tower of Silence) was constructed with a
straw-ﬁlled moat surrounding it, sand-pugged ﬂoors and thick windows
to insulate against the irregularity of external noise levels.61
Pudovkin
and Golovnia found that their presence affected the conduct of the
experiments, and for the experiments in the paediatric laboratory of
Professor Krasnogorsky they took the precaution of building a hide.
Shots remain in the ﬁnal cut in which the child subjects look out to
camera.
Pudovkin, although ﬁlming actual experiments in the laboratory
with dogs and monkeys, also contrived material which would serve to
illustrate Pavlov’s thesis as he understood it, ‘the general underlying
principal’ in accord with which all the material was organised. The
performance of the sea-lion in The Mechanics of the Brain was, by
Pudovkin’s own account, not at all left to its own devices:
One cannot command an animal to swim in a desired direction or
to approach a camera; but at the same time its movement was
exactly prescribed in the editing plan with which the construction of
the whole picture was bound up. . . . For the close-up the bait was
thrown again and again until the sea-lion leaped onto the right place
on the bank and made the necessary turn. Out of thirty takes made,
three were chosen and these gave on the screen the desired image of
continuous movement. This movement was not organised by direct
prescription of the work required but attained by approximate
control of chance elements and subsequent strict selection of the
material gathered.62
Iezuitov and Professor Voskresensky say that in general there is danger
in incorporating staged material in science ﬁlms, as this may provoke
40 Vsevolod Pudovkin
incredulity in an audience which may extend to any experimental
record with which it is associated.63
Another reason for Pavlov’s resistance to the initial proposal to
present his work may have been the association intended between the
bases of nervous activity and behaviour in animals, and developmental
psychology in humans. In the new-born child there are unconditioned
reﬂexes: a baby is shown clutching to an adult’s ﬁnger. In the opening
reel of the ﬁlm an orangoutang and a one year old infant are shown
making use of implements (a basic task which the syphilitic patient,
shown in the third reel, as a consequence of progressive cerebral
paralysis, can no longer perform). The mentally retarded subject is said
to have a brain no more developed than that of a ﬁsh and, like the oneyear-old
baby, reacts violently to the removal of food. Later, children of
different ages are shown performing more complicated tasks (washing,
building with bricks), then solving practical problems (a quoit hung on
the wall cannot be reached by a group of children nor can it be reached
from a table on which a child stands tiptoe holding up a long stick;
thereupon the children decide to put a chair on the table and by
standing on the chair the quoit is fetched down). Children play with a
toy car and a wendy-house. An older child ﬁnds the mechanism which
makes the car run. A six-year-old is shown playing with a train. Pavlov
is quoted in an intertitle: ‘. . . between reﬂexes there has to be a single
conditioned reﬂex, the reﬂex of purpose – the striving towards the
The unconditioned reﬂex in a newly born baby
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 41
achievement of a certain objective’. Seemingly, Pavlov was satisﬁed that
such parallels were thus far sound.
Pavlov chose the dog as the main subject for experiment because he
found it generally amenable; but he also declared the dog a useful
insight into the behaviour of man, as a result of their historic and environmental
interdependence.64
It is left to Mikhail Bulgakov, in The Heart
of a Dog (1925), to draw the absurdly logical conclusion that man and
dog are potentially anatomically interchangeable also.65
Pavlov tacitly
cast his work in an evolutionist mould, but was cautious as to undue
extrapolation from his results and, conversely, notoriously censorious
of ‘anthropomorphic’ terminology applied to animals in laboratory
conditions, exacting ﬁnes from defaulting students.66
While Shaw
(amidst much carping at Pavlov’s expense) complains of the extravernacular
character of his language, better informed commentators
identify ‘the reﬁnement of methodology and scientiﬁc nomenclature’ as
a distinct contribution. ‘In a deliberate effort to avoid psychological
terminology, Pavlov tied original labels to the concepts that he developed
to organise the data obtained from his research’.67
Outside of the
laboratory, Pavlov sometimes indulged himself in what Joravsky and
Vucinich term ‘holistic’ lapses, especially when enthusiastically
proclaiming the future potential of physiology to address the world’s
ills:
. . . now I am deeply and irrevocably convinced that along this path
. . . will be found the ﬁnal triumph of the human mind over its uttermost
and supreme problem: the knowledge of the laws and mechanism
of human nature . . . Only science, exact science about human
nature itself and the most sincere approach to it by aid of omnipotent
scientiﬁc method will deliver man from his present gloom and will
purge him of his contemporary shame in the sphere of interhuman
relations.68
Pavlov provocatively hypothesised that even language was no more
than a secondary function of higher nervous activity. Bekhterev admonished
Pavlov for this tendency to make grandiose prognostications
which ‘exact science’ was hard pressed to warrant:
Now the question is: do the reduction of the most complex biological
activities to such a simple scheme and the supporting of this
42 Vsevolod Pudovkin
position by expatiating on why, exactly, we Russians have, under the
inﬂuence of centuries of slavery, lost our volitional busyness, while
the Anglo-Saxons, in contrast, have for a long period freely developed
their ‘aim reﬂex’ – do these afford a solution of the problem in
the sense of explaining the given biological Phenomenon? It is scarcely
necessary to point out that very little is gained in this way and
that the adversaries of the objective method in its application to the
investigation of human personality are given a weapon.69
However, inside Pavlov’s Tower of Silence the laboratory imposed a
very precise and strict discipline. Indeed, Pavlov’s personal disaffection
for popular journals and for the academic conference circuit, his reluctance
to engage his scientiﬁc practice in a broader cultural context and
the preservation of its untainted exclusivity, may have sanctiﬁed yet
further its credentials as objective authority.70
Bekhterev swathed his work in a vast array of philosophical and
cultural reference, seemingly subsequently formulating experiments to
substantiate the particular position which he had already elected to
adopt. Bekhterev’s General Principles of Human Reﬂexology (1923) quotes
from Wundt, Freud, Mu¨nsterberg, du Bois Raymond, Christiansen’s
Philosophie der Kunst, the philologist Potebnia et al; most often it quotes
Bekhterev himself.71
Pavlov conﬁnes himself to the citation of other
scientists, only where there are speciﬁc points of concordance or
disagreement: for instance, he acknowledges that Thorndike’s experiments
in comparative physiology preceded his own by some two or
three years but effectively arrived at similar conclusions;72
he criticises
Kretschmer’s Physik und Charakter (1921) for failing to distinguish
between type and character and for reducing all mankind to two
clinical pathological types;73
his numerous objections to Gestalt
psychology include its lack of grounding in physiology (it has
neglected, he says, to acquaint itself thoroughly with Helmholtz), its
rejecting of analysis and the notion of associationism and in turn of the
study of behaviour in terms of stimulus-response units, ‘not that it
dislikes brain mechanics or dynamics; but it believes the brain to work
in large patterns, by ‘‘closing gaps’’ . . . rather than by the operation of
nerve paths linking this and that little centre in the brain’.74
Bekhterev
and Pavlov seem to characterise nicely Karl Popper’s distinction
between models of deductive and inductive science, with Pavlov laboriously
building theory from an accumulation of empirical evidence
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 43
gathered over considerable time and from a great number of individual
examples. Popper draws the distinction in order to cast doubt on the
presumed epistemological status of inductive science and to suggest
that, in practice, an absolute distinction may not hold fast- but of more
immediate concern, it seems to me, is that Pavlov’s scientiﬁc methodology
and Pavlov himself were recognised as highly serviceable to
Soviet purposes.75
Whereas William James, simultaneously attempting
to build a psychology on the foundations of natural science, openly
confesses that ‘here may be no science, only hope of a science’,
‘metaphysical questions leak through at every joint’, Pavlov appears
not to trouble to plug the joints but rather to deny the pertinence of the
questions.76
Shaw was not alone in assuming that Pavlov had
succeeded in eliminating the notion of ‘Soul’; Pavlov himself, in reply
to such suggestions, pronounced that declarations of its ﬁnal demise
were somewhat premature.77
Certain extreme factions of the party
were equally eager to leap to this same conclusion:
Our understanding of the process of cognition does not in the least
coincide with the meaning that has been given to these words in all
doctrines, except the theory of new biology: for us the words knowledge
and cognition signify only physiological reactions without any
participation of a psyche i.e. without any participation of non-spatial
phenomena.78
Techniques of the science ﬁlm
Pudovkin, in his 1925 article in Kino-zhurnal ARK ‘Montage in the
science ﬁlm’, makes a crucial distinction between the procedures
involved in recording experiments, usually intended for a professional
scientiﬁc audience, and ﬁlms made for popular consumption. To ﬁlm a
scientiﬁc experiment, he says, is to record not only an object but also a
dynamic process. But only for the professional audience can this be
translated without intervention, in a single unbroken sequence.79
The
former ﬁlms often require specialist equipment and installations, he
says, but says that such ﬁlms are already being produced in Germany.
In such ﬁlms the camera performs an ‘investigative role’.
The camera had, since its invention, served as an item of scientiﬁc
apparatus and its photographic products had been appreciated as
evidence objectively verifying scientiﬁc facts. Lisa Cartwright notes
44 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Lumie`re’s ‘near-lifelong commitment to medical biology, pharmacology
and experimental physiology’.80
Muybridge and Marey both
published their photographic analyses of movement in the 1870s.
Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
reproduces photographs made by Duchenne and uses engravings made
from photographs, presumably to show the location of muscles with
greater precision. Darwin praises Duchenne for his care and atten-
tion.81
However, the photographic image is here a record of the procedure
by which the supposedly typical representation of that emotion
was arrived at, rather than a genuine record of emotion spontaneously
expressed. The genuineness of the expression (as it relates to a particular
emotional state) appears to be taken as given, although no such
emotion was experienced at the time the photograph was taken. In
Voskresensky’s terms, these photographs are staged. Amidst the enthusiasm
for the new technique the distinction as to what exactly photography
is being employed to corroborate seems to me to be important
and relevant to the use of the ﬁlm The Mechanics of the Brain as a
record of Pavlov’s experiments. The possibility might be suggested that
the medium was itself selected to lend additional scientiﬁc authority to
the material recorded. The notion of Cinema Truth volunteered by
Vertov seems pertinent; but, in practice, Pudovkin ﬁnds Vertov’s directives
inadequate to his purpose of constructing a coherent exposition
and explanation of Pavlov’s work. Pudovkin says that ‘speciﬁcally
ﬁlmic means’ must be found through which to effect the ﬁlm-maker’s
understanding of his subject but that ‘the method of Cinema-Truth was
rejected’ in favour of ‘ﬁlm art’s own speciﬁc procedures for interpretation:
montage’.82
The scientiﬁc ﬁlm should not, says Pudovkin, rely on written
material interposed between shots (as was current practice), nor on a
spoken commentary for its intelligibility. The intertitles in The
Mechanics of the Brain are well spaced apart, usually short and single
frame (with the exception of a longer running quotation from Pavlov),
written in bold white type on black, frequently with especially signiﬁcant
words isolated and or underlined or enlarged (‘unconditioned and
conditioned reﬂexes serve as the basis of behaviour not only of animals
but also of mankind’). Pudovkin’s intricate, meticulously planned
scenario, shows that often at ﬁrst appearance a title is shown for
longer, then again but shorter then for a shorter time again as the
audience becomes increasingly familiar with its meaning: the repeated
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 45
intertitle is used to remind and reafﬁrm and ensures that slower readers
do not miss the point. Sometimes an image or sequence is repeated
either side of the relevant written text in order to reiterate the conclusivity
of the demonstration: in reel one, when the elephant takes food
in his trunk from the hand of his keeper and smartly deposits it in his
mouth, the sequence is subsequently broken down into the move hand
to trunk, then the intertitle, ‘conditioned behaviour in animals is
realised by the evolution of the higher regions of the brain’, then the
move trunk to mouth; in the third reel the children’s quoit is shown
isolated in close-up as if to identify the precise problem to be solved.
Some recognisably similar images or titles are repeated in different
instances in order to amplify the general content: the same shot of a
one year old infant is used alongside the orangoutang and the
syphilitic. ‘The scientiﬁc ﬁlm requires a strong idea around which to
organise its material’, says Pudovkin, ‘equivalent to the plot in a
feature ﬁlm’.83
Frequently there are shots of the mechanical apparatus
used to record the results of the experiments, as though with them
thereby to endorse: white-coated lab. technicians in their observation
chamber; needles jigging along rotating drums of graph paper; a metronome
ticking as the monkey negotiates a puzzle; a pressure gauge
strapped to the arm of a feeding child.
White coated lab. technicians
46 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Titles are also used to end sections decisively and to extend continuity
over the interruption between reels. Archive copies of the ﬁlm
match the breaks in the original scenario: ‘unconditioned reﬂexes are
innate’ (ends reel one); ‘What is a conditioned reﬂex? It’s simply
demonstrated in the digestion of animals’ (begins reel two). Continuity
is established between parts of an experiment taken (or staged) as
separate shots by maintaining direction of movement, simulating an
impression of itself as an unruptured demonstrative and integral whole:
an assistant moves in mid-shot camera right to left to remove a phial
attached to the cheek of a dog, which has just been fed, harnessed in
the stand; the shot is followed by a close-up in which a hand (similarly
jacketed) moves camera right to centre to display the contents of the
phial. Two similar phials are displayed, the assistant holding them
against his dark jacket as background, to compare the quantities of
saliva collected from (supposedly) two separate experiments: on the
left, the greater quantity of saliva collected from the response to raw
meat and, camera right, in response to rusks.
Secretion was in no way essential to the study of reﬂexes as a whole
but had been selected because it offered scope for the consistent veriﬁcation
of the commonest of conditioned reﬂexes and precise quantitive
and qualitative evaluation of stimuli employed.84
As Darwin observed,
‘a hungry man, if tempting food is placed before him, may not show
his hunger by any outward gesture, but he cannot check the secretion
of saliva’.85
Mariamov and Iezuitov relate that Pudovkin and his assistants
from Kuleshov’s workshop found the salivation of the dogs an
insufﬁciently photogenic subject and consequently sought to elicit
motor reactions also. This was a procedure favoured by Bekhterev and
only occasionally adopted by Pavlov. Animated diagrams, depicting
the formation of a conditioned motor reﬂex, were prepared for The
Mechanics of the Brain as the second venture of a specialist department
of Mezhrabpom-Rus.86
These were also used by Pudovkin to elucidate
the chain of activity and irritation in the leg of a frog and of particular
centres of the brain. Other diagrams were used to show which areas of
the brain in man governed speech, vision and motor activity. ‘The
location of the centres in man is similar to their location in higher
animals’; after operations, ‘in the case of ‘‘Clubs’’ all of the left cerebral
hemisphere is removed’, ‘in the case of ‘‘Jamaica’’ the centre of vision
is removed’, and co-ordination is lost. An intact dog is shown swiftly
negotiating an obstacle course built with chairs.
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 47
‘The lens of the camera is the eye of the spectator’, says Pudovkin,
but again he distances himself from the claim of the ‘cine-eyes’ that
material can be simply ‘seized from life’ [s’’emki ‘zhizni vrasplokh’].87
It is generally known that the essence of proper montage consists in
correctly connecting the attention of the spectator. If I photograph a
thing whole, then the spectator will perceive that thing in its entirety,
whereas the closer I approach it with the camera, the more the
spectator will grasp only selected details. This applies both to the
ﬁlming of a static object and to the ﬁlming of a dynamic process.
An observer following a demonstration guides his attention sometimes
here, sometimes there, then he pursues some detail, then he
occupies himself with the whole. As a result of which the attentive
observer secures a clearly delineated impression of the thing. He will
endeavour not to disregard any particular characteristic point whatever,
nor will he lose sight of them whilst concentrating on the principal
features . . . It depends on the director whether the spectator
becomes a good or a bad observer. It is clear that the shifting here
and there of concentration – corresponding to montage – is a strictly
regular process. Such laws of observation, which are required for
correct understanding, must be fully and completely transferred onto
the montage structure88
Pudovkin uses close-ups and the closing of the iris to draw attention to
particular points, to analyse, to summarise or draw an inference from a
whole sequence: the iris closes around the hand feeding the potato to
the elephant: it closes around the young boy in the swimming pool,
spluttering and shutting his eyes tight against stinging splashes.
Pudovkin uses the opening and closing of the iris in the labour
sequence to indicate time lapses between contractions.
On completing The Mechanics of the Brain, Pudovkin conﬁrmed the
principles which he believed fundamental to all ﬁlm work, ‘the
imperative for clarity and the careful organisation of camera work in
time and space’.89
His assertions regarding correct planning and
cutting were soon to be restated in his 1926 publications, The Film
Scenario and The Film Director and Film Material. In The Mechanics of
the Brain, Pudovkin produced a montage sufﬁciently correct (that is
to say, coherent, cogent, economical and unambiguous) to satisfy his
own purposes and also Pavlov’s exacting criteria of empirical exposi-
48 Vsevolod Pudovkin
tion. Pudovkin and Pavlov may even be said to be embarked upon a
similar project, to map, to trace, to quantify a simple psychical
process and, in Pavlov’s terms, to claim it for physiology and physics,
albeit for a physics which was already becoming out-moded at the
time at which he wrote; Pavlov takes Newton for granted as much as
he does Darwin: ‘Pavlov insisted’, says Babkin, ‘that the study of the
conditioned reﬂex mechanism permits one to reduce the problem of
the activity of the central nervous system to the study of space
relations, something psychology is unable to do: ‘‘You must be able
. . . to point . . . to where the excitation process was at a given
moment and where it has gone’’.’90
Pudovkin regards montage as an
implement effecting ‘the conscious guidance of the spectator’.
Pudovkin holds to and constructs (where Pavlov purports to reconstruct)
a notional space in which individual elements are cumulatively
associated, synthesised and connected.
Pravda reviewed The Mechanics of the Brain favourably, ﬁnding it to
accord with the usual view:
It destroys totally the myth of the human soul. Without willing it,
and even spite of himself, the spectator is irresistibly led to the only
possible conclusion: the soul does not exist, the life of the soul, its
creation, its inspiration – all this is nothing more than the higher
level of a reﬂex. The Mechanics of the Brain is a cultural product of
great value, not only for Soviet audiences but also internationally.91
Furthermore, in spite of Pavlov’s own protestations, this is the meaning
which Pudovkin apparently sought to convey. On the day on which he
began work on the ﬁlm, intent upon popularising Pavlov’s teaching on
the conditioned reﬂex as the foundation of behaviour in man,
Pudovkin wrote:
It is clear to everyone, how important it is to propagate this idea,
corroborated by the materialist world view, that for the present time
the notion of ‘Soul’ is conclusively extinguished.92
Notes
1 J. Leyda, Kino. A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, London 1960,
p. 206: ‘Professor Burankov, at the Pavlov Institute, was so impressed by
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 49
Pudovkin’s concentration and method that he offered him a post as his
assistant’.
2 interviewed by Jean and Luda Schnitzer in 1958, Poudovkine, Paris 1966,
p. 172
3 Boris Babkin, Pavlov: A Biography, London, 1951, p. 162; see also R. Fu¨lo¨pMiller,
The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, London 1927, p. 58: ‘The fact that
Pavlov’s ‘‘conditioned reﬂexes’’ seem to demonstrate the transition from
purely physiological automatism to association of ideas and primitive
forms of thought, was utilised by the Bolsheviks in the most grotesquely
exaggerated way in order to represent that all spirituality whatever, even in
its highest forms, art and science, is an expression of mere mechanism, as
it were the output of a more or less complicated factory . . .’
4 David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, London 1961, p. 66
‘. . . an effort was made to win the ‘‘bourgeois specialist’’ in natural
science to political sympathy with the regime and, if possible, to ideological
agreement with Marxism. But as late as 1928 natural scientists were
assured by Lunacharsky that it was their ‘‘legitimate right’’ not to be
Marxists’.
5 Joravsky, Soviet Marxism, p. 67
6 R. Gregory, Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford 1987, p. 59
7 transcript made by W. Horsley Gantt of an address given by Pavlov in
1923, Integrative Physiology and Behavioural Science 27.3 (1992), p. 271
8 qu. Windholz in ‘The Critical Mind and the Arrogance of Power’, Integrative
Physiology and Behavioural Science 28.2 (1993); see also Bukharin in M.
Solomon (ed), Marxism and Art, Brighton 1979, p. 205. Sheila Fitzpatrick
records that, notwithstanding their differences of opinion, Bukharin and
Pavlov maintained a respectful friendship: see Education and Social Mobility
in the Soviet Union, Cambridge 1979, pp. 84 & 273
9 Babkin, p. 152
10 David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History, Oxford 1989, p.xvi;
Loren Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Cambridge 1973,
pp. 375-394
11 for differences between Pavlov and the American tradition, and an interesting
discussion as to why experimental psychology gained such sway and
inﬂuence in the USA, see S. Koch and D. E. Leary (eds) A Century of
Psychology as Science, New York 1985, p. 297
12 see B. M. Teplov, ’Problems in the Study of General Types of Higher
Nervous Activity in Man and Animals’ in J. A. Gray (ed) Pavlov’s
Typology, Oxford 1964
13 Daniel P. Todes, ‘From Radicalsim to Scientiﬁc Convention’ Ph.D. thesis,
Michigan U, 1981, p. 426
14 Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, tr. R.Edmonds, Harmondsworth 1979, p. 160; a
ﬁlm adaptation of this was planned during the Civil War, in which
Maiakovskii was to play Bazarov
15 Aleksandr Herzen, Childhood Youth and Exile [1852], tr. J.D. Duff, Oxford
1980, pp. 90–91
50 Vsevolod Pudovkin
16 see Daniel P. Todes, ‘From Radicalism to Scientiﬁc Convention’
17 J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future, London 1924, p. 8;
Haldane was, of course, a Communist sympathiser
18 I. P. Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reﬂexes, tr. Gantt, London 1928, p. 213
19 William James, Psychology, London 1892, p. 467; Alexander Vucinich,
Science in Russian Culture, Stanford 1970, p. 309
20 George Bernard Shaw, Everybody’s Political What’s What?, London 1944,
p. 203
21 Evgenii Zamiatin, We, [1920–21] tr. C. Brown, Harmondsworth 1993,
p. 221
22 S. Rosenzweig in Koch and Leary, Psychology as Science
23 F. A. Talbot, Moving Pictures, London 1912, pp. 161-169 and 190-197
24 Voskresenskii, ‘O nauchnykh ﬁl’makh’, Kino-zhurnal ARK 9 (1925), p. 12;
Tikhonov, ‘Kinematograf v nauke’, Kino, 25 December 1922, pp. 21–22
and ‘Kinematograﬁa bol’shoi chastoty’, Kino , 1 December 1922, pp. 20–21
25 Sovetskoe kino 8, 1926, p. 8 ‘Nauchno-populiarnye’; see also Boris Fefer,
‘Mekhanika golovnogo mozga’, Sovetskii ekran 31 (1926) and Sovetskoe
Kino 1, 1927; see Nikolai Iezuitov, Pudovkin; puti tvorchestva, Moscow 1937,
pp. 50-51 and Rashit Iangirov, ‘Le cine´ma non joue´’, Vale´rie Posener, ed.
Le studio Mejrabpom, Paris 1996, p. 88
26 V. I. Pudovkin, ‘Kak delaetsia kul’turﬁl’ma’, Sovetskoe kino 1, 1927, pp. 5–7
27 see Rashit Iangirov: ‘ Le cine´ma non joue´’; see L. Landry, ‘Einstein au
cine´ma’ Cine´a 71–72 (1922) p. 12: ‘Before indicating the manner in which
the theories of Einstein have been represented on screen it is worth remembering
. . . what is supposedly known of these theories . . . One appreciates
that the cinematographic illustration of them was extremely difﬁcult’
28 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture, Cambridge 1992, p. 42
29 Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Cinema in Revolution, tr. D. Robinson, London
1973, p. 186
30 Paul Babitsky and John Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry, New York 1955,
p. 18
31 see Rene´ Marchand and Pierre Weinstein, Le Cine´ma, Paris 1927; Vance
Kepley jr. , Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds. Inside the Film Factory,
London 1991 and Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, Cambridge 1992
32 see A. Katsigras, Pravda 180, 10 April 1924 and Peter Kenez, Cinema and
Soviet Society, Cambridge 1992, p. 87
33 Iangirov, ‘Le cine´ma non joue´’, p. 93
34 see David Bordwell, ‘Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift’ Screen 15.4, 33 &
45: ‘Early Soviet Marxism as a whole eagerly embraced Pavlov’s reduction
of all behaviour to material laws’; ‘The philosophical school of mechanistic
materialism of the 1920s took Pavlov as its ﬁgurehead’; see also The
Cinema of Eisenstein, London 1993, pp. 116–119
35 Le´on Moussinac, Le Cine´ma sovie´tique , Paris 1927, p. 49; Winifred
Ellerman (Bryher), Film Problems of Soviet Russia , Territet 1929, pp. 46–47
36 Leyda, pp. 205–206; Experiment in the Film, ed. Roger Manvell, London
1949, p. 271:‘Amongst documentary ﬁlms, the remarkable Mechanics of the
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 51
Brain . . . is certainly worthy of special mention’; also Marchand &
Weinstein:, Le Cine´ma, Paris 1927, p. 145
37 Thorold Dickinson and Catherine de la Roche, Soviet Cinema, London
1948, p. 65; Peter Dart, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York 1974,
p. 10
38 A. Mariamov, Pudowkin: Kampf und Vollendung, [1951] Berlin 1954, p. 85;
compare Nikolai Iezuitov, Pudovkin, Moscow 1937, pp. 44–54
39 Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now, London 1951, p. 233
40 Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Cinema in Revolution, tr. D. Robinson, London
1973, p. 136
41 Anatolii Golovnia, ‘S’’emki kartiny ‘‘Povedenie cheloveka’’ ’, Sovetskii
ekran no. 40 1926, p. 4; Golovnia’s anecdote about a particularly amorous
hippopotamus is endorsed by Voskresenskii!
42 Pudovkin, ‘Kak delaetsia kul’turﬁl’ma ‘‘Povedenie Cheloveka’’ ’, p. 5
43 with regard to the banning of The Mother and deletions from The End of St.
Petersburg, see IMC/BFI/Special Materials Item 67; for bans on Pudovkin’s
ﬁlms in Britain, the Empire and elsewhere see also J.C. Robertson,
The Hidden Cinema, Londn 1993 p. 34 and Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored,
London 1994 pp. 43 & 86: ‘After examining The Mother, which he inexplicably
viewed within the privacy of his ﬂat, T. P. O’Connor astonishingly
misread Pudovkin’s unsubtle plot to the extent that he thought The Mother
contributed towards better understanding of Russian conditions. The
Baldwin government brought power to bear on the BBFC to veto the ﬁlm’;
IMC/BFI/SM Item 11, correspondence with the Home Ofﬁce concerning
the licensing of educational ﬁlms.
44 Royal Society of Medicine, Neurology Section (minutes of meetings 1907–
1936) pp. 394 & 398. Montagu says that in 1930 University College
London bought the ﬁlm and this is corroborated by Iezuitov, Pudovkin,
Moscow 1937
45 see Ellerman (Bryher), Film Problems of Soviet Russia, p. 48; also in CloseUp
3/4; Kino i kul’tura 1, 1929, p. 95 refers to articles by Bryher
advocating the use of ﬁlm in education: Times Educational Supplement 606,
616, 617 (1927)
46 see Ivor Montagu, The Political Censorship of Films, London 1929, p. 31:
‘Social: . . . Scenes connected with childbirth . . . which are considered too
intimate for public exhibition’; see also IMC/BFI/SM Item 67, letter 23
December 1929 to BBFC
47 IMC/BFI/SM Item 15, letter 20 June 1930 to Sidney Bernstein: ‘Mr.
Dickinson has just drawn my attention to the fact that the London
Workers’ Society have announced ‘‘Mechanism of the Brain’’ for its next
performance. He feels that this might lead to difﬁculties for us – the ﬁlm
was rejected by the BBFC . . . it should only be shown by special permission
of the LCC. . . . we applied to the LCC but just at the time of the
troubles re Sunday performances. Under the circumstances it was decided
to show the ﬁlm after quite a good deal was cut out of it . . . If London
Workers show it without making such careful cuts as we made it may well
52 Vsevolod Pudovkin
lead to trouble. There was no doubt that a number of our members
disliked the ﬁlm very much . . .’
48 Babkin, Pavlov: A Biography, London 1951; Hilaire Cuny, Pavlov and his
School, London 1962; J. Gray, Pavlov, Brighton 1979
49 I. P. Pavlov, Selected Works, Moscow n.d., p. 377
50 Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Poudovkine, Paris 1966, p. 20
51 Jay Leyda, Kino, London 1960, p. 174; C.A. Lejeune, Cinema, London
1931, p. 134; see also Lee Atwell, G. W. Pabst, Boston 1977, pp. 37–42
52 Mariamov p.74; Sovetskoe kino 1 (1926) p. 10; Iezuitov, p. 44
53 Iezuitov, p. 53
54 Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reﬂexes, tr. Gantt, London 1928, p. 42
55 Pudovkin, Kino, 26 April 1927
56 see for instance Tolstoy’s description of Count Oblonsky at the beginning
of Anna Karenina, tr. Rosemary Edmonds, Harmondsworth 1978, p. 14, or
Dostoevskii’s staged ‘show’ trial of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,
tr. David Magarshack, Harmondsworth 1951, pp. 272 and 544; on the
intervention of Tsarist authorities in the availability of foreign popular
science materials see Todes, ‘From Radicalism to Scientiﬁc Convention’, p.
79; see also Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, Princeton 1985,
pp. 247 & 268: ‘. . . no luboki were genuine works of popular sciencewriters
did not communicate much about scientiﬁc method nor impart an
understanding of how science differs from magic – but in the limited task
of combatting superstition popular writers made important contributions to
promoting a modern outlook among common readers . . . At the lower
level of popular literature occasional attempts to demonstrate the marvels
of technology or to enthrone . . . science in place of familiar popular
beliefs may have meant no more than the replacement of one vague and
mysterious explanation or phenomenon with another’.
57 V. M. Bekhterev, General Principles of Human Reﬂexology [1923], tr. Murphy,
London 1933, p. 141; Boris Babkin, Pavlov: A Biography, London 1951, p. 87
58 I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reﬂexes, tr. Anrep, Oxford 1927, p. xi
59 Babkin, p. 109
60 I. P. Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reﬂexes, tr. Gantt, London 1928, p. 42
61 I. P. Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reﬂexes, tr. Gantt, p. 144
62 ‘Organizatsiia ‘‘sluchainogo’’ materiala’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I,
pp. 108–109; also Jay Leyda, Kino, London 1960, p. 206
63 Voskresenskii, ‘O nauchnykh’, p. 12
64 I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reﬂexes, tr. Anrep, p. 169
65 Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog [1925], tr. Glenny, London 1968
66 Y. P. Frolov, Pavlov and His School [1938], London 1970, pp. 238 & 261
67 Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, Stanford 1970, p. 308
68 I. P. Pavlov, Twenty Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity in
Animals, London 1928, preface
69 Bekhterev, p. 141
70 Joravsky, Soviet Marxism, p. 241, re Pavlov boycotting congresses as a mark
of disapproval of the regime
Russian Physiology and Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain 53
71 Bekhterev, pp. 41, 55, 61, 64
72 Pavlov, Lectures on Human Refexology, tr. Gantt, p. 40
73 Pavlov, Selected Works, Moscow n.d., p. 624
74 Pavlov, Selected Works, pp. 578–595
75 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientiﬁc Discovery, London 1972, p. 30
76 William James, Psychology, London 1892, p. 467
77 Meyerhold wrote to Pavlov on the occasion of his 80th. birthday: ‘We
congratulate you as the man who has at last dispensed with such a disreputable
thing as the soul’ and was duly informed ‘As far as the soul is
concerned, we must wait a little while’. B. Picon-Vallin, Vsevolod Meyerhold
III, Paris 1990, p. 146, qu. Sovetskoe iskusstvo 20 December 1933.
78 David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism, p. 93 re Enchenism and Mininism
79 Pudovkin, Kino-zhurnal ARK 9, 1925, p. 10
80 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body, Minneapolis 1995, p. 1
81 see Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography, Harmondsworth 1974, p. 204;
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872],
Chicago 1965, pp. 5 & 25; Eisenstein too was familiar with Duchenne’s
experiments
82 Sovetskoe kino 1, 1925, p. 5
83 Pudovkin, Kino-zhurnal ARK 9, 1925, p. 10
84 Hilaire Cuny, Ivan Pavlov, London 1964, p. 72
85 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
Chicago 1965, p. 75
86 Boris Pavlov, ‘L’animation’, in Vale´rie Posener, ed. Le studio Mejrabpom,
Paris 1996, p. 95; the animation studio was set up in 1925
87 Pudovkin, Kino-zhurnal ARK 9, 1925, p. 10
88 Pudovkin, Kino-zhurnal ARK 9, 1925, p. 10
89 Pudovkin, Kino-zhurnal ARK 9, 1925, p. 10
90 Babkin, p. 310
91 Pravda, 14 December 1926, qu. Zapasnik and Petrovich
92 Pudovkin, Kinogazeta, 28 July 1925
54 Vsevolod Pudovkin
3. The Mother and the return of
the actor
A concern with the speciﬁcity of media
Film theory in Soviet Russia, as elsewhere, heralded its subject as a
new phenomenon, celebrated it for its prerogative as the most contemporary
of all the arts. Ippolit Sokolov, in Kino-Fot 1 (1922), celebrates
ﬁlm as the new philosophy, the new science and the new art, a new
form of education and propaganda, entirely suited to the new needs of
the century. In his 1927 ‘The Nature of Cinema’, the Formalist theoretician
Boris Kazansky endorses the earlier enthusiasms of Elliot and
Mu¨nsterberg:
Cinema arose within our own memory and literally developed
before our eyes. Thus its study presents possibilities and promises
results which cannot be obtained for the other arts, whose origins
extend far back into the darkness of time, hidden from sober investigation
by the fog of legend and the dogma of tradition.1
Theory strove to identify cinema’s peculiar characteristics and to establish
terms by which ﬁlm could be evaluated as an art. Paradoxically, to
this end it often resorted to the authority of a cultural heritage, discovering
in it portents of cinematic practice.
Thus we can see that the principle of cinema is not something which
dropped upon mankind from the heavens, but is something that has
grown out of the very depths of human culture. It seems to us that
this cinematic principle is growing and developing within the cinema
itself; and that since all forms of cinema are determined by the
nature of the society which creates them, it is in the highest form of
social organisation – ours – that we are moving towards the fullest
understanding of the aesthetics of this art form.2
Furthermore, in the course of establishing its own aesthetic (even an
aesthetic which was sometimes ﬁercely anti-art), writing on cinema
partakes in a discussion of more general cultural issues: the purpose of
art, the means whereby the art work affects its audience and the relationship
of the artist to that audience. Film is acknowledged as something
distinct but simultaneously as an amalgam which espouses a number of
other arts, which inherits its content and form from other arts and which
is most often received by the audience for whom it is intended as part of
a syncretic experience, aided and abetted by its musical accompaniment.
In The Film Director and Film Material, Pudovkin narrates the history
of ﬁlm as a progression away from theatre. In its ﬁrst phase, ﬁlm was
no more than living photography and did no more than record the art
of the actor. In its second phase, he says, ﬁlm managed to accomplish
distinct transitions of space and time of which the traditional theatre
was incapable: between acts such concentrations and leaps had been
made but not within the duration of a single scene.3
‘The ﬁlm director
. . . can concentrate in time not only separate incidents but even the
movements of a single person. This process, that has often been termed
a ‘‘ﬁlm trick’’, is, in fact, nothing other than the characteristic method
of ﬁlmic representation’.4
However, it should be noted that Pudovkin uses a conventional
example of theatrical practice to underscore the line of progression
which he wishes to trace. Not only had various cinematic strategies
been indicated in avant-garde theatre but the two areas of practice were
becoming mutually informing, exchanging personnel and procedures
and sharing a range of theoretical concerns. Pudovkin praises Meyerhold
for discovering and representing a contemporary theme in his
staging of the classics.5
Regarding the disciplines broadly, it is signiﬁcant
that Meyerhold had used a form of close-up in the over-scaling of
his props for his production of Masquerade (1917) and in the isolation
of essential set dressings for the artist’s studio in Krampton (1905).6
Close-ups of objects were already familiar in ﬁlms of the teens and
Meyerhold himself commented in 1914 upon a difference in procedure
which he then perceived:
56 Vsevolod Pudovkin
. . . in cinema an object appears on screen for utilitarian reasons; in
the studio (in a pantomime) an object appears so as to afford the
actor the chance to make use of it in order to make the spectator
happy or sad . . . The cinema’s principal aim is to grip the spectator
by means of the plot. In pantomime, the spectator is gripped not by
the plot but by the manner in which the actor’s free inspiration
manifests itself through his sole desire to dominate the stage.7
Meyerhold had attempted to stage ﬂashbacks and in 1907, in Spring
Awakening, had lit action in different parts of the stage space to present
them to the spectator in quick succession, juxtaposing the isolated
pieces in a putative montage.8
Eisenstein carried the programme of
disparate elements of his stage spectacles (which had included such
stunts as a boxing match and the short ﬁlm Glumov’s Diary inserted
into Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man) into the collage of grotesques
in The Strike [Stachka, 1925]. In a narrower aspect, it is signiﬁcant that
Meyerhold’s collective, including Eisenstein, shared a building with
Kuleshov’s workshop in the early 1920s, enabling their actors to train
together.9
Meyerhold’s elemental exercise in biomechanics, the intention,
realisation and refusal of action, have much in common with
Kuleshov’s reduction of basic tasks into separate attitudes, a` la
Delsarte. Whereas, in rehearsal, the complete action was differentiated
into its separate units by the deliberate and adept control of the actor
over the body, with Kuleshov the units could be separately shot then
assembled.
Pudovkin says that his own awareness of the potential for ﬁlm as an
art came with a fortuitous meeting with Kuleshov. He has little to say
in The Film Scenario and The Film Director and Film Material of his
previous apprenticeship with Gardin, certainly he does not choose to
credit him as a formative inﬂuence.10
(see chapter one, above)
Pudovkin, like Bala´zs, says that the Americans were the ﬁrst to seize
the peculiar possibilities of ﬁlm as other than a photographic record
and is dismissive of ﬁlm practice before Grifﬁth.11
Pudovkin reiterates
Kuleshov’s thesis that ﬁlm needs must discover its own proper
materials and usage, is required to reveal its ‘core’ in order to be recognised
as an art alongside its ancient predecessors:
It appears to me that every art has its own speciﬁc quality which is
what makes it an art. Painting cannot exist without colours;
The Mother and the return of the actor 57
sculpture without plastic material. The cinema consists of fragments
and the assembly of those fragments, elements which in reality are
distinct . . . All this . . . convinced me of the necessity to consider
montage as the basic means of cinema art, the speciﬁc fundamental
quality of the medium.12
Montage, and more especially Kuleshov’s use thereof, is proclaimed by
Pudovkin as the conspicuous founding moment of ﬁlm as art,
dismissing any debt to the efforts of ‘primitive’ ﬁlm-makers.
Meanwhile, Kuleshov is keen to draw a parallel between his art and
exemplary style elsewhere: he says that Tolstoy refers to the equivalent
of montage as ‘connection’ and Kuleshov and Eisenstein refer to
Pushkin: ‘You can take any poem by Pushkin and number the
shots . . .’;13
Eisenstein refers to the pertinence of imagery to theme in
Zola: ‘. . . his pages read like complete cue sheets’, and recommends
him in retrospect to Pudovkin: ‘I criticised Pudovkin because he did
not read Money before ﬁlming the stock exchange for The End of St.
Petersburg. It would have turned out even better if he had’.14
The over-emphasis in the 1920s on montage, later to be censured,
was surely prompted in no small part by this compunction to afﬁrm
artistic status for ﬁlm. However, even in the 1920s Pudovkin seems to
deal in the theoretical currency without being consistently tied to it in
practice. Whereas Kuleshov can tend towards the apprehension of
fragmentation as the end product in the spectator, Pudovkin is often
more intent upon accomplishing summation and synthesis.(see chapter
one, above) Pudovkin likewise is aware of Meyerhold’s sequence from
preparation to completed action and that the impression of the action
is enhanced in the representation of the sequence. However, rather than
cutting between successive segments Pudovkin employs a strategy
which is less visually disruptive and which better retains an image of
unity: in Storm over Asia, the withdrawal of the Mongol, the gathering
of his strength before he strikes the white man, is fast-cranked and
decelerated for the viewer, the blow itself appears accelerated in force
within the context of the sequence.(see chapter six, below) The
movement is performed whole, partially intensiﬁed. ‘Slow-motion in
editing’, says Pudovkin, ‘is not a distortion of an actual [deistvitel’nogo]
process. It is a portrayal more profound and precise, a
conscious guidance [coznatel’no rukovodia] of the attention of the
spectator. This is the eternal characteristic of cinematography’.15
58 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pudovkin declines additive montage in favour of more pressing
concerns.
A respect for the integrity of a particular performance sometimes
urges Pudovkin to opt for a locked-off, frontal mid-shot of a scene,
purposefully using conventional dramatic chiaroscuro lighting to direct
the spectator’s attention and emotion. Golovnia refers also to the inﬂuence
of painters, Rembrandt especially, on Kozlovsky’s spartan sets and
his own stark lighting.16
Pudovkin asserts:
There is one more element characteristic for the work of the director
with the actor- that is light, that light without which neither object
nor human being nor anything else has existence on the ﬁlm . . . An
actor unlit is nothing. An actor lit only so as to be visible is a
simple, undifferentiated, indeﬁnite object. This same light can be
altered and constructed in such a way as to make it enter as an
organic component into the actor’s work. The composition of the
light can eliminate much, emphasise much, and bring out with such
strength the expressive work of the actor, that it becomes apparent
that light is not simply a condition for the ﬁxation of expressive
work by the actor, but in itself represents a part of this expressive
work. Remember the face of the priest in The Battleship Potemkin, lit
from underneath.17
In The Mother, Mikhail Vlasov’s body is laid out centre frame, foreshortened.
As the scene opens, two ﬁgures, shrouded in black, sit with their
backs to the spectator, camera left. The mother sits immobile to the
right of the body, her face white against the dark background. The two
ﬁgures turn and are seen to be wailing babushki. They move away and
the mother continues to sit, motionless eyes ﬁxed blankly. Although
Pudovkin here uses a tonal and volumetric construction resembling a
form of ‘internal montage’ in Eisenstein I suggest that its employment
is the consequence less of a reluctance to detract from the dull resignation
conveyed in the duration of Baranovskaias’s performance. Here
again, the scene defers to Pudovkin’s general pronouncement that
‘arousing emotion in the spectator is the true end of all art’ and that it
is the ﬁlm-maker’s task to ﬁnd the means whereby this can best be
achieved on screen.18
Pudovkin prefaces the German edition of The Film Director and Film
Material with an analogy between ﬁlm practice and literature. It is a
The Mother and the return of the actor 59
common-sense statement directed at persuading his readers of what is
to follow:
To the poet or writer separate words are as raw material. They have
the widest and most variable meanings which only begin to become
precise through their position in the sentence . . . To the ﬁlm director
each shot of the ﬁnished ﬁlm subserves the same purpose as the
word to the poet.19
The Film Scenario and The Film Director and Film Material were both
published in 1926. Boris Eikhenbaum published The Poetics of Cinema
[Poetika kino] in 1927, including Viktor Shklovsky’s ‘Poetry and Prose’
(in which he discusses The Mother).20
His article ‘Semantika kino’
appeared in Kino-zhurnal in 1925.21
However, Pudovkin does not enter
into a theoretical debate with these contemporaries much exercised by
the possible psychological or semantic foundations of his analogy (see
chapter eight, below). Amidst the wranglings of the Formalists and the
contentions of Eisenstein and Vertov towards a suitably Realist theory,
Pudovkin is wont to express vague and vaguely idealistic sentiments.
Montage is for Pudovkin ‘. . . a selection conditioned in advance
[zaranee opredelialcia] by that ﬁlmic image . . . which exists in the
head of the director long before its actual appearance on the screen’.22
Beyond paying his required obeisance to montage, Pudovkin seems
untroubled in the early writings by any pressure to appear intellectually
or culturally au courant. Pudovkin does not refer to contemporary
avant-garde practice in literature or criticism in an attempt to locate his
own work favourably alongside it. In contrast, Eisenstein not only cites
major literary ﬁgures at home and abroad but also subjects their work
to speciﬁcally cinematic scrutiny:
. . . Fedorchenko is a more accessible and less expensive ‘edition’ of
James Joyce.
Ulysses is of course the most interesting phenomenon for cinema in
the West.
I don’t know about the literary aspect but I think the same applies
there.
At any rate, however odd it may seem, I am familiar with Joyce’s
writings.
I don’t have to read him at night in a hurry, like I did Dreiser the
60 Vsevolod Pudovkin
night before my ofﬁcial meeting with him.
Fedorchenko and Joyce are very close to contemporary cinema.
Certainly more than half way to what lay ahead.
They use the same ‘de-anecdotalisation’ and the direct emergence of
the theme through powerfully effective raw material.
This may be completely tangential to the plot that only ﬁgures in
the work because the author is conscientious.
The same ‘psychologism’ of detail.
In close-up.
In a purely intellectual effect, an abstract conclusion from their physiological
methods.
Cinema again.
There is, of course, signiﬁcantly more in Joyce. To meet the
demands of the denunciatory, polemical and other multiple tasks
that Ulysses or The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man set themselves.
Fedorchenko is more like a ﬁxing agent but her construction
is the same.23
When Pudovkin refers to Mayakovsky or Meyerhold it comes more
by way of a personal anecdote. Even when referring (rarely) to
classical authors, Pudovkin is predominently concerned with his
personal preferences and their potential as sources of cinematic
impulses, of ‘plastic raw material’, or, as for Eisenstein, of the deliberacy
with which details are selected, rather than with ﬁnding in them
precedents for a deﬁnite structure. Of his adaptation of The Mother,
Pudovkin says: ‘The Mother began for me with the image of the mother
crushed, ﬁrstly in a general perception of the atmosphere of Gorky’s
novel and secondly in the ﬁnal emotional shock: the mother under the
horses’ hooves’.24
A ﬁlm adaptation
Soon after the Revolution, major works of Russian literature, including
those of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol and Gorky, were declared
the property of the state. There was, says Jeffrey Brooks, ‘a widely shared
belief that Russian literature could serve as a bridge between classes’;
There was a perception on the part of many educated Russians that
they had a moral obligation to inﬂuence and contribute to cultural
The Mother and the return of the actor 61
development . . . a shared common belief that ‘proper’ literature was
a necessary beacon to guide the Russian peasant . . .
Efforts to mould the literary taste of the common reader were also
an expression of a more fundamental desire to bring common
people into a consensus of values shared by educated Russians or to
create a new consensus incorporating the values of the common
people . . . Success in this endeavour would both discharge the intelligentsia’s
debt to the people and close the gap between the common
people and the rest of society.25
These efforts took the form of disseminating cheaper editions of the
approved texts and, in recognition of the high rate of illiteracy (3 out of
5 Russians in the 1920s could not read) cinema was enlisted as a
suitable means of acquainting a broad public with its cultural
heritage.26
Indeed, literary adaptations, as period costume pieces, had
been a staple of the pre-revolutionary ‘Film d’Art’ movement
(including Gardin’s 1914 Anna Karenina, Protazanov’s 1915 War and
Peace, Persky’s 1911 and Sabinsky’s 1917 The Living Corpse) and in
1918, a competition was launched for a scenario based on a work by
Turgenev, to mark his centenary.27
More speciﬁcally, cinema was to be
exploited as a medium capable of popularising an ofﬁcially approved
canon of masterworks in which the lineage of the revolution was
afﬁrmed. ‘Once a work was ofﬁcially recognised as a classic its ideological
soundness was taken for granted’, observes Anna Lawton.28
The
Mother was held in especially high regard for the favour which it found
with Lenin and for its reputedly having been written with his consulta-
tion;29
Richard Stites dubs him ‘the semi-ofﬁcial bard of Bolshevism’.30
Furthermore, Gorky as an individual was esteemed as something of a
hero, a son of the soil sharing ‘the values of the common people’, and
a political descendant of Chernyshevsky, having suffered censorship
and exile under the ancien-re´gime31
(see chapter two, above).
Gorky had based his novel on events at the Krasnoe Sormovo plant
in Nizhny Novgorod and the character of Pavel Vlasov on the leader
of a May Day demonstration, Pavel Zalomov. In court, the demonstrators
conducted their own defence before being sentenced to prison.32
Natan Zarkhi, Pudovkin’s scenarist, drew additionally on reports in
Pravda of cavalry troops being sent in against strikers in Tver (Pudovkin’s
chosen location) in 1905;33
Eisenstein similarly based The Strike
on events in Rostov-on-Don. Fault had been found by Lunacharsky
62 Vsevolod Pudovkin
with Razumny’s 1919 ﬁlm adaptation for being merely episodic.
Mariamov, Pudovkin’s biographer, says that the earlier version was
found wanting in precisely those capacities which critical opinion was
to ﬁnd exempliﬁed in its successor:
The ﬁlm was no more than a period piece, accounting for a single
episode in social history. The sense of Pavel as a type representative
of his class and his time was thereby lost, but also the ﬁlm lost the
connection between Pavel and his comrades with the generation of
the October Revolution, binding the theme with the general public
seated in the auditorium. The ﬁlm did not treat its subject matter
correctly . . . a return to the broader ideological and artistic foundation
of Gorky’s work was called for.34
Razumny names Pavel’s comrades individually and occupies himself
with a quantity of background information; the mother similarly nurses
her husband in spite of his dissolute past and his cruelty towards her;
her religiousness is more clearly marked (paintings on the wall, icons
on a corner shelf) as is her later contribution to the comrades’ conversations
and her reading of ‘Proletarians of all Countries’. As in the
Gorky original (but unlike the Pudovkin version) seditious pamphlets
are shown as sufﬁcient cause for Pavel’s arrest. The 1926 adaptation
took liberties with the original in order to emphasise a political theme.
‘The idea of content does not refer to subject matter, in the ordinary
sense of the term, but to social purpose’, said Trotsky.35
Strategic
revisions were similarly made by Shklovsky in his scenario from
Pushkin’s A Captain’s Daughter and in various interpretations of
Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse. Otsep’s version [Zhivoi trup, 1929], in
which Pudovkin took the part of Fedia, deviates from the original in
that obstruction to a divorce between a loveless couple is seen to
emanate from the Orthodox Church rather than (as Tolstoy would
have it) from a rigid state bureaucracy. In The Mother, the necessary
summation is pointed by the particularity of location at the end of the
ﬁlm; at the beginning, Pudovkin’s ﬁlm shares with the novel a general
sense of the location being abstracted to any place, the protagonists to
unnamed characters, any of a number of anonymous industrial suburbs
and their inhabitants to which such incidents occurred.
In addition to Gorky, Pudovkin acknowledges Tolstoy (his favourite
author) as a source. In the trial scene in Resurrection, the judge is
The Mother and the return of the actor 63
distracted by thoughts of his mistress, in The Mother a conversation
about ‘a ﬁne-looking ﬁlly’ is revealed to concern a horse, which the
judge then draws on his blotter as the trial proceeds. The Death of Ivan
Ilyich volunteers itself as a secondary source for the cynicism of the
legal functionaries towards the practice of the law.36
In his 1928 article
‘How I Work with Tolstoy’, Pudovkin indicates that he found in
Tolstoy a species of pertinent detail which Eisenstein prefers to identify
in Joyce:
He works with enormous persistence upon every detail. He denies
himself any simple rules of elegant compositional style and doesn’t
shy away from using one and the same word repeatedly in a single
passage in order to confer upon it the greatest persuasive power.
Tolstoy leaves the reader no room to see something other than as he
shows it. Everything that he writes accords perfectly with a real
object . . . The form of his language is so fundamental to the idea
that any relativity is ultimately lost.37
The Mother deviates from Gorky’s novel signiﬁcantly in the role of the
father. In the latter, he is merely referred to in passing:
Living a life like that for some ﬁfty years, a workman died. Thus
also lived Michael Vlasov, a gloomy sullen man, with little eyes
which looked at everybody from under his thick eyebrows suspiciously,
with a mistrustful evil smile. He was the best locksmith in
the factory, and the strongest man in the village. But he was insolent
and disrespectful towards the foreman and the superintendant and
therefore earned very little; every holiday he beat somebody, and
everyone disliked and feared him.38
In the ﬁlm, the role is expanded to serve a number of purposes, both
dramatic and ideological, and material which in the novel might be
deemed to compromise or confuse the clarity of the theme is deliberately
discarded. For instance, in the novel the son behaves badly
towards the mother immediately after the death of Vlasov senior
(indeed, ‘he knew no better’) whereas in the ﬁlm the older generation
is consistently identiﬁed with reprehensible behaviour, or with ideas
which are shown to be held falsely in contrast with the younger generation’s
enlightenment (Gorky’s ‘Children of the Sun’). It is signiﬁcant
64 Vsevolod Pudovkin
that the story tells of the political awakening of a woman of peasant
stock: such as she were regarded by the state as generally conservative
and resistant to change.39
The babushki wailing at the side of the
corpse warn the mother against her son, it is he, they say, who has
brought this trouble upon her. The character of Vlasov is used to
endorse the ofﬁcial campaign against alcoholism (prominently voiced
by Trotsky) and to promote the idea of a new Soviet citizenry who
would reject alcoholic excess (see chapter two, above): ‘Drunkenness is
a violation of our class, proletarian communist morality. Vodka
poisons and destroys the organism, it bears us out of the world of
reality into a world of illusion, it deprives us of judgement’.40
In order
to buy vodka the father attempts to take the ﬂat iron which serves as a
weight to the clock, then to take the clock itself. This is the only
adornment of the bare interior and the mother intervenes to prevent
him. Vlasov’s vast shadow overwhelms the cringing mother and the
father succeeds by brute force to take the iron. Vlasov then presents it
at the tavern, drawing it out from a torn and dishevelled pocket. His
fecklessness is contrasted with the mother’s thrift and fortitude:
meanwhile, she sets to, endeavouring to piece together the broken
clock, evidently much repaired previously. Alcohol is the root of
further evil: unaware that he is an object of public mockery (an accordion
player in the tavern winks connivingly at the ﬁlm’s audience) the
refusal of the bar tender of the iron is seized upon by the members of
the Black Hundred conspiring in the corner as an opportunity to
manipulate him to their ends (Vlasov’s addiction renders him, a
working man, susceptible to bribes to betray his class). Here again, the
naming of the group contributes particular resonance. In the 1905
revolution the Black Hundred were agents provocateurs, acting against
Jewish groups and strikers.41
Thus Zarkhi crucially brings together
father and son on either side of the factory owners and the workers.
The manager ﬂicks cigar ash from a gloved hand (he will not sully his
hands himself); a paid lackey from the tavern draws out a knuckledustered
clenched ﬁst. Vlasov is shot in the ensuing ﬁght, but the
cronies who were so keen to enlist him into their gang on the previous
night now slink away and desert him.
The mother is converted to the cause of the young, she turns from
the established order and towards the promise of the new. At ﬁrst
unquestioningly she responds to the police ofﬁcer’s word that Pavel
will be treated better if he surrenders his arms; she bows and fawns to
The Mother and the return of the actor 65
his authority and pleads with Pavel to act to save himself. The simple
obedience of a peasant woman (‘it’s good to be simple’, Gorky has her
say) is a sign of political naivete´. In the novel, her folk roots are repeatedly
signalled in the language in which her point of view is described:
the mother is central to the novel in her becoming an heroic protagonist
but also in that the text is suffused with Orthodox and folkloric
images. The lawyers at the trial are ‘four large blackbirds’, uttering
‘hailstorms of unintelligible long words’.42
One is reminded of the old
woman in The Twelve [Dvenadtsat’], ‘like a hen’, wondering how many
pairs of footcloths for the children could be made from a red ﬂannel
banner . . . yet they all go barefoot.43
Pudovkin takes the Gorky original
as his ‘object of imitation’ and also adopts its ‘manner and style’.
However, political enlightenment is effected in the ﬁlm not by the
series of long conversations with Pavel’s comrades by which she is
persuaded in the novel (and in the Razumny version), but by growing
dissaffection with the old regime. Surrounding characters are employed
to demonstrate her emotional state in their reaction or appearance to
her. For instance, in the arrest, although she defers to the ofﬁcer’s
authority, it is her growing distrust of him which is shown in the
camera’s look askance and in the obscuring of his eyes with the wire
frame of his spectacles (whereas the comrades look directly to camera,
eyes clear and bright, looking forwards like the comrades in The End of
St. Petersburg. While the mother approaches her son’s trial with trepidation
(anxiously arriving long before anyone else), fearful of what
darkness in his soul may be uncovered by the probing of the court, she
then comes to realise that the pomp and gravity of the judges is no
more than superﬁcial and sham, their participation no more than
routine (one functionary is intoxicated, it is observed): grandiose
histrionic oratory leaves the guards unmoved (it is tediously usual and
familiar) and a dowager onlooker, viewing the scene through a lorgnette,
applauds the ﬁne-ness of the show. It is the mother’s sense of injustice
which is conveyed at Pavel’s trial, at the failure of the established
order to command authority any longer (the trial, clearly ﬁgured by the
double-headed eagle as a Tsarist performance, is reduced to an entertainment
staged for a bourgeois audience): ‘Here was nothing to
frighten her by its power or majesty’.44
Pudovkin and Zarkhi consistently argue for the primacy of theme
(the ‘supra artistic concept’ [poniatie vnekhudozhestvennoe]) conveyed
in a written scenario as the ‘hard skeleton’ governing the clear
66 Vsevolod Pudovkin
organisation of a ﬁlm, but reiterate the difﬁculties involved in transfering
a literary work to the screen:
The theme is almost the most that one can take from a literary
work in changing it into a scenario. The development and treatment
of the plot of a literary work (especially in the hands of a great
master) are the result of purely literary methods. Their translation to
the screen is quite impossible.45
The scenario must be written in visual and active terms. Pudovkin
disparages the literary scenario and the use of long explanatory intertitles.
Pudovkin and Zarkhi were far from alone in addressing the
problems of effecting such a transition, M. Smelianov’s ‘The Literature
of Cinema’ in Kino-zhurnal ARK and V. Dekabrsky’s ‘Literature and
Cinematography’ in Art-ekran voice similar concerns.46
Numerous
scenarios are rejected, says Pudovkin, because they are written in terms
which are not susceptible to plastic expression: ‘often’ is not a
cinematic term, he says, discussing the example of the life of the family
Nikonov.47
Indeed, the several year span of Gorky’s novel is contracted
in the ﬁlm to a number of signiﬁcant events. In the book, the characters
who take care of the mother while Pavel is in prison are individually
identiﬁed by name and origin; the comrades serve to demonstrate the
solidarity of proletariat (Pavel), peasant (Andrei) and intelligentsia
(Riabin and Sonia) during the revolution against capitalist exploitation.
This solidarity is hard won: there is much discussion of the relative
merits of revolutionary methods and programme. The comrades’
interim disputations are unsuitable for direct translation to ﬁlm and
there is less differentiation between them. When they point to one
another in turn as ‘Pavel Vlasov’, it is I would suggest, not merely a
mocking gesture, a manoeuvre to impede the course of the arrest: any
one of these comrades could become the character Pavel and take his
part in what is to come. Selﬂessly, Pavel foregoes the fond longings of
the woman revolutionary who delivers the guns, for the sake of a
higher cause. In the book, the characters who take care of the mother
are enumerated; in the ﬁlm it is sufﬁcient to render that she is
comforted: the action is abstracted to its typical expression in the
stroking of hands, in feet taking someone to the hob to prepare a meal
for her. The gesture is repeated sufﬁciently for it to be understood that
this was done over a period of time.
The Mother and the return of the actor 67
The ﬁlm uses individual ﬁgures to point a general understanding of
theme. Intertitles and single shots are used not only as formal
‘keystones’ (in Pudovkin’s terminology), conceived ‘in plastic (externally
expressive) images’ which structure the shape of the work but
also as keys whereby the meaning of the theme is to be extrapolated.
THE MOTHER is introduced to the viewer in her deﬁning territory,
‘penned-in’ in her ‘narrow cage’, between the washing line and the hob.
To THE FATHER is attributed his characteristic realm: the tavern.48
The juxtaposition of words with images becomes a means of rendering
emphatically apparent a connotation lost or submerged in common
usage. The intertitle PILLARS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT is
framed by a shot of the colonnaded portico of the Palace of Justice
and a low close-up shot of the sturdy, booted, akimbo legs of a soldier
guarding the palace. Montage does not merely materially connect shots
but effects ‘a differential exchange’ of content; the intertitle WORD
WENT ROUND is coupled with a frontal shot of a metal grille
denoting the cellular structure of the revolution: the shot is simultaneously
feasible within the spatial continuity of the sequence locating
Pudovkin as a police ofﬁcer
68 Vsevolod Pudovkin
the ﬁlm action in the factory and opportunistically effecting as an
arrested, emphatic afﬁrmation of theme. The intervention of the intertitle,
as a visual phenomenon, the punch of white on black, is
employed to stimulate the viewer’s imagination into activity. It initiates
the operation of the viewer’s imagination, where the very requirement
of participatory imagination is construed as a method of registering
and ﬁxing in the audience an intended meaning. Pudovkin presupposes
a mapping of the viewer’s experience on to his directorial intention,
afﬁrming a shared social purpose: ‘The director and scenarist lead
despotically along with them the attention of the spectator . . . the
smallest error in clearness of vividness of construction will be apprehended
as an unpleasant confusion or as a simply unimpressive void’.49
In the novel, the mother for a long while remains unnamed and
unidentiﬁed, until the Ukrainian asks her to introduce herself;
Pudovkin transfers this passivity to a performance which conspicuously
lacks voice: Baranovskaia plays the role with her mouth clenched shut,
as though dulled into submission. She is not so much silent as forcibly
muted. The slowly dripping tap by the body of her husband marks time
and the heavy thud of tears, although her face, unlike those of the
wailing babushki, registers Vlasov’s death as a blank. Her increased
animation, expressiveness and radiance accompanies her growing
participation in the new cause and draws from the novel her heightened
and accelerated sense of the passage of time: the ‘. . . bygone days in
which her past dragged along, a thin, black thread’ as against ‘the days
glided by one after the other, like the beads of a rosary’ and ‘the
pendulum which always beat with an energy that seemed to say: ‘‘I
must get to the goal; I must get to the goal’’.’50
At the trial, Gorky
says, it seems to the mother that the judges are slavering after Pavel’s
blood, preying upon the health and vitality of his body; in the ﬁlm the
commanding ofﬁcer, old and gaunt, is shown with his hound at his
feet and the cavalry horses sweat and chew at their bits in anticipation
of the imminent charge.51
The mother’s optimism for a new age, ‘The
life is for our children; the earth is for them’, is introduced in her
encounter with a young mother suckling her own child, a baby boy as
was once her own.52
The mother’s growing love for Pavel’s friends,
beginning with her adoption of Andrei (‘unthinkingly she called him
Andriusha’) shows the expansion of an individual, selﬁsh love (‘we
love that which we need’) to a generous fellow-feeling for an entire
generation, for the Children of the Sun who will lead the world to a
The Mother and the return of the actor 69
better future. Her political awakening is staged as a religious conversion,
to which she herself gives testimony:
Why, this is like a new god that’s born to us, the people. Everything
for all; all for everything; the whole of life in one, and the whole of
life for everyone and everyone for the whole of life! This I understand
all of you; it is for this that you are on this earth I see. You
are in truth comrades all, kinsmen all, for you are all children of
one mother, of truth.53
For Pudovkin’s mother, taking hold of the red banner at the head of the
demonstration is staged with as grand a gesture as the signing of the
cross in mourning.
In spite of all these translations from novel to screen, Gorky himself
is said to have disapproved of the Pudovkin version, accusing it of
political tendentiousness at the expense of maternal motivation and
was molliﬁed only when Zarkhi and Pudovkin appealed to him in
person.54
Subsequently, examining the ﬁlm in the light of the new
regime’s pronouncements towards the political recognition of women,
Judith Mayne has judged The Mother wanting and regressive in the
centrality of the son to her awareness and social enfranchisement:
‘Ultimately, then, The Mother is not the mother’s ﬁlm; it is Pavel’s’.55
The martyrdom of the son is not only Christ-like but also reminiscent
(as is Bair in Storm over Asia ) of the self denial of saintly princes in
Russian folklore56
(see chapter ﬁve, below). It is as though, in seeking
to legitimise and endorse the revolution by ﬁnding for it a social
equivalent of its Christian pre-cursor, to build a new God, the old
mythology cannot withstand demolition. Gorky’s mother herself faces
this dilemma; what will she have left if her God is taken from her?57
The signiﬁcant keystones of the scenario, the clear articulation of
character to serve the theme, refers Pudovkin’s The Mother to the
celebratory spectacles orchestrated by the Commissariat of the Enlightenment
in imitation of popular ritualistic forms, even though the
conventions are here effectively humanised by Baranovskaia’s performance
and such details as the prison porridge and the boy having his
ear clipped by his bourgeois father as he cheers on the joyful demonstrators.
Contemporary commentators were wont to herald ﬁlm as the
vehicle of a new urban folklore, peculiarly adept at addressing a new
and migrant proletariat dispossessed of its rural traditions.58
Both novel
70 Vsevolod Pudovkin
and ﬁlm owe much to a received form in folklore, a conventionalised,
national form which Propp identiﬁes in its Soviet succession: ‘Epic
poetry shows whom people consider a hero and for what deeds . . . the
content of epic poetry is struggle and victory . . . waged not for narrow,
petty goals, not for personal interests, not for the well-being of the
individual hero but for the people’s highest ideals’.59
In the novel, the
mother’s politicisation and gradual involvement in the struggle is registered
partly in the move from a passive to an active role in the events
described. She forms her opinion as a witness to the conversations of
Pavel and his comrades, she struggles with her own confusions which
are then resolved in crucial events: the arrest; the trial; Pavel’s death. It
is less important that the viewer derives a sense of the real time elapsed
over events represented than that a sensation of a continuous sequence
of episodes be appreciated in the theme’s coming to fruition. It is
characteristic of pictures that they live only in the present and that the
spiritual dynamic of the ﬁlm is sensed as a present continuous.
To this purpose, it is signiﬁcant that Pudovkin draws upon Grifﬁth
as more than a source of images (the breaking ice ﬂoes of The Mother
owe much to Way Down East, where Bartlett jumps across the ice to
save Anna Moore). Piotrovsky analyses the construction of The Mother
in comparison to the Grifﬁth schema of catastrophe-chase-rescue,
preceded by the briefest introduction of characters and limited delineation
of preparatory circumstances. The crucial events of the ﬁlm,
‘representing treachery, judgement, ﬂight’, are each ‘constructed
according to the schema ‘‘preparedness for catastrophe-catastrophe’’ ’.60
Furthermore, Piotrovsky observes: ‘The emotional tension of the whole
is enormous and it, as distinct from the melodrama of Grifﬁth, is
spread in equal measure’. As an analysis of the narrative content
alone of the scenario this conclusion may be satisfactory, but for
Pudovkin the scenario plans for a ﬁlm as a physical event. It seems
to me that the end of The Mother produces a markedly heightened
tension which is physically effected and effecting: shots of the
marching demonstrators’ shadows cast over the ﬂakes of ice ﬂowing
downstream; shots of demonstrators marching regularly horizontally
across frame (eventually abstracted to a ﬂickering staccato punctuation
of light and shade), shots of the ﬂag being passed in action to the head
of the march (the ﬂag ascending from bottom to top of the frame,
culminating in its appearance atop the Kremlin) create an urgent,
forceful rhythm which is appreciably retarded, tautly wound-back and
The Mother and the return of the actor 71
strained by parallel interjected shots of the prisoners slowly walking
counter clockwise in the prison yard. The explosive sense of physical
release which is experienced at the end of the ﬁlm serves to sublimate
the moment of the mother’s death. Piotrovsky is of the opinion that the
theatrical basis of ‘a tragic de´nouement’ is ‘seriously obstructed in
cinema’ because in ﬁlm the person of the performer is wholly identiﬁed
with the mask of the character. Piotrovsky volunteers this incapacity as
an explanation for the prevalence of ‘happy endings’.61
The Mother is
seemingly epic cinema; it accomplishes a speciﬁcally cinematic
catharsis.
Lunacharsky was lavish in his praise of Pudovkin’s ﬁlm, proclaiming
it an astonishing success for a young director, remarkably accomplished
with the maturity of a master, ‘a genuine masterpiece of Russian
cinematography’.62
Lunacharsky commended The Mother, ﬁrstly, for its
truthfulness of imagery and performance, in which a staged theatricality
was never present, in which Batalov and Baranovskaia completely
fused themselves with the typical characters presented. Secondly,
he ﬁnds that Pudovkin employs images in a manner constituting a
distinct ﬁlm language, where images are the stuff of the ﬁlm and not
merely ancillary and decorative. Thirdly, he appreciates The Mother for
its lyricism, achieved by the emotional associations between connected
images. For Lunacharsky it is by these means that Pudovkin renders
the reality, pathos and glory of the ﬁrst workers’ revolution. And
Lunacharsky, too, honours Pudovkin by comparing his style with the
beautiful manner of Tolstoy.63
Eisenstein, in ‘Our ‘‘October’’ ’ and
Shklovsky, in ‘Poetry and Prose’, criticised disparities in the ﬁlm:
When we examine Pudovkin’s The Mother, in which the director has
taken great pains to create a rhythmic construction, we observe a
gradual displacement of everyday situations by purely formal elements.
The parallelism of the nature scenes at the beginning prepares
us for the acceleration of movements, the montage and the
departure from everyday life that intensiﬁes towards the end. The
ambiguity of the poetic image and its characteristically indistinct
aura, together with the capacity for simultaneous generation of
meaning by different methods, are achieved by a rapid change of
frames that never manage to become real. The very device that
resolves the ﬁlm – the double exposure angled shot of the Kremlin
walls moving – exploits the formal rather than the semantic
72 Vsevolod Pudovkin
features: it is a poetic device . . . The Mother is a unique centaur, an
altogether strange beast. The ﬁlm starts out as prose, using emphatic
intertitles which ﬁt the frame very badly and ends up as purely
formal poetry. Recurring frames and images and the transformation
of images into symbols support my conviction that this ﬁlm is poetic
by nature.64
Rudolf Arnheim subsequently adds to Shklovsky’s observations by
complaining that the ‘Joy’ sequence inadequately prefaces its ﬁgurative
intention: ‘Each shot is substantive . . . Film’s afﬁnity for physical
reality compels each shot to maintain its literal signiﬁcance’:
It is very questionable whether the symbolic connection of smile,
brook, sunbeams, ‘happy prisoner’ and ‘joyous child’ can add up to
visual unity. It has been done thousands of times in poetry; but disconnected
themes can easily be joined in language because the
mental images attached to words are much vaguer, more abstract
and will therefore more readily cohere. Putting actual pictures in
juxtaposition, especially in an otherwise realistic ﬁlm, often
appears forced. The unity of the scene, the story of the prisoner who
is rejoicing, is suddenly interrupted by something totally different.
Comparisons and associations like the brook and the sunbeams are
not lightly touched upon in the abstract but are introduced as concrete
pieces of nature – and hence are distracting.65
Arnheim admits that, however unsuccessful he ﬁnds this particular
instance, the possibility of the kind of montage which it represents
nevertheless exists. He does not qualify his criticism by reference to the
reception of the ﬁlm by the audience for which it was intended, nor to
any familiar conventional cinematic cues on which the sequence may
be relying. But in pre-revolutionary cinema and Soviet ﬁlm, the closeup
of a face staring full forwards was often used as an announcement
of introspection. Razumny’s Brigade Commander Ivanov [Kombrig
Ivanov, 1923], for instance, uses such a shot as a lead into a revelation
of the commander’s thoughts. Furthermore, in the ‘Joy sequence’,
Pavel’s vision of laughing children playing in the open is matched
with the other prisoners’ ‘Dreams of Freedom’: back on the farm,
working the land. The ‘Joy sequence’ is also worked into the diegesis
in parenthesis (to employ a grammatical analogy from the preface to
The Mother and the return of the actor 73
the German edition of The Film Director and Film Material), with the
mother returning from the prison through the ﬁeld and past the duck
pond at which the children play; the ice ﬂoes break as Pavel is
attempting to escape across the river, heightening the urgency of the
drama, as much as signalling the cataclysmic revolution which is to
follow. The title ‘And outside it is spring’ simultaneously conveys narrative
information, necessary to the plot, and functions metaphorically,
conveying the subject of the parable contemplated by Pavel on hearing
of the escape.
The Mother and the Moscow Art Theatre
In spite of his 1929 London address, ‘Types instead of Actors’,
Pudovkin later dates his move away from Kuleshov’s ‘naturshchik’ (see
chapter one, above) to his work on The Mother. Certainly, as Ivor
Montagu was quick to point out, by 1929 Pudovkin’s own practice (his
performance as Fedia in Otsep’s The Living Corpse) did not appear to
correspond to this theoretical position. Although The Living Corpse was
received well in Germany (Otsep and Anna Sten opting to remain after
completing the production there) in Russia, too, it was accused of
pandering to bourgeois tastes. Montagu wrote to Pudovkin:
As you will see, The Living Corpse has been well received and highly
praised. Personally I did not like it or indeed your acting which
seemed to me in some places to illustrate the defects which you
have taught us are inseparable from professional actors! However I
look forward to discussing it.66
On The Mother, Pudovkin worked for the ﬁrst time with professional
actors from the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). Although Stanislavsky
himself was not himself enthusiastic about cinema, directors
and actors from the Theatre were frequently enlisted. In the planning
stage of The Mother, it was even intended that Nikolai Batalov and
Vera Baranovskaia should be joined by Ivan Moskvin, in the role of
the father.67
This was subsequently taken by Chistiakov, who also
worked with Pudovkin on The End of St. Petersburg, The Deserter and A
Simple Case, and who had known Pudovkin since their apprenticeship
with Kuleshov. Pudovkin says that his own training left him
feeling ill-equipped initially to create the necessary rapport with artists
74 Vsevolod Pudovkin
themselves trained with Stanislavsky. He later claims that he discovered
the System as an effective means of establishing trust between
themselves:
On what could one base this conﬁdence? . . . I still looked at
actors from a formalist point of view, entirely externally . . . How
could I reach the intelligence and the heart of those whom I had
to direct, whom I had to guide in the creation of characters which
still existed only in my imagination. How to ﬁnd a common lan-
guage?68
Vera Baranovskaia, a principal from MKhAT, remembers for Sovetskoe
kino how she too approached her work on The Mother with some trepidation,
unaccustomed as she was to the procedures of its director. The
‘naturshchik’ in avant-garde cinema, she relates, served as no more
than a model unquestioningly carrying out the director’s instructions
(‘Again from the beginning! To the right! To the left’) and less as a
model for an artist’s painting, drawn from life. She identiﬁes the difﬁculty
in ﬁlm-acting of overcoming its practical exigencies, shooting a
role in separate pieces and out of sequence, and says that the craft of
the professional actor is that which enables him or her to master
‘mosaic work’.69
Pudovkin in 1934 repeats her formulation:
In the cinema, exactly as in the theatre, we immediately come right
up against the problem posed by the discontinuity of the actor’s
work being in direct contradiction with his need for a continuous
creative ‘living-into’ [vzhivaniia] and embodiment of the image
played.70
Baranovskaia, like Valeri Inkizhinov, claims that Pudovkin was a
director who respected the contribution of actors (see chapter six,
below). However, although Pudovkin, his scenarist Zarkhi and assistant
Doller (himself an erstwhile actor and director for the stage) worked in
alternation or collaboratively, there is little sign that impromptu interventions
were welcomed from elsewhere: once determined, the
scenario, ‘the hard skeleton’, absolutely governed its realisation by the
group as a whole. Baranovskaia says that discoveries made in rehearsals
could be accommodated, but the instances she cites do not extend
beyond details of performance. Pudovkin quotes for The Mother the
The Mother and the return of the actor 75
precedents of the court scene in Tolstoy’s Resurrection and the hands of
Mae Marsh in Intolerance:71
‘the actress was probably crying when she
pinched the skin of her hands; she lived a full and real experience and
was completely in the grip of the necessary emotion as a whole’.72
However, when it came to ﬁlming Baranovskaia in her role he
sometimes found mannerisms performed by the actress, almost unselfconsciously,
without deliberation, most suitable to his intentions:
First I removed all that seemed to me superﬂuous and exaggerated
and then I decided . . . to suggest that she should act this scene
without making a single gesture or movement . . . then . . . I allowed
the actress to make a single gesture which I had noticed among the
many she had made in the beginning. It was a movement of the
hand as of someone naively fending off some terrible threat.73
With the ofﬁcial rehabilitation of Stanislavsky, Pudovkin advances a
claim on his behalf as a visionary precursor for a naturalistic trend in
cinema, presuming for cinema a more adequate realisation and validation
of Stanislavsky’s theatrical project. But although life-like credibility
was claimed by the younger medium as its particular preserve
(sometimes as a virtue, sometimes as an impediment), constraints were
imposed on the style of performance in order that its rendition on
screen prove acceptable. Large gestures in front of the camera were
functionally enlarged when screened and looked simply ridiculous
when accompanying speech could not be heard (Pudovkin cites the
example of Moskvin in The Postmaster).74
Stage make-up was to be
discouraged (Vera Baranovskaia was induced to play the Mother
without make-up, and Sovetskoe kino emphatically offers an illustration
of her decked out in powder, pearls and feathers as a ‘Film d’Art’
diva). Hence, in part, Lunacharsky’s commendation of the truthfulness
of Pudovkin’s material. Discussing The Battleship Potemkin at the time
of its release in 1925, Pudovkin had observed: ‘As far as the performances
in the different roles are concerned, everything is bad, apart
from the almost static moments of people who are not acting. This is
partly the fault of the director, who has not mastered his human
material’.75
Critical reaction to The Mother suggested that in 1926
Pudovkin had already achieved his own distinct and avowed aims:
The ﬁlm The Mother can be compared with Potemkin. The battleship,
76 Vsevolod Pudovkin
the ﬁrst ﬁlm of general signiﬁcance produced by Soviet cinema, is a
creative triumph for the director and cameraman. In this picture
Eisenstein was able to demonstrate astonishing mastery in directing
the mass and the magniﬁcent art of montage. In The Mother, in
addition to these achievements, the triumph of the actors deserves
just as much attention: they have been employed by their director to
the full extent of their creative ability.76
Notes
1 Boris Kazanskii, ‘The Nature of Cinema’, tr. Herbert Eagle, Russian
Formalist Film Theory, Michigan 1981, p. 101; see also Eric Elliott, Anatomy
of Motion Picture Art, Territet 1928 and Hugo Mu¨nsterberg, The Psychology
of the Photoplay [1916], New York 1970
2 Eisenstein, Selected Works II, ed. Richard Taylor, London 1991, p. 117
3 Pudovkin, ‘Metod kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 97
4 Pudovkin, ‘Metod kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 97
5 Pudovkin, ‘Teatr i kino’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 188
6 Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, London 1969, pp. 43 and 79
7 Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 147
8 see ‘Chaplin and Chaplinism’ [1936], Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre
9 Mel Gordon, ‘Meyerhold’s Biomechanics’, Drama Review 18.3, 1974, p. 78
and Kuleshov on Film, tr Ronald Levaco, Berkeley 1974, p. 112
10 Luda and Jean Schnitzer, Poudovkine, Paris 1966, p. 12: ‘. . . above all,
Pudovkin owed to him his respect for the actor, for his own thoughts and
feelings’; Peter Dart, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York 1974,
gives a full ﬁlmography
11 Pudovkin, ‘Metod kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 96
12 Pudovkin, ‘Naturshchik vmesto aktera’, SS I, p. 181
13 Kuleshov interviewed in Schnitzer, Cinema in Revolution, tr David
Robinson, London 1973, p. 71
14 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 95
15 Pudovkin, ‘Vremia krupnym planom’, Proletarskoe kino 1, 1932, p. 32
16 Anatolii Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, Moscow 1945, pp. 114–115;
see also M. Bliumbert, ‘Osveshchenie kino atel’e’, Kino zhurnal ARK 11–
12, p. 18 for the effects of directional lighting on perceived expression
17 Pudovkin, ‘Akter i svet’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 123; on the
limitations of depth of focus see ‘Operator i apparat’
18 Pudovkin, ‘Diktsiia, grim, zhest’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 220
19 Pudovkin, Film Technique, New York 1949, p. xiii
20 Boris Eikhenbaum, ed. Poetika Kino, Moscow [1927], ed. Richard Taylor,
The Poetics of Cinema, Oxford 1982
21 Kino-zhurnal ARK 8, 1925, p. 5
The Mother and the return of the actor 77
22 Pudovkin, ‘Analiz’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 102
23 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 96
24 Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Poudovkine, p. 128
25 Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia learned to Read, Princeton 1984, pp. 317 and
319, also in Stites, Kenez, Gleason, eds. Bolshevik Culture, Bloomington
1985, re the difﬁculties of book distribution; Richard Stites suggests that
the insistence on ‘correct’ reading material led to a fall in literacy after
1917
26 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture, Cambridge 1992, p. 42 and Peter
Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, Cambridge 1992, p. 30
27 for pre-revoutionary adaptations from Pushkin, Tolstoi et al see Yuri
Tsivian, ed. Silent Witnesses, London 1989 and B. S. Likhachev, Istoriia kino
v Rossii 1896-1913, Leningrad 1927, pp. 176–201
28 Anna Lawton, The Red Screen, London 1992, p. 7
29 A. Mariamov, Pudowkin, Berlin 1958, p. 93 re Lenin on the exceptional
‘timeliness’ of the novel; Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, London 1985, p.
52
30 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Oxford 1989, p. 33
31 Maxim Gorkii, The Mother, tr Isidore Schneider, Secaucus 1977, p. 403
32 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, London 1985, p. 52, says that Zalomov
complained to Gorky about the supposed mis-representation of his
mother
33 report by comrade D. Smirnov, ‘1905 god’, Pravda 10 January 1926, p. 3
34 Mariamov, Pudowkin, p. 98
35 Leon Trotskii, Literature and Revolution [1924], Ann Arbor 1960, p. 232
36 Leo Tolstoi, Resurrection, tr Rosemary Edmonds, Harmondsworth 1979,
chapter 34 ; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, tr Rosemary Edmonds, Harmondsworth
1960, pp. 99–101
37 Pudovkin, ‘Kak ia rabotaiu s Tolstym’, SS II, p. 58
38 Maxim Gorkii, The Mother, tr. Isadore Schneider, Secaucus 1977, p. 6
39 Barbara Evans Clements, ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’ in Stites,
Kenez, Gleason, Bolshevik Culture, Bloomington 1985, p. 221: ‘[The Bolsheviks]
believed that the woman of the masses was both a conservative who
could be the enemy of the revolution and the long-suffering victim of
oppression who must be liberated by the revolution’
40 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 117 quoting Komsomol authors in
1927; see also Trotskii, ‘Vodka, the Church and the Cinema’ [1923]
Problems of Everyday Life, New York 1973, pp. 31–35
41 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924, London
1997, pp. 196–197
42 Gorkii, pp. 132 and 352; for a structured comparison of the novel with the
scenario, see Doris Lemmermier, Literaturverﬁlmung in sowjetischen stummﬁlm,
Vienna 1989
43 Aleksandr Blok, The Twelve [1918], ed. Avril Pyman, Durham 1989, I
44 Gorkii, p. 356
45 Pudovkin, ‘Mat’’, Sovetskii ekran 35, 1926 in SS II, p. 49; see also Zarkhi’s
78 Vsevolod Pudovkin
undated, incomplete book manuscript, ‘Kinematurgiia (teoria kinostsenariia)’
RGALI 2003/1/92 and his scenario for Mat’, RGALI 2003/1/
37; Iezuitov suggests that the ﬁlms and ‘school’ of Pudovkin should more
properly be recognised as the combined effort of Pudovkin-Zarkhi: Nikolai
Iezuitov, Pudovkin, Moscow, 1937, pp. 203–204
46 M. Smelianov, ‘Literatura kino’, Kino-zhurnal ARK 1 (1925), pp. 59–64; V.
Dekabr’sky, ‘Literatura i kinematograf’, Art-ekran 5 (1923), p. 12
47 Pudovkin: ‘Siuzhetnoe oformlenie temy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 59
48 Gorkii, p. 195; the mother remains unnamed for much of the novel and
only gradually Pavel’s comrades come to address her as comrade; Grifﬁth
was not unique in introducing protagonists similarly in Hearts of the World
etc., but Pudovkin says nothing of this
49 Pudovkin, ‘Konstruktsiia stsenariia’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 55
50 Gorkii, p. 197
51 Gorkii, p. 364
52 Gorkii, p. 188
53 Gorkii, p. 392
54 Jay Leyda, Kino, London 1960, p. 206; see also A. Karaganov: Vsevolod
Pudovkin , Moscow 1973, pp. 50–53 and Nina Glagoleva, Mat’, Moscow
1975
55 Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question, Columbus 1989, p. 108
56 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 49
57 Gorkii, The Mother, p. 60: The novel abounds in religious imagery, which is
less conspicuous in the ﬁlm; on Gorkii as a God Builder see Lunacharskii,
Religion and Socialism and Stites, Revolutionary Dreams
58 Taylor, The Poetics of Cinema, p. 8
59 Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore [The Morphology of the
Folktale, 1928], Manchester 1984, p. 149
60 Taylor, The Poetics of Cinema, p. 104; for Pudovkin’s own enthusiastic
observations on Way Down East see ‘ Liudi v srede’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial,
SS I, p. 115
61 Taylor, The Poetics of Cinema, p. 93; the ‘kheppi’ ending was the subject of
much critical comment, but tragic endings were common in Russian
melodrama and were expected by ﬁlm audiences: see Tsivian, Early
Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception and Kenez, Film and Soviet
Society, Cambridge 1992, p. 20: ‘Most Russian ﬁlms did not conclude
happily . . . in order to penetrate Western markets on occasion Russian
directors prepared two endings for a ﬁlm, a tragic one for domestic
audiences and a happy ending for export’
62 Anatolii Lunacharskii, Kino na zapade i u nas, Moscow 1928, pp. 17–20;
but Lunacharskii, like Shklovskii writing in the same year, notes that the
ﬁlm fared disappointingly outside the cities and sometimes even ran at a
loss
63 Pudovkin archive, RGALI 2060/1/246
64 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 102; Viktor Shklovskii, ‘Poetry and Prose’,
The Poetics of Cinema, p. 88; Pudovkin, ever sensitive to criticism, was
The Mother and the return of the actor 79
sufﬁciently personally piqued to reply: ‘If this ﬁlm was a success, it seems
to me that this is because I really showed everything that I felt and
experienced in a very simple manner. I like this ﬁlm more than any other
of my works. There is a unity in it. Shklovskii calls me a centaur. Personally
I think that I was a young puppy, with one paw shorter than the
others. I do not want to be a mythological beast – it has no future. But I
know that a puppy becomes a grown up and lively dog – and it’s this dog
that I want to become’: Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Poudovkine, Paris 1966,
p. 129
65 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, London 1958, p. 81; also Ernest Lindgren,
The Art of the Film, London 1950, pp. 81–85
66 IM/BFI/SM item 89, letter to Pudovkin 23 July 1929, sent together with a
review of the ﬁlm; by 1934 Pudovkin was reluctant to use the misleading
term ‘type’ and Montagu, in his translation of Akter v ﬁl’me, duly remarked
upon the change of stance: see Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting,
New York 1949, p. 118 and ‘Rabota s ‘‘neakterom’’ ’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p.
226
67 on Zarkhi’s original scenario, then intended for direction by Zheliabuzhskii,
and in which an even larger role for the father was destined for
Moskvin, see N. Iezuitov’s introduction to N. Zarkhi, ‘Otets’, Iskusstvo kino
3, 1936, p. 52 and Leyda, Kino, p. 206
68 Pudovkin, ‘Rabota aktera v kino i ‘‘sistema’’ Stanislavskogo’ [1952],
Izbrannye stat’i, Moscow 1955, p. 217
69 Vera Baranovskaia, ‘Akter dramy v kino’, Sovetskoe Kino 38, (21 September
1926) p. 4
70 Pudovkin, ‘Preryvnost’ akterskoi raboty v kino’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 193
71 Mae Marsh, Screen Acting, Los Angeles 1921, p. 117, corroborates Pudovkin’s
suspicion: ‘Mr. Grifﬁth is quick to appreciate the involuntary action
of one of his actresses while a scene is being played or rehearsed. As, for
instance, in the court room scene . . . (the mother and the law) when I
began unconsciously to wring my handkerchief and press it to my face’.
72 Pudovkin, ‘Akter i ekrannoe izobrazhenie’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I,
p. 122
73 Baranovskaia, ‘Akter dramy v kino’, Sovetskoe kino 38, gives the same
example as Pudovkin in ‘Rabota aktera v kino i ‘‘sistema’’ stanislavskogo’
[1952], Izbrannye stat’i, Moscow 1955, p. 207
74 Pudovkin, ‘Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p.
120
75 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda, p. 90 and A. Karaganov, Vsevolod
Pudovkin, Moscow 1973, p. 61, both citing Kino 2 February 1926; however,
this did not prevent Pudovkin from otherwise praising this ﬁlm
76 Kino, 11 October, 1926; see also Khrisanf Khersonskii, ‘Mat’, Pravda 21
October 1926, p. 6 and in Tatiana Zapasnik and Adi Petrovich, eds.
Pudovkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, Moscow 1989, p. 158
80 Vsevolod Pudovkin
4. The End of St. Petersburg
Mechanism, Vitalism and physiological psychology
The attachment of Soviet Marxism to Pavlov lay largely in his usefulness
in accounting for change, through time and across space. (see
chapter two, above) For Soviet Marxism, Pavlov’s work was of
material concern in the understanding it afforded of the integration of
the individual in the dynamics of society, of history, of evolution in
time and with the natural environment (see chapter ﬁve, below). ‘Along
with strength, equilibrium and mobility’, wrote Pavlov in 1935,
‘another very important property of the nervous system incessantly
manifests itself – its high plasticity. Consequently, since this is a
question of the innate type of nervous system, we must take into
account all the inﬂuences to which the organism has been exposed
from the day of its birth to the present moment’.1
Bekhterev similarly,
in 1923, claimed for his ‘reﬂexology’ that:
. . . it investigates all manifestations of so-called psychic activity or
the spiritual sphere from an objective standpoint and conﬁnes itself
to the external peculiarities of the activity of man; his facial expression,
his gestures, voice and speech as a coherent integration of
signs in correlation with exciting external inﬂuences – physical, biological
and social – but also with internal inﬂuences, regardless of
whether either of these two types of inﬂuence is referable to the
present or the past, even the very remote past.2
Lenin took his rendition of Nature from Engels, who in turn inherited
it from Hegel: ‘There is no matter without movement any more than
there is movement without matter . . . The study of the different forms
of movement is therefore the essential object of the science of nature’.
In On the Question of Dialectics (1921), Lenin wrote:
Dialectics is the science of general laws of motion, both of the
external world and of human thought . . . as a doctrine of development
concerning itself with forces and tendencies acting on a given
body, phenomenon or society; the interdependence and close indissoluble
connection between all aspects of any phenomenon; universal
process of motion..that follows deﬁnite laws.3
Marxism viewed science as a function of human activity derived from
society as a whole and, in turn, insisted that Marxism was rooted in
Nature. Soviet Marxism was not alone in stressing that movement was
an essential function of Nature, but Lenin was especially concerned to
render a Nature in which matter retained its objective reality and in
which the continuum was clearly articulated around decisive moments.
For Lenin, the reﬂex is decisive as a reaction between an internal
organism and an external stimulus; the reﬂex marks the boundary
between physical and psychical activity in the individual. But Lenin’s
Natural Philosophy has a political imperative: Materialism and EmpirioCriticism
(1909) was written in direct response to the new physics’
denial of the primacy of matter, and more speciﬁcally, to the
Machians’ claims to have constructed a more correct world view on
the basis of this discovery of how the world is and has come to be. In
‘The Relations of Mechanics to Physiology’, Mach declares:
The majority of natural inquirers ascribe to the intellect the implements
of physics, to the concepts mass, force, atom etc., whose sole
ofﬁce is to revive economically arranged experiences, a reality
beyond and independent of thought. Not only so, but it has even
been held that these forces and masses are the real objects of inquiry
and if once they were fully explored, all the rest would follow from
the equilibrium and motion of these masses . . . we should beware
lest the intellectual machinery employed in the representation of the
world on the stage of thought be regarded as the basis of the real
world.4
Mach advocates tolerance of an incomplete conception of the world
and disputes the notion of cause and effect in nature; he opposes the
82 Vsevolod Pudovkin
primacy which Lenin accords to matter: ‘Space and time are ordered
systems of sets and sensations’. Lenin, as the successor of Engels,
opposes Mach for his alignment with Du¨hring.5
Lenin criticises Mach
for being wrong in principle and inconsistent in application:
In Mach, the ﬁrst sensations are declared to be ‘real elements of the
world’ . . . then the very opposite view is smuggled in, viz that sensations
are connected with deﬁnite processes in the organism. Are
not these ‘processes’ connected with the exchange of matter between
the organism and the external world? Could this exchange of matter
take place if sensations of particular organisms did not give them an
objectively correct idea of this external world . . . ? . . . Natural
Science instinctively adheres to the materialist theory of knowledge
. . . Materialism, in full agreement with natural science, takes matter
as primary and regards consciousness, thought, sensation as secondary,
because in its well-deﬁned form sensation is associated only
with the higher forms of matter (organised matter) while ‘in the
foundation of the structure of matter’ one can only surmise the existence
of a faculty akin to sensation . . . Machism holds to the opposite
idealist point of view and at once lands into an absurdity: since
in the ﬁrst place, sensation is taken as primary in spite of the fact
that it is associated only with deﬁnite processes in matter organised
in a deﬁnite way; in the second place, the basic premise that bodies
are complexes of sensations is violated by the assumption of existence
of other living beings and in general of other ‘complexes’
beside the given great I.6
Marxists were not alone in requiring an attachment of knowledge of
reality to scientiﬁc discovery, but early Soviet Marxism required a
doctrine which described mechanically the process and structure
whereby objects were set in motion rather than assuming movement as
a transcendant vitalising force, nor was it sufﬁcient to assume that
logical order reﬂected natural order. The reﬂex was a decisive moment
for philosophy in that it located the origins of consciousness, both in
the process of evolution of the individual being from birth to maturity
and in the process of evolution of life forms. ‘The view of subjective
psychology does not harmonise with the law of evolution, if it cannot
tell at what level of development in the animal kingdom the phenomenon
called consciousness begins’.7
Thus Bekhterev criticises James
The End of St. Petersburg 83
and Bergson (published in Russia in 1908 and 1914 respectively) for
idealism in their adherence to the vague notion of a ‘cosmic consciousness’,
subsuming all nature, animate and inanimate, organic and
inorganic. ‘Haeckel, le Dantec, Petri and de la Grasserie and others
regard the psychic and consequently consciousness as resident in every
cell and every molecule and atom . . . a ‘‘psychology of minerals’’.’8
But Bekhterev, ever equitable, cannot entertain a rigidly mechanistic
position either:
The view holds undisputed sway among modern psychologists that,
in investigating the behaviour of man, it is not possible to exclude
the psychic altogether because every reality and every process is ﬁrst
of all a psychic reality, for our knowledge of nature is second hand,
through the medium of the psychic world, which the mechanists
deny . . . if we turn to the objective investigation of the external
person and regard that individual’s logical process and his behaviour
as reactions to stimulii from the external world, we shall have
direct evidence that development of these reactions is inevitable,
if we take into account the individual’s bio-socio development under
the inﬂuence of his experience and consider the utilisation of
external inﬂuences for his own presentation and that of the commu-
nity.9
Conversely, the vitalist Bergson repudiates Spencer for a misplaced
attachment to the reﬂex and an inadequate evolutionism which falsely
emphasises isolated states over the process of becoming. Bergson calls
for ‘A PHILOSOPHY WHICH SEES IN DURATION THE VERY
STUFF OF REALITY. Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a
perpetual becoming. It makes itself or it unmakes itself, but it is never
something made’.10
Dynamism, plasticity and organic unity
Moreover, science was not the only area of knowledge to enter the
mechanist/vitalist debate and to pursue new relationships of space and
time and a new fascination with movement. ‘Plastic art discloses what
science has discovered’, says Mondrian, aspiring to found art on an
objective basis. ‘Neo-Plasticism should not be considered a personal
conception. It is the logical development of all art, ancient and
84 Vsevolod Pudovkin
modern; its way lies open to everyone as a principle to be applied’.11
Here, too, Bergson makes a notable contribution:
Pure change, real duration, is something spiritual, impregnated with
spirituality. Intuition is the quality which reaches the spirit, duration,
pure change . . . There is, however, a fundamental meaning: intuitive
thinking is thinking in duration. Intelligence arises ordinarily from
the immobile and constructs the quality of movement as well as it
may from juxtaposed immobilities. Intuition arises from movement,
posits it or rather notices it as reality itself and sees nothing in
immobility but an abstract, instantaneous moment which our mind
has singled out of mobility. Usually it is of things – that is to say of
the stable – that intelligence is given and change becomes an accident
that is supplied afterwards. For the intuition, change is the
essential.12
Throughout the arts, there was an enthusiasm for dynamism,
movement per se, and for plasticity, both as the description of form in
space and its representation in movement through time. The term
‘plasticity’ is prominent in the manifestos of the artistic avant-garde in
Europe. For the artists of de Stijl the ‘new plastic’ was deﬁned as ‘a
new organisation of the surface’;13
the Italian Futurists presented their
1912 credo under the title ‘Pittura, Scultura, Futurista (dinamismo
plastico)’14
La´szlo Moho´ly-Nagy urged that ‘the signiﬁcance of the
plastic features of a face, of shells, ﬂowers and a thousand other
matters . . . be rediscovered again’,15
and Le´ger, on behalf of Purism,
concluded that ‘plastic beauty is totally independent of sentimental,
descriptive and imitative values’.16
Lunacharsky noted the rise of
‘rhythmic’ and ‘plastic’ studios of dance, following the example of
Isadora Duncan.17
The meaning ascribed to ‘plasticity’ by those who
employed it was various, but, broadly, ‘plastic’ denotes the organisation
and articulation of material in movement. Even stillness, says
Mondrian, is in plastic terms no more than the poising in equilibrium
of potentially generative forces: ‘In plastic art, reality can be expressed
only through the equilibrium of dynamic movement of form and
colour . . . dynamic equilibrium, the uniﬁcation of forms or elements of
forms through continual opposition . . . destroys static balance’.18
In
the manifestos, ‘plasticity’ indicates an enthusiasm for movement as a
proper theme for the modern work of art (as distinct from any previous
The End of St. Petersburg 85
subsidiary concern with the expression of the plastic attributes of such
and such a subject), with movement (natural or mechanical) as the
generator of forms and with the means by which dynamism and ﬂux
(as opposed to stasis) are to be conveyed in an art work truly representative
of a modern perception of the world.
In the theatre, Appia, Tairov and Meyerhold similarly celebrate
plasticity, but their exploration of its dramatic potential extends beyond
a formalist enthusiasm for abstract sculptural settings of mass and
light. Meyerhold discusses the plastic as a means of involving the
audience as the fourth creator in a ritualistic performance:
. . . the spectator is compelled to employ his imagination creatively
in order to ﬁll-in those details suggested by the stage action . . .
stylisation employs statuesque plasticity to strengthen the impression
made by certain groupings on the spectator’s memory . . . the
stylised theatre wants to abolish scenery which is located on
the same plane as the actor and the stage properties, to remove the
footlights, to subordinate acting to the rhythm of dialogue and
plastic movement; it anticipates the revival of the dance and seeks to
induce the active participation of the spectator in the performance.
. .19
Film, as the art of the moving image, was accorded a peculiarly privileged
position. Film was welcomed by avant-garde artists as a
medium which responded to, could even materially fulﬁl, these
various aspirations. In 1934, Panofsky recognised in ﬁlm unique
possibilities for the ‘dynamisation of space’ and ‘the spatialisation of
time’.20
In 1923, Elie Faure observed: ‘The cinema is plastic ﬁrst; it
represents a sort of moving architecture which is in constant accord –
in a state of equilibrium dynamically pursued’.21
The duration and
disclosing of a ﬁlm referred it qualitatively, for some critics, to older
and exotic precedents, for instance, Egyptian reliefs and Chinese roll
paintings.22
More often, ﬁlm commended itself as a symptom of
modernity and a celebration of a modern aesthetic: ‘cinema ﬁts
naturally into the rhythm of the world’, said Le´ger.23
The plastic arts
increasingly adopted terms descriptive of the performing arts to
express their aesthetic ideals. Film not only juxtaposed performing
and plastic art but presented a unity in which the traditional distinction
could be overcome. Faure continues:
86 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Let us not misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘plastic’. Too
often it evokes the motionless, colourless forms called sculptural –
which lead all too quickly to the academic canon, to helmeted
heroism, to allegories in sugar, zinc, papier-mache or lard. Plastics is
the art of expressing form in repose or in movement by all the
means that man commands: full-round, bas-relief, engraving . . .
drawing in any medium, painting, fresco, the dance; and it seems to
me in no wise overbold to afﬁrm that the rhythmic movements of a
group of gymnasts or of a processional or military column touch the
spirit of plastic art far more nearly than do the pictures of the school
of David. Like painting, moreover, and more completely than painting,
since a living rhythm and its repetition in time are what characterise
cineplastics – the later art tends and will tend more every
day to approach music and the dance as well. The interpenetration,
the crossing and the association of movements and cadences already
give us the impression that even the most mediocre ﬁlms unroll in
musical space.24
St. Petersburg . . . Petrograd . . . Leningrad
It seems to me worth setting ﬁlm against this broad swathe of intellectual
enquiry into dynamism, plasticity and organicity, before investigating
the various interpretations evinced in Pudovkin’s ﬁlms and in
his writings. Pudovkin does not stand conveniently on one side or the
other of the mechanist/vitalist debate, he is concerned with ﬁlm both
as a conspicuously additive construction and as duration, as the
absorption of time ﬂuidly passing: in the same breath he uses an
analogy from architecture (bricks, keystones) alongside an analogy
from music (crescendo, diminuendo).25
A ﬁlm, for Pudovkin, has
objective identity and existence, it stands as a deliberate abstraction
from the indifferent natural visual and rhythmic continuum, but simultaneously
plays and functions in real time. Unlike his contemporaries
in the pure ﬁlm movement in the rest of Europe (Richter, Eggeling,
Lye, Le´ger), Pudovkin does not make abstract qualities of line, volume,
tone and movement the subject of his work, but rather requires of an
aesthetic that it serve a particular social and political imperative.26
Pudovkin uses ‘plastic’ in a narrow sense to denote the selection of
subject matter to be photographed. The camera directs the attention of
the viewer towards a particular object, an ability akin to that identiﬁed
The End of St. Petersburg 87
by Kuleshov in Pushkin and by Eisenstein in Zola to locate pertinent
details in a given scene (see chapter eight, below). Golovnia recounts
that he and Pudovkin would often spend hours searching out a particular
tree or river at a particular time of day and then insert the shot in
a sequence of material entirely unrelated in actuality. Sometimes they
would encounter their ideal entirely by chance. In The Mother, morning
is shown by mists over still water and the cockerel crowing; waves and
the stirring of the wind appear after the death of Vlasov; the elemental
imagery culminates in the ice ﬂoes breaking as Pavel escapes and the
demonstrating mass advances27
(see chapter three, above).
The choice of shot entails exploiting or contriving lighting which
reveals the object in its ideal aspect: in The End of St. Petersburg [Konets
Sankt-Peterburga, 1927], Golovnia attempted to capture the idiosyncratic
quality of the twilight and the White Nights, ‘when contours
become uncertain, the space nebulous, when the image loses its naturalistic
quality’.28
But the ‘plastic’ denoted more than the search for a
natural object which can be photographed more effectively than
another example: it means more than unusually photogenic, it means
commitment to the centrality of theme, for instance in Zarkhi’s
working title St. Petersburg . . . Petrograd . . . Leningrad. Equally, for
Pudovkin, ‘plastic’ equates with more than the Impressionists’ ‘photoge´nie’,
that which Delluc deﬁned mysteriously as the capacity of the
camera to transform pictorially the natural aspect of an object, to
reveal appearances beyond the usual: for Delluc, Photoge´nie is the law
of cinema, it is ‘the poetic truth of moving photography’.29
Delluc was
known in Russia for his contributions to the international magazine
Veshch’-Gegenstand-Objet and for his 1920 publication, Photoge´nie.30
In
his Kino-zhurnal ARK article ‘Fotogeniia’, responding to the 1924
Russian translation, Pudovkin says that for Delluc the term comprises
‘the photographic representability of such and such an object, with the
‘‘genius’’ of ﬁlm’ but says that he seems to ‘have considered the
question of the ﬁlm material itself of scarcely any importance’. One
thinks here of Eisenstein’s later response to Bala´zs, ‘Be´la Forgets the
Scissors’.31
Pudovkin continues:
So it is that something appears on the ﬁlm strip. Now, if we go on
to study the completed picture on the screen, every moment one
piece of the strip is replaced by another (a kind of leap) and certainly
it will have a distinct impression (on the spectator), in its
88 Vsevolod Pudovkin
being perceived and apprehended, as a kind of visual shock – an
accent, as I choose to call it, even if the change is registered only
mildly.
These accents (points of change) are to be distributed throughout the
ﬁlm, or, rather, in that time which it takes to show the entire ﬁlm.
They are planted in some pattern, grounding the relative pieces and
their combination . . . The accented moments, the organisation in
time by the division of the division of the various intervals, is this
not – precisely – a form of temporal rhythm?32
Eisenstein answers Delluc with a useful deﬁnition which corresponds
to ‘typage’ (see chapter six, below): ‘An idea expressed in its completeness
is photogenic; that is, an object is photogenic when it corresponds
most closely to the idea that it embodies’.33
For Pudovkin, the ‘plastic’
incorporates a similar notion, meaning the appreciation at the outset of
an element in sequence and the selection of visual material appropriate
to the expression of a particular theme, ‘a supra-artistic concept’
[poniatie vnekhudozhestvennoe] commanding the ﬁlm as a whole:
The scenario-writer must bear always in mind the fact that every
sentence he writes will have to appear plastically upon the screen in
some visible form. Consequently, it is not the words he writes that
are important, but the externally expressed plastic images that he
describes in these words . . . The scenarist must know how to ﬁnd
and to use plastic (visually expressive) material: that is to say. he
must know how to discover and how to select, from the limitless
mass of material provided by life and its observation, those forms
and movements that shall most clearly and vividly express in images
the whole content of his idea.34
Pudovkin intends by ‘clear and expressive’ that which readily and
economically conveys a deﬁnite idea or feeling, an intention on the
part of the director to avoid confusion or misunderstanding between
the making and the viewing of the ﬁlm. In The End of St. Petersburg, the
garlanded statue of Alexander III, ‘the peace-maker’, weeps as Europe
goes to war. The series of shots of landmarks of St. Petersburg includes
the distinctive silhouette of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the tympanum of
the cathedral portico bearing its dedication to its patron on the entablature;
the equestrian statues of Peter the Great, Alexander III and
The End of St. Petersburg 89
Nicholas I precede the ofﬁcer on the bridge, similarly mounted; a closeup
of the cross on the ﬂank of Tsar Nicholas’ steed becomes a ﬁgure
for the union of the city with the lineage of the tsars and of the tsars
with the church, repeated later during the war sequence the single
silhouette of St. Isaac’s dome is used to locate parallel action in St.
Petersburg alongside the trenches. Pudovkin wills a particular interpretation
of an image by its position in a sequence: images may be
introduced in an apparently narrative sequence which grounds them in
the diegesis, then are subsequently interspersed as individual frames in
later montage sequences in which they ﬁgure metaphorically, as a
momentary tendentious reminder of a larger synthesis. A shot of a
factory worker, collapsed from exhaustion, is established early in The
End of St. Petersburg and then recurs; a soldier dying agonisingly slowly
in the mud in the trenches is cut successively into the stock market
sequence, the frenetic activity as prices rise (‘both sides are satisﬁed’).
With the opening shots of the ﬁlm, Pudovkin and Golovnia sought to
convey Russia in general and not just the particular landscape of the
Volga region:
The ﬁrst shots . . . show hilly countryside with sheaves of rye,
ploughed ﬁelds which reach as far the horizon to merge with the
The church and autocracy (the statue of Nicholas II)
90 Vsevolod Pudovkin
sky . . . In these pictures a sense of space was achieved by the well
considered succession of graded tones, of the yellow rye and blue
sky with white clouds. The troughs and furrows conveyed the
feeling of an inﬁnite distance and the cutting from landscape to
landscape determined the extension of vision.35
‘It is well known’, says Pudovkin, ‘to the specialist and to the general
public alike, that some shots turn out well on screen and some
badly’.36
The selection of individual elements, ultimately the choice of
shot and camera angle, is always to be subordinated to the general
theme and the will of the director. Although Pudovkin quotes
Kuleshov’s analogy of ﬁlm as a putting together of bricks (or of ‘pieces
of clay’), these separate individual pieces are not free to ﬁnd or to
generate their own form of combination.37
‘Plasticity’ is implied by
Pudovkin more loosely in the internal feel, fundamentally intuitive, for
a ﬁlm as a whole, as material clearly organised within very deﬁnite
boundaries. ‘Cinematography is, before anything else, limited by the
deﬁnite length of a ﬁlm. A ﬁlm more than 2,200 metres long already
creates an unnecessary exhaustion’.38
A director must ‘feel’ the division
of the ﬁlm into its reels and shape his material accordingly. ‘A reel
must not exceed a certain length . . . a reel runs through in under ﬁfteen
minutes and the whole ﬁlm in about one-and-a-half hours. If one tries
to visualise each separate scene as a component of a reel, as it appears
upon the screen and consider the time each will take up, one can
reckon the quantity required as content of the whole scenario’.39
In this
respect, Pudovkin speaks of the appearance of movement of the
screened image, the fact of its movement and the time accorded to it,
as that which speciﬁcally distinguishes ﬁlm from photography. Here
the director’s activity is somewhat akin to orchestration: ‘A ﬁlm is
only really signiﬁcant when every one of its elements is ﬁrmly welded
to a whole . . . When one calculates that in a ﬁlm of about 1,200
metres there are about 500 pieces, then one perceives that there are
500 separate but interlocked groups of problems to be solved . . . by
the director’.40
I suggest that for Pudovkin there is an additional sense
in which the ‘raw material of ﬁlm’ acquires a substantial plastic
meaning apart from its appearance on screen. Pudovkin says that
many technicians have become proﬁcient directors by ﬁrst learning to
handle material shot by others, to feel the balance between different
lengths and tones (elements, unlike bricks, dissimilar in kind);41
The End of St. Petersburg 91
Pudovkin advocates that cutting is the basic skill of the director, not
only in relation to the spectator’s apprehension of the screened image
but also as a craft underpinning the ﬁlm-making process. Iezuitov and
the Schnitzers have published excerpts from the lists held by VGIK,
giving the exact lengths of Pudovkin’s individual shots (and consequently
their relative proportions) of sequences in The Mother and The
End of St. Petersburg (Eisenstein’s example of ‘perfect metric
montage’).42
As a distinct element, titles are for Pudovkin a case in point. Titles
may have plastic content, by means of an expressive type face or by
size of font: German ﬁlms were known to use gothic black letter to
indicate ofﬁcialdom; Gardin, amongst a number of expressionist
devices, uses fancy lettering in the style of a calling card to introduce
the Baron in Locksmith and Chancellor [Slesar’ i kantsler, 1923]. In
Hunger . . . Hunger . . . Hunger [Golod . . . golod . . . golod, 1922], notes
Pudovkin, the title ‘Comrades’ appeared normal size, followed by the
larger title ‘Brothers’ and thereafter ‘Help’ ﬁlling the whole screen.
Dovzhenko’s The Arsenal [Arsenal, 1928], Kuleshov’s The Female
Journalist [Vasha znakomaia, 1927] and Pudovkin’s own The End of St.
Petersburg use a similar effect. But Pudovkin notes further that ‘more
important than the plastic aspect of a title is its rhythmic signiﬁcance
. . . it must be borne in mind that with the length of a title must be
considered the speed of the action in which it appears. Rapid action
demands short, abrupt titles; long drawn out action can be linked only
with slow ones’.43
In The End of St. Petersburg, the staggered single
caption ‘from Penza, from Novgorod, from Tver’ recurs as a graphic
leit-motif through the ﬁlm. Pudovkin is wary of the disruption of the
ﬂuid movement of a sequence by an unwieldy, halting title and, again,
is eager to facilitate the address of the ﬁlm to the audience in an
aesthetic unity of word with image:
The main consideration affecting spoken titles is: good literary treatment
and, certainly, as much compression as possible. One must
consider that, on the average, every line of title (two to three words)
requires one metre of ﬁlm. Consequently a title twelve words long
stays on the screen from twelve to eighteen seconds, and can, by a
temporal interruption of this kind, destroy the rhythm, and with it
the sequence and impression, of the current shots.
Clarity is as important for the spoken as for the continuity title.
92 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Superﬂuous words that may enhance the literary beauty of the sentence
but will complicate its rapid comprehension are not permissible
. . . It must be added that in construction of the scenario one
must be careful of the distribution of titles. A continual, even interruption
of the action by titles is not desirable. It is better to try to
distribute them . . . so that the remainder is left free for development
of the action. Thus work the Americans, giving all the necessary
explanations in the early reels, strengthening the middle by use of
more spoken titles, and at the end, in quicker tempo, carrying
through the bare action to the ﬁnish without titles.44
The organisation of literary material is hereby structured in accordance
with a general ideal schema, as exempliﬁed for Pudovkin by Grifﬁth.
Pudovkin observes that Intolerance (released in Russia in 1916)
combines ‘the inner dramatic content of the action and a masterly
employment of external effort (dynamic tension)’ and seemingly
follows his own advice to directors to take Grifﬁth’s ﬁlms in general ‘as
models of correctly contrasted intensiﬁcation’:
At the very last moment, when the noose is being laid around the
neck of the hero, comes the pardon, attained by the wife at the price
of her last energy and effort. The quick changes of scene, the contrasting
alternation of the tearing machines with the methodical preparations
for the execution of an innocent man, the ever increasing
concern of the spectator . . . all these compel an intensiﬁcation of
excitement that, being placed at the end, successfully concludes the
picture . . . A working out of the action of the scenario in which all
the lines of behaviour of the various characters are clearly expressed,
in which all the major events in which . . . the tension of the action
is correctly considered and constructed in such a way that its
gradual intensiﬁcation rises to a climactic end – this . . . is a treatment
already of considerable value and useful to the director in
representation.45
In The End of St. Petersburg, images are accorded an appropriate length
of time, indeed are inseparably matched to screen time, for the comprehension
of their content, in their own right and in sequential
context. The quivering reﬂections of the palaces on the banks of
the Neva remain on screen for long enough to allow contemplation
The End of St. Petersburg 93
of the unstable foundations of this fated city, ‘. . . the most abstract
and intentional city in the whole round world’, observed Dostoevsky46
;
there was, some said, a constant need ‘to puzzle out the enigmatic
existence of a city founded on all contraries and contradictions,
physical and moral’ a striving to understand ‘this contradictory chaos
of mutually devouring forces’;47
said Pushkin, of this city ‘clothed in
granite’:
Almost a century – and the city young
Beauty of the Northern world, amazing,
From gloomy forest and muddy swamp upsprung,
Proudly risen in splendour blazing.48
These shots announce the guiding theme for Pudovkin and Golovnia,
‘St. Petersburg . . . Petrograd . . . Leningrad’, in this their contribution
to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In The End of St.
Petersburg, sequences are balanced like separate movements in a single
shot or like separate elements in a single composition; dynamic
movement is balanced against stillness and an appropriate speed and
direction is determined for each sequence. The ﬁlm opens with a calm,
stratiﬁed picture of a sunrise; the day breaks and the blades of a
St. Petersburg’s shaking foundations
94 Vsevolod Pudovkin
windmill slice vertically, chopping regularly through the sky; winds
blow left to right across the plains and the tide passes over the estuary.
‘It was not a single windmill’, says Golovnia, ‘destined to be looked at
and studied, but a detail of the countryside considered as an uninterrupted
shot, consisting of a whole series of elements rhythmically
uniﬁed . . . by montage into a single picture’.49
The younger man waits
motionless while the older breaks bread; neither is perturbed by the
child (rushing into foreground from top of frame to bottom) reporting
the screams of the mother: the men, worldly wise, know all too well
that these pangs herald birth and not death and they continue their toil
regardless. There is resignation: ‘one more mouth to feed; one more
proletarian must leave to ﬁnd work’. The slow monotonous pace of the
sequence sets the ensuing action of the ﬁlm against the immutable
course of the day and the seasons. As a train speeds the peasants away,
windmills are seen on the horizon, turning ever turning. The spectator
is suddenly jolted to attention by the rushing, lilting carriage transporting
the minister through the city of St. Petersburg: a sense of
urgency is afoot. A slow-cranked shot of clouds passing over the statue
of Peter the Great enhances the feeling of unnatural acceleration.
Belching factory chimneys and close-ups of fast-moving wheels and
pistons continue the sense of urban dynamism, of men working to the
rhythm of machines: when the strike is called the same wheel will be
shown in close-up, stationary.
Raw material is selected to situate the narrative but simultaneously is
employed to establish visually the momentum of the action: the factory
smoke mirrors the clouds. Before the storming of the Winter Palace a
bridge is shown closing, but as the camera seemingly passes under, the
screen becomes a stark composition in black and white: night falls like
the slow closing of an eye. The raising and lowering of the ship’s guns
over the Neva is a recurring motif: its recurrence lends shape and
visual structure to the ﬁlm and dynamically punctuates the narrative;
the guns denote the ominous power of the state over the workers, but it
is their labour, feverishly polishing shells, which keeps the guns primed;
the guns are garlanded for war; the guns of the Aurora salute the fall of
the Winter Palace. The effect of a passing train in Chaplin’s 1923
Woman of Paris (well known and much discussed in Russia) could have
provided a source for Pudovkin’s shots of the lift. When the manager is
offered promotion by the industrialist Lebedev, the alternating black/
white cast ﬂashingly by the grille-work of the elevator cage on his face
The End of St. Petersburg 95
serves to mark the speed of his ascent to dizzying heights: Panofsky’s
‘spatialisation of time’ is applied to metaphorical purpose. Pudovkin
equally employs dramatic content and external effort reciprocally. To
effect a diegetically accommodated transition from one scene to
another without disrupting the ﬂow of the sequence, Lebedev advances
upon the camera; his bulk consumes the screen in an encroaching
blackness. The artful convention of a fade is effected apparently
artlessly and effortlessly.
Yuri Tsivian says that early viewers frequently remarked jolts and
shakes which rendered the act of projection all too appreciable.50
Mu¨nsterberg observed (as did Arnheim thereafter) that the momentum
of projection functions quasi transparently.51
Certainly the mechanical
progress of the ﬁlm through the projector is not normally consciously
perceived, one is not normally aware of the vehicle of movement itself
moving. I contend that, in Pudovkin, an appreciation of ﬁlmic
momentum, through the rigorous manipulation of movement in and
between frames, verges on the palpable:
Always there exist two rhythms, the rhythmic course of the objective
world and the tempo and rhythm with which man observes this
world. The world is a whole rhythm while man receives only partial
impressions of this world through his ears and skin. The tempo of
his impressions varies with the rousing and calming of his emotions
while the rhythm of the objective world he perceives continues in
unchanged tempo.52
Echoing Meyerhold’s understanding of plasticity as a participatory
relationship between performance and audience, in his notes on
rhythmic montage, Pudovkin lavishes praise on Ruttmann’s Berlin
(Germany 1927): ‘In his ﬁlm Ruttmann never merely places something
in front of the spectator, always he works with the montage of the
material and the spectator together, as one’.53
Certainly the city scenes
in A Simple Case and in The Deserter owe something to Ruttmann (see
chapter six, below). At the end of The Mother, the tension of the
dramatic action (anticipation of the son’s impending escape) is visually
wound-up by the intermittent succession of shots of the prisoners
walking round and round in a circle, counter-clockwise, in the prison
yard. In The End of St. Petersburg, the spectator is emotionally engaged
via a sensational assault. Images are often assembled to produce a
96 Vsevolod Pudovkin
sequence with the capacity to arouse a particular response, irrespective
of their subject matter. In context, their source is often difﬁcult to ascertain
and is of no consequence. In the introduction to the German
edition of Film Direction and Film Material, Pudovkin recalls:
At the beginning of that part of the action that represents war I
wished to show a terriﬁc explosion. In order to render the effect of
this explosion with absolute faithfulness I caused a great mass of
dynamite to be buried in the earth, had it blasted, and shot it. The
explosion was veritably colossal – but ﬁlmically it was nothing. On
the screen it was merely a slow, lifeless movement. Later, after much
trial and experiment I managed to edit the explosion with all the
effect I required – moreover, without using a single piece of the
scene I had just taken. I took a ﬂame thrower that belched forth
clouds of smoke. In order to give the effect of the crash I cut in
short ﬂashes of a magnesium ﬂare, in rhythmic alternation of light
and dark. Thus gradually arose before me the visual effect I
required. The bomb explosion was at last upon the screen, but, in
reality, its elements comprised everything imaginable except a real
explosion.54
With fast cutting bombarding the eye, it seems that the sensational
impulse is transferred from one shot to the next rather than the attention
being held to allow for an identiﬁcation of content. It would seem
that this impulse operates independently of any residual image on the
retina.55
Even the howling baby in The End of St. Petersburg seems to be
employed for purely physiognomic effect rather than to convey
dramatic action. ‘Single features . . . appear in space; but the signiﬁcance
of their relation to one another is not a phenomenon pertaining
to space, no more than are the emotions, thoughts and ideas which are
manifested in the facial expressions we see. They are picture-like and
yet they seem outside space; such is the psychological effect of facial
expression’, says Be´la Bala´zs.56
The cutting of shots during the central
section of the ﬁlm (the war years) is so rapid that the eye cannot catch
all the images clearly, the combination of speed and brightness agitates,
even aggravates the eye in the manner of op. art. Knowingly or by
experiment, Pudovkin applies the phi effect, whereby two graphic
forms projected alternately produce an illusion of transformation or
simultaneity or movement.57
Vertov uses a similar effect in The Man
The End of St. Petersburg 97
with a Movie Camera [Chelovek s kinoapparatom,1929], staging the trick
with virtuosic aplomb.58
In The End of St. Petersburg, the symbol of the
‘Aurora’ is transformed into the symbol of the Bolshevik leader with
his arm outstretched, previously located in the action. The silhouette of
the battleship (60 frames) is replaced by the negative of the same image
(7 frames), proceeded by the blast, white on black (3 frames) superseded
by the Bolshevik (20 frames). Petrograd becomes Leningrad.
On the sailors’ hat bands were ‘Avrora’ and ‘Zaria Svobody’- names
of leading Bolshevik cruisers of the Baltic Fleet. One of them said,
‘Kronstadt is coming!’ . . . it was as if, in 1792, on the streets of
Paris, someone had said, ‘the Marseillais are coming!’ For at Kronstadt
were 25,000 sailors, convinced Bolsheviks and not afraid to
die.59
Ivor Montagu later commented to Pudovkin that the ‘historical classic’
ﬁlm succeeds in ‘creating a reality so vivid that it even replaces history
itself in the imagination of the beholder’.60
Selection of individual shots
Theoretically, the closest approach Pudovkin makes to Pavlov’s reﬂex
is in his isolation of the shot or camera angle as the most reductive
element. Pudovkin suggests that the making of a ﬁlm can be likened to
the process of differentiation and integration in mathematics. Ivor
Montagu notes that the analogy with calculus extended to (or was
derived from) Pudovkin’s understanding of perception as a computation
of stimulii in the brain; Vance Kepley traces it to Pudovkin’s early
training as a chemist61
(see chapter two, above). Shots, of moving and
static objects, are to be selected by virtue of their ability to express in
concrete form the theme of a particular scenario. In The End of St.
Petersburg, Pudovkin shows the monotony of the trenches by the painstaking
grinding of a blade; the time while the Bolshevik’s wife waits is
shown by the waning wisp of steam from a glass of tea, akin to the
famous ashtray in The Leather Pushers [USA, 1923], perhaps.
Pudovkin acknowledges that the director is predisposed, obliged, to
photograph the external world in a particular, purposeful way. The
selection of a particular camera position can in itself render ordinary
reality extraordinary, can lend an analytical interpretation to the usual
98 Vsevolod Pudovkin
or familiar. ‘To show something as everyone sees it is to have accomplished
nothing’, says Pudovkin.62
For instance, in The End of St. Petersburg,
shots frequently deviate from an orthogonal stance: the camera is
placed to re-orientate decisively the perspective (literally and
metaphorically) of the viewing subject. Contrary to Dart’s complaint
that Pudovkin’s orientation is destructive of audience identiﬁcation in
the ﬁlm, I suggest that Pudovkin constructs a particular position in
which the viewing subject is of necessity placed.63
The shot of the two
peasants walking across the pale open courtyard is more emphatically
contrasted in scale by having the equestrian ﬁgure of Alexander III
heavy and black in foreground; or, again, in the steep distorting angle
of a shot of the isolated peasants overshadowed by the statue of an
apostle of St. Isaac’s cathedral, seeming even more insigniﬁcant and
insect-like;64
the housing-block on the Petrograd side to which they go
to ﬁnd lodging is ﬁrst shown to the spectator as a distant object,
looking, with its regular grid of bare black rectangular openings, more
like a pigeon coop than apartments.65
The low shots of the ministers
who declare war on behalf of the nation are framed to show their legs
in relation to the cabriole legs of chairs (these are stout bandy-legged
old men, unlikely themselves to be despatched to war), to show their
the Petrograd side housing blocks
The End of St. Petersburg 99
richly embroidered costumes emblazoned with the regalia of state
(these are not medals attained in battle), to exclude recognition of
accountable individuals (these are mere faceless functionaries). One is
reminded of Bely’s description of Nikolai Appollonovich, ‘with his cap
clutched in a white gloved hand, he would ascend the stairs behind the
dignitaries, the old men in gold braid and white trousers’.66
An old
man and a young woman lean out to wave to the troops departing for
war: all the young men are leaving; photographed from below, the
ﬂowers cascading down on them are omens of the grenades to come.
As Bala´zs observes generally, sometimes a picture can make a point
strikingly which would in words be no more than a cliche´.67
Unlike Vertov, who in theory likened the camera lens to a window, a
ﬁxed ﬂat plane parallel to the action which streamed past (at one stage
even suggesting the burying of a camera in a wall to record whatever
happened to pass before it), Pudovkin (like Kuleshov) lays stress on the
choreographing of the pro-ﬁlmic event, on the organisation of the
mise-en-sce`ne within the boundaries of the frame and within an appropriate
depth of ﬁeld; that which is enclosed by the frame is not an
accidental portion of a temporal and spatial continuum but is deliberately
assembled. The absolute boundary of the picture frame concentrates
the director’s attention on the subject matter enclosed, it
establishes a particular relation of subject with frame. This corresponds
to the eventual focus of the spectator on the projected image in relation
to the boundary of the screen: in the projected image the picture frame
retains a directed and substantive presence (see chapter one, above).
Lebedev is generally shot in The End of St. Petersburg such that he
exceeds the limits of the frame; standing front to camera (his head
swivels above his stifﬂy starched collar).
Pudovkin acknowledges that the limitations of the recording
apparatus (the camera angle of vision, the focal length of the lens)
impose constraints upon that which can be photographed effectively
and that such a photogenic evaluation of potential raw material refutes
the ﬁlm’s claim to be a direct representation of the natural world. But
in this transposition also resides the camera’s extraordinary potency.
Extreme close-ups, as a means of de-familiarising the original subject
matter had been used previously in Le Ballet me´canique (France,1924).
However, with Le´ger these magniﬁcations remained little more than a
startling novelty, an entertaining party trick. Pudovkin photographs a
shell axially foreshortened and a ship’s gun hole, and alternates these
100 Vsevolod Pudovkin
with the cropped shot of the face of the howling baby. The similarity of
the shots as abstract compositions combine to register graphically the
idea that making war brings pain and suffering to those at home and at
the front. Pudovkin never becomes entirely formalist: recognition of an
actual object in the image is always an active element.
Kuleshov seemed in general to favour the positioning of the camera
to correspond to the eye of a spectator viewing a scene played in the
same horizontal ground plane. The picture stands perpendicular to
the ground plane. Kuleshov regarded as affectation the practice of
Expressionist and Constructivist photographers ‘to seize things from
above and below’, and certainly Kuleshov was not alone in doubting
that unusual camera angles rendered Rodchenko’s photographs any
more politically correct.68
Kuleshov entertained the notion of a spatial
web embracing the entire mise-en-sce`ne, a three-dimensional grid
radiating from the lens, akin to the cone of vision employed by a
standard perspectival presentation of natural optics, with a single sight
line similarly drawn parallel to the ground plane. Kuleshov, endorsed
by Eisenstein, advocates this conceptual pyramid as a tool assisting
the clear and distinct arrangement of elements within the shot
frame.69
Pudovkin generally endorses Kuleshov’s mise-en-sce`ne, and, indeed,
frequently reiterates tenets of his mentor’s theories, but there is no
mention of the web. Furthermore, the camera is often set not in the
limiting vertical plane of the space in which the dramatic action is
performed but rather is placed in a continuous space such that action is
deemed to extend behind the camera: entrances are made from camera
left, exits are made past camera right. Pudovkin uses the height, angle
and tilt of the camera not only as devices which effect a particular
interpretative expression in the screened picture; sometimes the picture
is a means of rendering more forcibly a sense of the camera being
somewhere, of situating the camera point of view as an authentic eye
witness: in The End of St. Petersburg, a view from the war trenches is
shot as a thin horizontal slit of white at the top of the frame above a
black base; a view from the roof of the Winter Palace reverses the
proportion. Kuleshov says that his Dura lex [Po zakonu, 1926] similarly
deviated from the normal division of the frame by thirds and cites this
as an extension of cinema’s expressive potential.70
In theory, Kuleshov
is seemingly more proscriptive and the web indicates consistent
spectator placement. The screened image is for Pudovkin a thing in its
The End of St. Petersburg 101
own right in and to which the spectator can re-orientate his or her
point of view at the director’s will. Pudovkin assumes that such reorientations
are customarily and habitually incurred in ﬁlm-viewing.71
Indeed, inter-titles could not be accommodated without it. However,
Pudovkin’s advice that these be limited and judiciously distributed
(explanatory titles towards the beginning, dialogue titles in the middle,
with as few as possible towards the end) suggests that titles obstruct
subject incorporation, which is abetted by the unimpeded progress of
the action.
Rather than using the ﬁlm camera to obtain an image which
conveyed the illusion of three dimensional depth, Pudovkin frequently
seems to have deliberately ﬂattened his image. Pre-Revolutionary directors,
notably Bauer, had used props, and a succession of vertical planes
and contrasted tones to enhance the apparent depth of ﬁeld, to counter
the loss of focus in depth, and employed this spatial articulation
theatrically.72
By the same token, Kuleshov noted that uncluttered
carefully positioned sets and the selection of colours and textures
which produced ﬂat, dark tones on ﬁlm, could seemingly bring the
action towards the picture plane73
(see chapter one, above). Perspectival
distortion can also be productive of a ﬂattened image: the tilted shots
in The End of St. Petersburg of the peasants crossing the courtyard have
a quality, I would suggest, reminiscent of Le´ger paintings of trapeze
acts (signiﬁcantly enough also painted from photographs). Pudovkin
seems to use ﬂat backgrounds to intensify the graphic, surface quality
of some gestures and some images. Like Kuleshov, he is concerned for
their ability to communicate efﬁciently, for their ready apprehension.
These serve, like posters, to arrest the spectator’s attention within the
duration of the ﬁlm, just as do the over-sized titles: FREEDOM!,
BROTHERS!. These shots are not the constitutive fragments of a
conceptual, single united pro-ﬁlmic space in which actions have been
simultaneously or consecutively performed. These shots are often
uniquely declamatory rather than mutually conversational. Consequently
I think that Peter Dart misses Pudovkin’s intention when he
complains of lapses in continuity (continuity in a normative sense is
not here at issue):
Several times in The Mother and in The End of St. Petersburg especially
people who are supposed to be confronting each other are
shot in close-up, each looking toward the same edge of the screen.
102 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Thus, they do not appear to be looking at each other but rather they
appear to be looking at some third thing while they speak.74
Dart criticises Pudovkin under the presumption that identity of space
and causality of image is inherently necessary or natural to ﬁlmic
coherence and comprehension; but such a presumption is I think,
generally insubstantiated and here, speciﬁcally, misplaced. Sometimes
the same arresting image is repeated several times in a sequence (for
instance, the strike leader and the peasant boy in absolute proﬁle,
earnestly gazing out of frame left) or the silhouetted shot of the strike
leader, arm outstretched as he addresses the workers. When the Bolshevik’s
wife is shown as the ofﬁcer holds a bayonet to her throat, her chin
uplifted, one is being presented with a gesture of deﬁance rendered in
its most archetypal and photogenic form. Indeed, the shot appears to
be speciﬁcally lit to this purpose: hitherto the face has been shown with
the eyes sunk in shadow, the cheeks hollow (the low level of a
basement): now the eyes open and the face is fully illuminated.75
When the peasant boy demands that Lebedev release his comrade,
his determined features are starkly lit from below, exaggerating the set
of the brow (there does not appear to be any explanation ‘natural’ to
the mise-en-sce`ne for this effect). Indeed, Barry Salt dubs such a shot
‘a cliche´ of the Soviet avant-garde’.76
The snapshot of the single gesture
is itself, commented Rodchenko, a phenomenon not ordinarily available
to the spectator; Rodchenko prefers a series of reductive snapshots
to the synthetic portrait.77
Noe¨l Burch suggests that Eisenstein uses
separate shots intending a synthesis, towards the plastic construction of
an object in space;78
by contrast I suggest that these poster shots of
Pudovkin retain their singularity and thereby derive their impact.
Where Pudovkin does take the same object from a succession of
clearly differentiated angles or positions, (for instance, of himself as the
police ofﬁcer in The Mother), this characterises the ﬁgure (his evasion of
the direct gaze, his want of literal ‘glasnost’), it is again subjectively
expressive rather than sculpturally exploratory. Sometimes Pudovkin’s
snapshots imitate agitational posters more directly: hands raised in
support of the Bolshevik leader recall posters of the revolution showing
workers and the Red Army saluting the ﬂag. (See, for instance, Moor’s
1918 ‘The glorious promise’ or Klucis’ 1930 ‘A practical plan for good
work’).79
Pudovkin cites various distinguishing ﬁlmic devices which have
The End of St. Petersburg 103
become conventional and to which audiences have become accustomed.
The portrayal on ﬁlm of simultaneous events in different
locations and ﬂashes backwards and forwards, are spatial and temporal
transpositions of naturally available experience. The screen close-up
signiﬁes a similarly altered perception, a similar cue. Theoretically,
Pudovkin found no reason why ‘close-ups in time’ could not be
applied to concentrate and intensify attention and experimented with
these in A Simple Case and in The Deserter (see chapter six, below).
When the director shoots a scene, he changes the position of the
camera, now approaching it to the actor, now taking it farther away
from him, according to the subject of his concentration of the spectator’s
attention . . . This is the way he controls the spatial construction
of the scene. Why should he not do precisely the same with the
temporal? Why should not a given detail be momentarily emphasised
by retarding it on the screen, and rendering it by this means
particularly outstanding and exceptionally clear.80
Indeed, contrivances of performance speed were called for customarily.
Pudovkin notes that Ivan Moskvin’s rhythmic, emphatic movements in
The Postmaster [Stantsionnyi smotritel’, 1925], made to accompany
stage delivery of speech, did not achieve on ﬁlm the desired effect:
During the shooting, when the words were audible, the scene was
effective . . . but on the screen it resulted as a painful and often ridiculous
shufﬂing about on one spot . . . Gesture – movement accompanying
speech, is unthinkable on the ﬁlm. Losing its
correspondence with the sounds that the spectator does not hear, it
degenerates to a senseless muttering. The director in work with an
actor must so construct the performance . . . that the signiﬁcant
point shall lie always in the movement, and the word accompany it
only when required.81
In The End of St. Petersburg, the Bolshevik’s wife frenetically rocks her
baby, which the spectator perceives as expressive of her extreme
anxiety. Similarly, the bourgeois’ applause of Kerensky contributes to
the rabid pace of the war. Pudovkin observes that fast cranking had
been used by Epstein in creating a dream-like aura around his adaptation
of The Fall of the House of Usher [La Chute de la maison Usher,
France, 1928], but censured the use of the device in this instance as too
104 Vsevolod Pudovkin
general.82
Entr’acte, also cited by Pudovkin, includes a slow-motion
sequence of a cortege and Murnau’s Nosferatu [Germany, 1922]
features slow-cranking. Slow-motion was familiar in educational and
scientiﬁc ﬁlms, slow-cranking had hitherto been used humorously and
fast-cranking had been used to emphasise the balletic qualities of the
stunts of such as Fairbanks, to further enhance what Shklovsky and
Delluc coined ‘his grace and natural poetry’.83
In Storm over Asia,
Pudovkin uses slow motion to heighten tension, as the troops turn
against the Mongolians (see chapter ﬁve, below).
Ivor Montagu, in his notes to Film Technique, claims that the
Russians, ‘as naturalists’ were inclined to disfavour tracking shots as
drawing attention to the camera.84
The appellation and the explanation
seem hard to credit (Bazin was later to praise Renoir for employing
tracks and dollies as a naturalised, self-effaced technique) and odd
given the conspicuous manoeuvring of spectator placement in different
rapidly juxtaposed camera angles.85
Furthermore, Montagu claims
(more plausibly), tracking shots were resisted as inordinately expensive.
Eisenstein argued that such shots proved unwieldy in cutting.86
Certainly tracks had been used before the Revolution, for instance by
Bauer in A Child of the Big City [Ditia bol’shogo goroda, 1914], where
the spectator’s attention is drawn to the dancer on stage in the
background of a restaurant scene; or in Day Dreams where a track
identiﬁes a character’s stream of attention as it is caught by a passing
woman who reminds him of his dead wife.87
Pudovkin similarly uses a
moving camera subjectively. In the End of St. Petersburg, the slow track
and pan as the Bolshevik’s wife walks through the Winter Palace
conveys the grandeur of the building, its monumental symmetry, her
awe in attempting to encompass it in her gaze (and possibly also her
trepidation). Intercut shots of her battered metal potato kettle remind
one of the incongruity, of her not being well acquainted with such
ﬁnery. Given tracking as an acceptable option, when Pudovkin chooses
not to use a track, I would contend, there is also signiﬁcance in the
selection of an alternative, in his favouring the use of a more effective
means of ‘dynamisation of space’.
When the peasants arrive in St. Petersburg there is a close-up, fullsquare
shot of the base of a marble column; the shot lends appreciable
scale to the subsequent shot of the colonnaded portico, thereafter
dissolved into subsequent similar shots. The dissolve and the fade,
states Pudovkin, are commonly used to carry ﬁlm action from one
The End of St. Petersburg 105
location to another, denoting a transition in time compressed and
across space unseen.88
Where the colonnade shots overlap and mix
into one another, one moving sideways behind another in the opposite
direction, there is a subjective impression of repetition, of the same
thing being seen time and time again, of multiplicity and perplexity on
the part of the peasants in this vast city of Italianate palaces and
monuments, ‘which appear in the usual accounts of letters and poems’,
says Golovnia.89
The shots of rising share prices are overlaid top to
bottom in the war sequence to suggest that they are no sooner chalked
up, than they are erased and superseded. The intervening title,
‘Forward, Forward!’, matches the proﬁteering of the manufacturers’
share-holders to the engagement and re-engagement of troops in battle.
Fervour on the ﬂoor of the stock exchange is rendered subjectively, the
camera shoots in the face of the frenzied, slavering speculators, it keels
as the crowd jostles:
While taking the ﬁrst shots of the stock exchange we observed that
wide shots of the action in the background, on the staircase, turned
out badly, the scene became static. We wanted to achieve a dynamic
mass, because these shots of the agitation in the exchange were to
be edited in parallel with the action at the front. To render the
concept clearly, this composition was constructed to forward the
action: a marked diagonal movement in the shots of the attack and
a chaotic linearity in the shots of the exchange. In this way the conceptual
difference of the two actions was emphasised plastically. The
exchange is frenetic confusion, speculation, febrile movement, disorganised.
The front is tension, decisiveness, strength.90
‘Rhythm is a modern catchword’, says Pudovkin, ‘rhythm guided by
the will of the director can and must be a powerful and secure instrument
of effect’.91
For Panofsky, movement in a literal sense is of the
essence of cinema, both in its founding and in the experience of it by
an audience. The question remains whether cinema was experienced as
a really new phenomenon or whether its particular aesthetic properties,
the ‘dynamisation of space’ and the ‘spatialisation of time’ allowed for
a new apprehension of the world. Certainly the mechanists found in
the discovery of cinema a powerful means of asserting a theoretically
consolidated world view; Bergson complains that absolute duration is
wanting from their reality.
106 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Notes
1 ed Jeffrey Gray, Pavlov’s Typology, Oxford 1964, p. 37
2 Vladimir Bekhterev, General Principles of Reﬂexology [1923], tr Murphy,
London 1933, p. 33
3 Vladimir Lenin, On the Question of Dialectics [1921], Moscow 1980, p. 8
4 Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, London 1919, p. 505
5 Mach, p. xi: ‘ [because I had already published] Du¨hring . . . did not particularly
inﬂuence me – nevertheless there are many points of agreement
with Du¨hring and Avenarius and the criticisms here expressed’
6 Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism [1909], London 1952, p.
37; for Lenin’s shortcomings as a philosopher in this work, see Richard T.
de George, Patterns of Soviet Thought, Michigan 1966, pp. 146–160; for
faults in Lenin’s understanding of science, see David Joravsky, Russian
Psychology, Oxford 1989, p. 193
7 Bekhterev, p. 74
8 Bekhterev, p. 61
9 Bekhterev, p. 43
10 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907] tr Mitchell, London 1911, pp. 287
and 386: Bergson is replying to Herbert Spencer, The Principles of
Psychology, London 1855, note p. 534: ‘The reﬂex action being the lowest
form of psychical life, is, by implication, that which is most nearly related
to the physical life – that in which we see the incipient differentiation of
the psychical from the physical life’.
11 Piet Mondrian, ‘Toward the True Vision of Reality’, Plastic Art and Pure
Plastic Art, New York 1945, p. 14
12 Bergson, Pense´e et mouvement [1935] qu. Frank Popper, Origins and Development
of Kinetic Art, London 1968, p. 224
13 Popper, p. 57
14 qu. La´szlo Moho´ly-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago 1956, p. 237
15 Moho´ly-Nagy, p. 218
16 Fernand Le´ger, ‘The Machine Aesthetic’ [1925], Functions of Painting, ed.
E.F. Fry, London 1973, p. 63
17 Ilya Ilyich Schneider, Isadora Duncan: The Russian Years, tr. David Magarshack,
London 1968, pp.23 and 63.: ‘Duncan abhorred the ‘‘rhythmic’’
and ‘‘plastic’’ studios for they adopted only her ‘bare feet’ and tunics, and
forgot the chief thing – the naturalness of movement, its simplicity and
expressiveness’.
18 Piet Mondrian, p. 27
20 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, ed. D.
Talbot, Film: An Anthology, Berkeley 1967, p. 18
21 Elie Faure. ‘The Art of Cineplastics’, ed. D. Talbot: Film: An Anthology,
p. 5
22 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, London 1958, p. 58; Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in
Aesthetics’, [1909] Vision and Design, London 1990, p. 23; this ‘unrolling’
was similarly noted also by Eisenstein
The End of St. Petersburg 107
23 Le´ger, ‘Speaking of Cinema’ [1933], Functions of Painting, p. 101
24 Faure, p. 6
25 Pudovkin, ‘Siuzhetnoe oformlenie temy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 58
26 see Grigori Roshal ‘Soviet Film’, Experiment in the Film, ed. Roger
Manvell, London 1949
27 see selection of stills in VGIK archive
28 Anatolii Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, Moscow 1945, p. 124; see also
Pudovkin, ‘Petersburg . . . Petrograd . . . Leningrad’, Sovetskoe kino 2, 1927,
p. 6; see also ‘Repertkom tov. Mordvinkinu’, Lunacharskii o kino, Moscow
1963, p. 272
29 qu. Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc, Paris 1965, p. 48; see also David Bordwell,
‘The Nature of the Filmic Image’, French Impressionist Cinema, New York
1980
30 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard Taylor, London 1988, p. 57; see
also ‘Literarura i kinematograf’, Veshch’-Gegenstand-Objet 1–2, Berlin 1922,
p. 11, for an earlier reference to Delluc
31 see Eisenstein, ‘O pozitsii Bela Balasha’ [1926], FF, p. 145
32 Pudovkin, ‘Fotogeniia’, Kino-zhurnal ARK 4–5 (1925), pp. 9–10
33 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. p. 56
34 Pudovkin, ‘Plasticheskii material’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 64
35 Golovnia, p. 123; Pudovkin’s sketches in the margins of his own shooting
script show what care he and Golovnia took: for instance, as the small boy
runs down the ﬁeld to the father and son, the furrows are deliberately
shown curved rather than straight: Pudovkin archive, Zarkhi scenario
‘Peterburg . . . Petrograd . . . Leningrad’, 2060/1/1, shots 58–64. For the
particular part played by the Volga region in Revolution, see Orlando
Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, Oxford 1989, p. 21
36 Pudovkin, ‘Fotogeniia’, p. 9
37 Ronald Levaco, ed. Kuleshov on Film, Berkeley 1974, p. 7
38 Pudovkin, ‘Tema’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 56
39 Pudovkin, ‘Siuzhetnoe oformlenie temy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 61
40 Pudovkin, ‘Tekhnika rezhisserskoi raboty’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I,
p. 111
41 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy obrabotki materiala’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 69
42 VGIK Kabinet Kinovedenia, Mat’; see also Iezuitov: Pudovkin, Moscow
1937 and Jean and Luda Schnitzer: Poudovkine, Paris 1966
43 Pudovkin, ‘Nadpis’’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 67
44 Pudovkin, ‘Nadpis’’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 66
45 Pudovkin, ‘Siuzhetnoe oformlenie temy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 61; see also
Vance Kepley Jr., ‘Pudovkin and the Classical Hollywood Tradition’, Wide
Angle 7.3 (1985) and ‘ ‘‘Intolerance’’ and the Soviets’ Wide Angle 3.1 (1979)
46 Fedor Dostoevskii, Notes from Underground [1864], tr. David Magarshack,
Harmondsworth 1972, p. 17
47 qu. Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal
Arts, Stanford 1997, p. 103
48 Aleksandr Pushkin, Mednyi vsadnik [1833], London 1961
108 Vsevolod Pudovkin
49 Golovnia, p. 123
50 Yuri Tsivian, Early Film in Russia and its Cultural Reception, London 1994,
p. 52
51 Hugo Mu¨nsterberg, Psychology of the Photoplay [1916], New York, 1970; a
contrary, non-neutral effect was produced when ﬁlms were shown at incorrect
projection speeds, for instance, the notorious case of the ﬁrst London
screening of The Battleship Potemkin, synchronised to Meisel’s score,
rendered the rising lions sequence ridiculous
52 Pudovkin, ‘Asinkhronnost’ kak printsip zvukovogo kino’ [1934], SS I, p.
159; Andrey Tarkovsky suggested that succumbing to the temporal
substance of a ﬁlm was the primary phenomenal attraction of the experience;
see Sculpting in Time, London 1986
53 Pudovkin, ‘O montazhnom ritme’, SS II, p. 270; for Vertov’s disparaging
view of the same ﬁlm see ‘Speech to the First All-Union Conference on
Sound Cinema’, (1930) FF , pp. 301–302
54 Pudovkin, Film Technique, tr. Montagu, New York 1949, p. xv; also ‘Predislovie’,
SS I
55 see Joseph and Barbara Anderson, ‘Motion Perception in Picture’ in eds.
de Lauretis and Heath, The Cinematic Apparatus, London 1980 also Joseph
Anderson, The Reality of Illusion, Carbondale 1996
56 Be´la Bala´zs, Theory of the Film, London 1952, p. 61
57 The phi phenomenon depends on critical intervals between images shown;
see Richard Gregory, Eye and Mind and Visual Perception, also Ernst
Gombrich, Art and Illusion, London 1977, p. 260
58 see Vlada Petric´, Constructivism in Film, Cambridge 1987, p. 139
59 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World [1926], Harmondsworth 1982, p.
82; the cruiser ‘Aurora’ is now open as a museum, telling the story of the
ship on the night of 24/25 October 1917 and describing conditions on the
ship for the ofﬁcers and men; the tone of John Reed’s account suggests
well the mythical status enjoyed by the ship, although some historians
doubt the authenticity of the current exhibit. The Museum of the Revolution
in Moscow also has memorabilia from the ship, including sailors’ hat
bands!
60 RGALI, 2060/1/151, letter 28 February 1944
61 Vance Kepley Jr., ‘Pudovkin and the Classical Hollywood Tradition’, Wide
Angle 7.3 (1985) p. 59
62 Pudovkin: ‘Material kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 100
63 Peter Dart, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York 1974, p. 103
64 a photograph in RGALI, 2060/1/46, shows the camera crew intrepidly
perched on a platform atop the cathedral
65 for a discussion of Mitrokhin’s On the Petrograd Side (1925) and much else,
see Kaganov, p. 146
66 Andrei Belyi, Petersburg [1913], tr. Cournos, London 1960, p. 251
67 Bala´zs, p. 111
68 Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks II, London 1992, p.
107: Kushner’s 1928 challenge to Rodchenko; Kuleshov’s disagreement
The End of St. Petersburg 109
with Rodchenko did not prevent their working together successfully, on
The Female Journalist, for instance.
69 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 57
70 Levaco, p. 82
71 see, for a useful discussion, Linda Williams, ed. Viewing Positions, New
Brunswick, 1995
72 sometimes foreground architecture was darkened and backgrounds
lightened, in imitation of Danish practice; see Yuri Tsivian, ‘Cutting and
framing in Bauer’s and Kuleshov’s Films’ Kintop 1 (1993) pp. 103–113 and
his comparison of Bauer and Hofer in Thomas Elsaesser and Michael
Wedel, eds. A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, Amsterdam 1996
73 Levaco, pp. 73–74, on the sets for The Female Journalist conceived as a
‘shot sign’
74 Dart, p. 110
75 an interesting location photo of the lighting set-up for the ﬁnal shot of the
mother’s face in the Winter Palace, on the Jericho staircase, conﬁrms my
suspicion that such close-ups were re-rigged: see RGALI 2060/1/48
76 Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology, London 1992, p. 192
77 ‘Against the Synthetic Portrait’, in John E. Bowlt, ed. Russian Art of the
Avant-Garde, London 1988
78 Noe¨l Burch, Theory of Film Practice, London 1973, pp. 32–50
79 see The Soviet Political Poster, Lenin Library Collection, Moscow 1984
80 Pudovkin, ‘Vremia krupnym planom’, Proletarskoe kino 1, 1932, p. 30
81 Pudovkin, ‘Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie’, Kinorezhisser i kino material, SS I, p.
120
82 Pudovkin, ‘Vremia krupnym planom’, Proletarskoe kino 1, 1932, p. 32
83 Louis Delluc, Cine´ma et cie, [1919], Paris 1965, p. 103
84 Pudovkin, Film Technique, New York 1949, p. 182
85 Andre´ Bazin, What is Cinema? tr. Gray, Berkeley 1967, p. 29
86 ‘Architecture and Montage’ in Eisenstein, Selected Works II, ed. Richard
Taylor, London 1991
87 for a discussion of early tracking see Tsivian, Early Cinema, pp. 205–207
and Tsivian and Cherchi Usai, Silent Witnesses, London 1989
88 Pudovkin, ‘Prosteishie spetsial’nye priemy s’emki’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 67
89 Golovnia, p. 124
90 Golovnia, p. 125
91 Pudovkin, ‘Ustanovka ritma ﬁl’my’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 116
110 Vsevolod Pudovkin
5. Storm over Asia
Typologies
An impetus towards the subdivision of the entire spread of society into
discretely differentiated groupings was derived in large part from the
taxonomy of nineteenth century natural history (see chapter two,
above). However, even Darwin cautioned that the term ‘species’ was
fundamentally ‘arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience’, and that
his conceptual model was no more than provisional.1
The ideological
imperative to found a vision of society on a scientiﬁcally authorised
model was made manifest in literature and the visual arts. The theme
of ‘Darwinism and Marxism’ was present in all academic programmes
of the Commissariat of Enlightenment: this ‘gave the progressive
secondary school teacher the chance to work on the formation of a
materialist world-view in his pupils, to inculcate scientiﬁc-atheistic
views of the world, and to make them active transformers of nature’.2
In Soviet practice speciﬁcally it found equivalence in a determinedly
politicised vision of history, embracing the past and the future.
Plekhanov, as founding father of Russian Marxism and himself greatly
inﬂuenced by Darwin, declared the general agenda in 1898:
At the present time, human nature can no longer be regarded as the
ﬁnal and most general cause of historical progress: if it is a constant,
then it cannot explain the extremely changeable course of
history; if it is changeable, then obviously its changes are themselves
determined by historical progress. At the present time we must
regard the development of productive forces as the ﬁnal and most
general cause of historical progress of mankind and it is these productive
forces that determine consecutive changes in the social
relations of men . . . history is made by the social man, who is its
sole ‘factor’.3
In Soviet ﬁlm, the impetus is systematically doubled and bi-focal in
orientation: ﬁrstly, it concentrates essential traits and attributes which
tend to distinguish individual characters one from another; secondly, in
the identiﬁcation of particular interest groups in the audience such that
characters can be constructed to agitational and didactic (and entertaining)
effect.4
In Storm over Asia (The Heir to Genghis Khan) [Potomok Chingiskhana,1928],
an old Mongolian lies dying. Prayers are offered by a
lama. The son, Bair, is told to sell a rare and wonderful fox fur. This
pelt, advises his father, will fetch enough money to keep them for the
winter. The lama, catching sight of the fur, demands a higher price for
his services, but Bair sees him off and in the tussle an amulet is
dropped. Bair takes the amulet and goes to market. Bair is offered far
less than the true price for the pelt but the merchant, Hughes, insists
that he accept his price. Bair becomes angry and a ﬁght breaks out in
which a white man is injured. In retaliation for the shedding of one
man’s blood, troops are despatched to pillage the native encampments
and punish the whole population. Bair is urged to ﬂee for his safety.
‘Go to the Russians, they are kind and strong’. An intertitle interjects
to locate the action in 1920, on the Eastern front between the partisans
and the White Russians (supported by American and European battalions
and services). Bair then encounters a partisan and a soldier
ﬁghting on a cliff edge. The soldier falls, but Bair holds the partisan
fast. He is thanked as a friend. Other troops are heard advancing and
Bair and the Russian needs must escape. Another partisan arrives, at
the gallop. ‘What are you waiting for?’, cries this partisan and Bair
leaps behind the saddle. Bair is then invited into the partisans’ camp.
There are old and young men, of various origins in the new Soviet
Empire. A fellow Mongolian translates for Bair. Bair’s eyes widen as
he looks across at the partisan who saved him: in the depths of an
engrossing fur coat, a child is being suckled. Bair had not realised that
Daria, his saviour, was a woman. Another woman, with plaited braids,
also with a young child, is shown sharing in the group’s amusement at
Bair’s surprise. The Russian is now brought in on his death bier. He,
the commander of the group, calmly and stoically utters his ﬁnal
words. ‘Listen to Moscow’, translates the Mongolian, ‘that’s where
112 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Lenin lives’, he explains. ‘Moscow . . . Lenin’ are to become Bair’s
talisman in place of the monk’s amulet which he carries. The sequence
ends with a held shot of a primed gun mounted silhouetted against sky
and a distant longshot of the Kremlin against a setting sun.
Although they are all applied to a common purpose, there are a
number of typological strategies at work in this sequence and in Storm
over Asia as a whole. Typiﬁcation is used as a means of registering a
wide sweep of individuals and activities. Broadly speaking, inclusivity
of range is a deﬁning function of realism in art, as is extensivity in its
historical context: realism is deﬁned in the perceived extension of
preceding conventional limits. In Soviet ﬁlms of the 1920s, the representation
of characters is often adopted from (or at least shared with)
reputable and approved novels, from Gogol or Gorky for instance. My
Universities gives a description which beﬁts Bair: ‘His head was shaven
Tartar fashion and he seemed to be tightly sewn up in his grey Cossack
jacket which was hooked right up to his chin’.5
Pudovkin’s The Mother
inherits from the Gorky original a range of typical individuals amongst
the activists: intellectuals, well-bred young women (with portfolio),
peasants of Good Soul6
(see chapter three, above). The typological
model was authorised not only for representation to the native
audience, it had also been the chosen form of address of the nascent
Soviet republic when represented abroad. In 1918, the delegation sent
to peace talks in Brest-Litovsk contained several Russians, an
Armenian, two Jews, a woman revolutionary, an old soldier and a
rough-hewn worker. ‘To complete the sociological mosaic of the
worker-peasant state, they picked up on their way to the station in
Petrograd a peasant from the streets and pressed him into service as
the embodiment of the People’.7
Political posters of the 1920s and
early 1930s similarly show a range of types.
Judith Mayne has rightly observed the importance of ‘the Woman
Question’ to the Soviets as an aspect of social egalitarianism and draws
attention to the new equality instituted in state beneﬁts, rights in
marriage and education. She construes the representation of women in
Soviet ﬁlms as ‘problematical’.8
The social enfranchising of women is
in some sense shown to have been earned by their active part in the
revolutionary struggle, as is demonstrated in such ﬁgures as the
shop-girl in The New Babylon [Novyi Vavilon, 1929], Daria in Storm
over Asia, the Red partisan in Protazanov’s The Forty-First [Sorok
pervyi, 1927] and, later, the girl gunner and later nurse, Mashenka, in
Storm over Asia 113
Pudovkin’s A Simple Case [Prostoi sluchai, 1932] and in the Vasilievs’
Chapaev [1934]. This acknowledgement in ﬁlm was predated by the
appearance of ‘the new Soviet woman’ in periodicals, in the guise of
‘nurse, political leader in the army, even as combat soldier’:
She was modest, ﬁrm, dedicated, sympathetic, courageous, bold,
hard-working, energetic and often young, gave no thought to her
personal welfare and could leave her children, although with regret,
if she was needed at the front; she could put up with physical hardship,
face combat and torture if captured and even endure death,
believing that her sacriﬁce had contributed to the building of a better
world.9
These ﬁlms and periodicals also engage with campaigns for the further
politicisation of women, but as women ﬁghting for society rather than
on issues exclusively of interest to women. Figures such as Daria were
in some measure drawn from life, but more signiﬁcantly were intended
as an inspirational ideal for proletarian women, whom the Party
leaders believed to be inherently conservative.
The Party leaders insisted that agitation among women must do
nothing to rouse ‘feminist’ attitudes, which meant that such agitation
must emphasise women’s responsibilities to the ‘general revolutionary
cause’ . . . women were to be persuaded to work for the
good of all and to pursue their own special interests only to advance
the revolution.10
The model is aspirational and utopian. True, these ﬁgures can be
deemed to represent more of an idealised archetype than a statistical
mean or abstract average, but I think that Mayne’s complaint that none
of these women are ‘real ﬂesh and blood’ fails to acknowledge the
stylistic conventions which govern the representation of all the
individual types in these ﬁlms. I think also that she posits a notion of
spectatorship which consists in matching a particular individual
character against the vagaries of personal experience: mis-match ﬁnds
the characters defaulting. Such a notion is itself not unproblematical.
The mass address of early Soviet ﬁlms is formed inclusively in the
accumulation of a number of distinct characters rather than in an
attempt to construct an holistic amalgam concurring with and infallibly
114 Vsevolod Pudovkin
reproducing a full encounter with a living individual in everyday life,
nor, as Eisenstein asserted, in an attempt to construct ‘the objective coordination
of sign and essence’. Nevertheless, such criticisms were
equally levelled by contemporaneous Soviet audiences and the conventions
shifted accordingly. The effect of the sign upon the audience is
prioritised over its verisimilitude.
Conversely, Storm over Asia attaches itself ﬁrmly to the reality of
everyday experience in its capacity as an anthropological and envirnmental
document. Like Little Red Devils [Krasnye d’’iavoliata, 1923],
Vertov’s earlier One Sixth of the World [Shestaia chast’ mira, 1926] or
later Three Songs for Lenin [Tre pesni o Lenine, 1934], Storm serves to
demonstrate to its Soviet viewers the geographical extent of the Soviet
empire and its ethnic inclusivity. It was not merely a matter of a correspondent
submitting copy from ‘the far ﬂung outskirts’ to the centre:
ﬁlms were carried by train, boat and camel into the regions in an
attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible, ‘acquainting people
of various districts with each other’s mode of life, habits and dress’.11
The journals and contemporary commentators report the activities of
regional studios and of Russian companies in the regions: Goskino and
Mezhrabpom-Rus’ both made ﬁlms in the Caucasus, Proletkino in
Turkestan; there were studios in the Ukraine, in Georgia, in Uzbekistan
and Tatkino made ﬁlms with Tartar subtitles;12
Kino-zhurnal ARK
discusses the activities of Bukhkino. One Sixth and Shub’s The Fall of
the Romanovs had shown Caucasians, Arabs, Negroes and Asiatics. The
distribution of ﬁlms throughout the Union was especially important
given that, as late as 1927, more than 98 per cent of the peasantry was
still living on small holdings, and amongst the peasantry especially,
illiteracy was common.13
Part of the appeal of Storm’s scenario for Pudovkin and Golovnia
was in the opportunity it presented to work away from the constraints
of the studio, working with living material on location, recoding the
exotic landscape and culture of the Buriat-Mongolian Republic.14
Indeed, avant-garde and purist critics censured them for being entirely
enthralled by their subject matter and indulgent towards its aesthetic
and decorative (and commercial) possibilities:
Pudovkin was deﬁnitely rejected and excommunicated by . . . a
group of theoreticians, partisans of montage cinema, ‘grand’ and
‘pure’. Storm over Asia was considered as regressive, contrary to the
Storm over Asia 115
general direction of cinema, submissive to its subject and to mere
chances of fortune, and other reprehensible things . . . there was a
conspiracy of silence around this ﬁlm.15
Reviewing the ﬁlm for Izvestiia, Nikolai Osinsky complains that the
‘symbolic’ ending of the ﬁlm (umpteen billy cans are rolled over the
steppes by a tempest, followed by soldiers’ caps, followed by soldiers
themselves, unable to stand against the force of the storm, gusting and
billowing a thousand leaves against them) was open to misinterpretation
and that both ending and beginning of the ﬁlm were too drawn
out; he even suggests (horror of horrors) that the scene of Bair’s release
is slightly reminiscent of such scenes in mild comedies made before the
revolution. Others, more sympathetic and tolerant, perhaps, have said
that this ﬁlm suited Pudovkin’s temperament well.16
Certainly, the
original 1928 copy of the ﬁlm includes considerably more peripheral,
establishing travelogue footage of the Mongolians at market than
survives in the later version, showing sword dancers and acrobats,
different market stalls and Mongolians jostling with one another to see
and hear a record player. Equally, the technical difﬁculties of ﬁlming in
these conditions (like those of Flaherty’s pioneering expeditions into
the North) are logged in the manner of an explorer overcoming an
obstacle to his path. Golovnia recalls:
The feast of Tzai did not exist in the original scenario any more
than the other scenes which resulted from our contacts with the
actual life of the monasteries, which still existed there at that time
and made a great impression upon us . . . The feast of Tzai is always
celebrated on a certain date. At Achirov’s request the Bog Do Lama
. . . agreed to bring forward the date of the festival especially so that
we could ﬁlm it. But the performance of the ceremony could not be
modiﬁed: the ritual had to be strictly followed, independent of the
requirements of the ﬁlming. They paid absolutely no attention to us
and of course there could be no retakes. I was just shown the plan
of the ceremony in advance – what people would dance when,
where etc . . . Unhappily at this time there were no hand cameras. In
order to shoot all this I had a harness which held the camera on my
chest. It was an old Debrie; and the motor gave up the ghost at
once so I had to operate it manually, turning the handle and all the
time running right and left, 5,000 metres of ﬁlm.17
116 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Film expeditions to Central Asia produced good copy for the journals.
In the year prior to Golovnia’s expedition (covered by Sovetskii ekran
over several weeks), Sovetskoe kino included the article ‘With a cinecamera
in the Buriat’ and ‘Some friendly advice about world travel’,
suitably illustrated with pictures of cameramen trekking for footage.
The recording of Mongolian culture was not a self-sufﬁcient enterprise,
in spite of appearances. It roots Bair in a particular environment
and social organisation and serves to amplify a larger theme. Diversity
and extensiveness are employed to demonstrate a transcendent
humanism of body and spirit and to identify this with a speciﬁc
ideology. ‘All the emotions which we revolutionists, at the present time,
feel apprehensive of naming’, says Trotsky in 1924, ‘such as disinterested
friendship, love for ones neighbour, sympathy, will be the
mighty ringing chords of socialist poetry’.18
Fraternal love is similarly
represented by Gorky and Lunacharsky, in quasi cultist terms as a
putative substitute for religion: ‘We will kindle a new sun . . . a new life
comes into being born of the children’s love for the entire world’.19
‘Take my hat, my mittens’ say Bair’s fellow trappers as he bids them
farewell. Bair’s help is offered to the partisan ﬁghting the soldier on the
basis of an enemy’s enemy being a friend. Bair warms to the partisans
because they likewise show him familiar kindness: this is a human
transaction which transcends the barriers of language. In contrast, an
inhumane exchange is demanded by the representatives of an oppositional
ideology, the occupying forces. Want of humanity is indicated in
the unequal exchange of blood – the shedding of one white man’s
blood demands an inordinate forfeit, a reparation of enormous
suffering on the part of the native population (in seizing their cattle, a
livelihood is denied them). In the sonorised version the theme is ampliﬁed
further: blood is discriminately valued in the discussion between
the white doctor and nurse: ‘a white man’s blood for him?’, queries the
nurse attending to Bair, the wounded Mongolian trapper; ‘He has to
live’, replies the doctor, referring to Bair, the prince of ancient lineage.
In spite of the overlaying of different typological strategies in Storm
over Asia, these remain clearly organised and correctly prioritised. Class
type is favoured over national type in the identiﬁcation of characters’
interests. A distinction is made between the British foot-soldiers and
their commanding ofﬁcers. Decking out the mess-hall with with ﬂags
and tassels in readiness for the treaty-signing, Ronald complains:
‘What’s all the fuss about?’; ‘It’s for that prince they nearly shot’, says
Storm over Asia 117
his fellow rustic. Osip Brik, Pudovkin’s scenarist, says that the episode
of Bair’s execution is drawn out as a matter of dramatic necessity
(critics said that it was drawn out too long).20
It is intercut with the
parallel action of the deciphering of the amulet fragment, such that the
discovery of Bair’s supposed identity and the moment of his supposed
execution occur together.21
However, the suspense is not used gratuitously,
merely to tantalise the audience. The episode is crucial to
Pudovkin’s thematic purpose. Grudgingly, Ronald goes out to perform
the command to execute Bair. He procrastinates, slowly putting on his
jacket, then his coat, then turning up the coat collar. Another soldier
hides behind a penny magazine: he wants no part in this affair either.
Ronald dithers over selecting a riﬂe, then decides to take a pistol too.
On the way, he makes a detour around the edge of a large puddle,
which Bair splashes through the middle of regardless. He then ﬁnds
further ploys to postpone the shooting, ﬁlling a pipe for himself. Then
he laboriously tears off a strip of paper and rolls a cigarette for Bair
from his own pouch. He moves to untie Bair’s hands, so that he can
smoke it. But this is no routine enactment of a prisoner’s ‘one last
request’: Bair serenely, graciously, declines to smoke, he is already
resigned to his fate. Ronald is angered I would suggest, less by the rejection
of a gift kindly intended than by Bair’s dispassionate disengagement
from the situation; in refusing to save himself, even momentarily,
Bair equally denies Ronald a momentary stay of execution from the
task he dreads to perform. Bair is not complicit in the act of vengeance.
The refusal of the comradely offer of the cigarette, albeit benignly
intended, tacitly witholds from Ronald any easing of his own
conscience.
A similar distinction is made between the Mongolian priests and the
tribesmen who call upon their services. While the tribesmen may be
held to be the innocent victims of superstition, their fears are deviously
preyed upon by the priest at the old man’s bedside: ‘the gods demand a
great sacriﬁce’, he says. As he sways with the incantation of the
prayers, his eyes ﬂash open at the mention of the valuable fur,
suggesting that his mind is really occupied with more worldly concerns
and that his religion is sham. Hughes is similarly not to be trusted: the
trappers bite the coins he throws to them to test and value their metal.
Mercantile, ecclesiastic and military concerns are shown to be in
cahoots with one another in their exploitation and oppression of the
Mongolians, in ‘THE INTERESTS OF CAPITAL’, reads a title.
118 Vsevolod Pudovkin
In 1922, a decree had been passed through the Commissariat for
Enlightenment requiring the screening of ‘ﬁlms of speciﬁc propaganda
content’ alongside the entertainment pictures, intended for amusement
and income. Films ‘from the life of peoples of all countries’ were to
include, it was suggested, such material as the colonial policy of
England in India. Pravda praises Pudovkin’s ﬁlm for its searing
portrayal of the whites, the traders and the occupying forces intent
upon the exploitation of the territory.22
It is signiﬁcant that in a ﬁlm of
1928 the opposition is identiﬁed with imperialism (however insidious),
feudalism and the intervention of foreign capital. No claim is made on
behalf of the foreign army for support during the Civil War for the
restoration of Tsarism.23
Equally, it is historically signiﬁcant that the
focus of Storm over Asia should be symbolically centred on Moscow,
indeed the death of the partisan leader and the held silhouetted shot of
the Kremlin against a blaze of light is a structurally pivotal point in the
ﬁlm. Furthermore, in Brik’s original scenario this was splendidly reiterated
at the end of the ﬁlm, with Bair escaping on horseback and
galloping over the Mongolian steppe, through rivers and over
mountains; at last a mirage is viewed in the distance and as Bair draws
nearer it is seen to be a town . . . the radiant city of Moscow.24
Marx
had indicated that communist revolution would occur worldwide.
Informed by the Soviet experience, and the absence of revolution
elsewhere, Lenin’s revisions to this proposition in the early 1920s (thereafter
adopted by Stalin) suggested that Communism was immediately
possible or necessary within this single state. Under these circumstances,
I would suggest, the appeal of Storm over Asia to foreign
audiences is less an urge towards universal uprising and more a
summons for support for the only state in which a revolution had been
magniﬁcently achieved. It is also an answer to fears on the part of
individual nationalities of aggressive russiﬁcation.25
There is an open
invitation to honour Bair’s talisman, ‘Lenin . . . Moscow . . . go to the
Russians, they are good and strong’. In spite of the reach of the ﬁlm to
represent the periphery of the union (‘far ﬂung on the outskirts. . .’) the
partisans’ attention is centralised.
Films of the earlier 1920s tended to use static types to represent
character, these sometimes adopted from visual forms suited to a broad
and general and immediate address, for instance posters, chap-books
and street festivals. The depiction of Kerensky in October and The End
of St. Petersburg as vain and foppish, the darling of the bourgeoisie
Storm over Asia 119
applauding him from the gallery, is predated by similar representations
in Evreinov’s The Storming of the Winter Palace [1920], the verses of
Mayakovsky and elsewhere.26
In November 1918, Meyerhold had
staged Mayakovsky’s spectatcular Mystery Bouffe, in which a world is
divided into two camps, workers and non-workers. Mayakovsky did
not depict more than a single interest in each camp, and the
bourgeoisie was identiﬁed with tsarism. When the bourgeois opt for a
republic it is of no effect for the workers: ‘the republic is the same old
tsar, just with a hundred mouths’.27
Such types are specially clearly
rendered in the puppet animations of Ptushko and Medvedkin
and in Vertov’s graphic animation Soviet Toys [Sovetskie igrushki
1924].28
Trauberg identiﬁes the hero, the inge´nue, the coquette and the
vamp as types identiﬁable in American cinema; Sovetskii ekran delineates
a few standard comic types in Soviet ﬁlm (including the alcoholic,
the hooligan, the kulak, the bureaucrat and the female degenerate
complete with powder puff).29
In The Mother and The End of St Petersburg
the lorgnette is a typical attribute of bourgeois women; in The
New Babylon the capitalist is denoted by the typical attribute of a shiny
top-hat. It adopts the atmosphere of a carnival by placing its principal
ﬁgures close to the camera with a dancing, swirling throng as a
backdrop. Trauberg and Kozintsev researched Daumier’s caricatures
for their presentation of the Paris commune and Pudovkin’s portrayal
Deni poster, 1918
120 Vsevolod Pudovkin
in his ﬁlm of a shop assistant seems to owe much to Zola’s Au bonheur
des dames (1883).30
However, while the oppositional types are ﬂatly portrayed in poster
fashion, meanwhile the character of the shop-girl at the centre of the
story changes with the growing awareness of her responsibilities to her
class. Once a timorous, set-upon creature, like Bair a political naif, she
is later seen armed and mounting the barricade, like Daria, an active
partisan. The bourgeois and aristocratic types serve merely as functionaries
to the incidental articulation of this process. Indeed, their
obligation to behave according to type, apparently oblivious and
uncomprehending of the historic necessity which threatens to shatter
their false security, is itself used as an object for satiric comment: they
select a site for a feˆte-champeˆtre overlooking the city, affording a good
prospect of the ﬁre-works below; like the factory owner in The Mother
and the gallery in The End of St. Petersburg, they are removed from the
fray, decadently indulgent and blissfully ignorant of their impending
extinction.
In Storm over Asia the opposition is similarly shown to be ignorant
but here the commentary is, I would suggest, more subtle, more ironic
than satiric and is effected within the enactment of the narrative rather
than presumed in the audience’s ready recognition of familiar types.
The opposition, priestly and secular, is shown to be arrogant in its
belief that it can manipulate Bair to its own ends. Although parallel
cutting draws comparisons between the superﬁcial gloss of both
systems (the preening of the envoy and his consort; the dressing and
polishing of the temple) the pomp and circumstance is equally
undercut by the child-god, the medium of the protective deities (after
all, really a child and less of a god) laughing at the expense of the
British ofﬁcer as he bows his shiny bald pate.31
It is suggested that the
proposed alliance of the priestly and secular interests is prompted by
mutual self-interest rather than by understanding: the irony of a British
ofﬁcer pinning militaristic medals on the robes of paciﬁst Buddhist
monks passes unacknowledged by either party. The society women are
ignorant of the true majesty and power of the tribal inheritance borne
by Bair (actual and imagined), insulting its dignity by passing
comment on the ceremonial robes as though he were a ﬁgure merely
affected to delight the eye. The sense of something at work more
ponderous than broad satire is, I think, abetted by Bair’s own sclerotic
passivity. Whereas one feels encouraged to laugh spontaneously with
Storm over Asia 121
Bair at his ingenuous surprise in discovering Daria, one feels in the
mounting tension that the later jokes are misplaced and at his expense.
Mythology and Ethnography
In the fuzzy mythology of the late twentieth century, Genghis Khan is
surely a by-word in the West for absolute autocratic rule and ruthless
barbarity. It seems worth indicating alternative representations which
suggest that this is not an image universally nor historically consistently
sustained. At different times and under different circumstances the
image has been constructed otherwise. In the context of Storm over Asia
how, one may ask, does the Tartar become yoked to a distinctively
optimistic and celebratory Soviet view of the future? How did Bair the
Mongolian ﬁgure for his audience in the new art described by Trotsky,
‘incompatible with pessimism, with scepticism and with all other forms
of spiritual collapse . . . ﬁlled with a limitless creative faith . . .’?32
In popular literature and song before the Revolution, says Jeffrey
Brooks, the Tartars were unﬂatteringly presented as the most dangerous
and terrible of peoples within the Empire, typically described in Suvorov’s
history of the Russian Empire: ‘Out of the Asiatic steppe there
surged into Russia the Tartars . . . These people were terrible; they were
ferocious in appearance and pitied no-one. Neither rivers nor
mountains nor dark forests could stop them’.33
The prevailing myth is
attributed by Charles Halperin to the Westernising of Russia initiated
by Peter the Great. This ‘introduced European feelings of superiority
into eighteenth century Russian historiography and racist and colonialist
ideologies into nineteenth-century Rusian historical writings.
Imperial Russian policy towards minorities at the turn of the twentieth
century engendered rabid chauvinism’.34
The suggestion that ‘twas not
ever thus and that a positive view of the Khans could be construed as
the retrieval of a pre-Tsarist historiography is borne out by the account
in Marco Polo’s The Travels. This refers to the founder of the Mongolian
Empire as the ‘good Chingiz Khan’, the ﬁrst to hold lordship and
to conquer half the world, ‘a brave and prudent ruler’, tolerant of all
religions:
Now it happened in the year of Christ’s incarnation 1187 that the
Tartars chose a king to reign over them whose name in their language
was Chingiz Khan, a man of great ability and wisdom, a
122 Vsevolod Pudovkin
gifted orator and a brilliant soldier. After his election, all the Tartars
in the world, dispersed as they were among various foreign countries,
came to him and acknowledged his sovereignty. And he exercised
it well and honourably, so that he was loved and honoured not
as a lord but as a god . . . The number of Tartars who rallied round
him was past belief. When Chingiz Khan saw what a following he
had, he equipped them with bows and their other customary
weapons and embarked on a career of conquest. And I assure you
that they conquered no less than eight provinces. And this was quite
natural; for at that time the lands and provinces in these parts were
either ruled by popular government or each had its own king and
lord so that lacking mutual union they could not individually resist
such a multitude. He did not harm the inhabitants or despoil them
of their goods, but led them along with him to conquer other
nations . . . And those he had conquered, when they saw his good
government and gracious bearing, asked nothing better than to join
his following.35
Halperin suggests further that Mongolian rule exerted less impact on
the Russian peasantry than on the aristocracy, pressed into slavery, he
suggests that it was no worse than life under the warring princely
factions who seized power after the disintegration of the empire. I
should like to suggest that the ﬁlm Storm over Asia engages with the
revisionism of contemporaneous Eurasianist intellectuals, attempting to
counter the prejudices of their Petrine precursors.36
Dmitri and
Vladimir Shlapentokh say that the advocates of Eurasianism praised
Genghis Khan as the founder of the great Eurasian empire, which, in
their view, preceded Imperial Russia and the USSR. The great Khan
was extolled for his opposition to the West and his antipathy towards
individualism and the idea of private property.37
In Storm over Asia (The Heir to Genghis Khan), the potency of the
myth is acknowledged both in the behaviour of characters in the ﬁlm
and in its address: the British generals believe that they will be able to
secure suzerainty and legitimise their power over the people through
the authority of the Khan’s lineage, in the individual agency of the
strapped and bound puppet over whom they hold mastery. Bair,
however, is not so much a false Khan as the true avenger of his people.
Similar exemplary ﬁgures were adopted by Mardzhanov’s Law and
Duty [Zakon i dolg,1927], which, based on Stefan Zweig’s Amok, tells
Storm over Asia 123
of attempted British colonial expansion in the Caucasus, by Tarich’s
The Revolt in Kazan [Bulat Batyr, 1928], which celebrates the
martyrdom of a Tartar leader who aided peasants in their revolt
against the Empress Catherine II, and Mikhin’s Abrek Zaur (discussed
by Sovetskii ekran). The ﬁnal heroic frames of Storm, not in the original
Brik scenario but praised by Montagu as ‘a pictorial resolution of a
metaphor’, show Bair multiplied many times over, a veritable Mongolian
horde charging across the steppes. The increasing turbulence of the
elements, throughout the ﬁlm, culminate in the ﬁnal frames. Bair as a
type representative of his people is shown as a ‘world historical individual’
equivalent in his seizure of the force of the moment to the Great
Khan himself. Storm uses popular mythology to promote an antipopularist
historical type, Plekhanov’s type of ‘social man . . . who
makes history’.
The translation of a raping and pillaging brigand into a positive
ﬁgure of the revolution is not without precedent and parallel in Soviet
popular culture. Stenka Razin was similarly a rebel chief famous in
folk-lore and song and familiar in ‘lubok’ illustrations. He was the
subject of one of the most successful pre-Revolutionary ﬁlms, the ﬁrst
(made by Romashkov in 1908), appeared in a ballet by Alexander
Gorsky, a Kashensky verse-play and numerous mass spectacles staged
in the years following the revolution.38
According to Jay Leyda a
scenario about Stenka Razin was prepared by no less a luminary than
Maxim Gorky, intended for direction by Protazanov in 1927, and in
1938 Olga Preobrazhenskaia responded to ‘The Historical Theme in
Cinema’ with the same subject.39
Jeffrey Brooks gives examples from
Russian ‘byliny’ of other bandits, heroes ‘whose adventures conformed
both to the peasants’ long struggle for freedom and to a traditional
view on man’s helplessness before the forces of whimsical nature’.
Popular serials told the stories of the bandits Churkin, Anton Krechet
and Buslaevich.40
Equally, one might ﬁnd mythical sources for Bair in the dual cults of
Russian Tsardom: ﬁrstly, passively, as a passion bearer imitating the
holy suffering of Christ; secondly, actively, as a warrior prince (a
portent of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky).41
Here again, Brooks remarks
upon other instances of such a paradoxical conjunction: ‘Bandits were
also identiﬁed in apocalyptic dreams with the myth of the redeemer
tsar who would regain his rightful place on the throne and bring justice
and freedom’.42
The assimilation of such superﬁcially antithetical
124 Vsevolod Pudovkin
myths into Soviet narratives served to lend popular credence and
authority. Lunacharsky, Commissar for Enlightenment, seemingly
sanctioned such opportunistc translations of Christian imagery in his
Religion and Socialism (1908). Similarly, The Mother, both the Pudovkin
ﬁlm and the Gorky original, adopt Maryon myths from Russian
folk belief (the mother who lays down her life), just as certainly as
Christianity had borrowed from preceding pagan rituals and
practices;43
Vertov’s Soviet Toys pictures the Red Army as a Madonna
in Misericorda.
Both Valeri Inkizhinov (who plays Bair) and his father (who plays
the father of Bair) have faces in which their ethnic origins are readily
recognisable.44
Indeed, Golovnia says that they were members of a
tribe neighbouring the Buriat territory in which the ﬁlming took place:
‘the land of his father and his father’s fathers’, reads a subtitle. Their
features represent an appreciable mean value; they are cast for verisimilitude,
but the plastic value of their distinguishing features (broad
forehead, wide-set almond eyes, high cheekbones) are enhanced and
emphasised with make-up and lighting. In later life, the younger Inkizhinov
was cast indiscriminately in a range of Asiatic roles. There is a
tendency in literature also towards the assiduous and detailed description
of typical ethnic physiognomy. A Ukrainian is numbered amongst
Pavel’s comrades in The Mother:
Valeri Inkhizhinov as Bair, the Mongolian trapper
Storm over Asia 125
The stranger leisurely removed his short fur jacket . . . His head was
perfectly round and close-cropped, his face shaven except for a thin
moustache, the ends of which pointed downward . . . his eyes large,
grey, transparent, protuberant . . . In the entire angular, stooping
ﬁgure, with its thin legs, there was something comical, yet winning.
He was dressed in a blue shirt and dark loose trousers thrust into his
boots.45
Before the Revolution, there had been photographic catalogues
compiled of various ethnic types in the Empire and their respective
habitats, some overtly decorative in intent (for instance, Bukhar’s
Album of Views and Types of the Orenburg Region, 1872) others more
strictly scientiﬁc (for instance, Kostenkov’s The Kalmuck Steppe and its
Inhabitants, 1860).46
In the ﬁne and applied arts, at the turn of the
century, there was a fashion for the itemising of various regional differences
in physiognomy and costume. The sculptor Konenkov made a
series of ceramic portraits of the Russian people (now in the Tretiakov
Gallery); Kamensky in 1907-8 modelled ceramic ﬁgures, amongst
them a Buriat woman (now in the Moscow Museum of Decorative
and Applied Art). However, this sort of appropriate casting according
to ethnic type, as practicised by Pudovkin in Storm over Asia, should
not be confused with the term ‘typage’ as used by Eisenstein, even
though Eisenstein himself has contributed to the confusion by using
the term variously on different occasions and has since been subjected
to further re-interpretations. Eisenstein was aware of the distinction
and duly commented on Pudovkin’s idiosyncratic casting of
Inkizhinov:
Pudovkin works with actors: that is one point on which our views
differ. He is doing something very interesting: he is looking for
something between a professional actor and the people that I use in
my ﬁlms. He takes an actor like Inkizhinov and uses him once as if
he were not an actor. He lets him play a role that corresponds to his
temperament and his natural calling. He is thus at the same time an
actor and a real person: but such coincidences are rare and that is
why Pudovkin almost always uses each actor in only one ﬁlm.47
The question of typage, variously understood, as that of the actor
versus the non-actor, was commonly and vigorously debated in the ﬁlm
126 Vsevolod Pudovkin
journals.48
Jay Leyda’s note to ‘Form and Content: Practice’ says that
‘typage, as a term and as a method, might be deﬁned as ‘‘type-casting’’
of non-actors’.49
Such a practice had an ancient pedigree in the theatre
for the casting of rustic or secondary characters according to facial
physiognomy: in this tradition, Pudovkin and his assistant, Doller, cast
non-professionals to play the prison guard and the ‘babushki’
mourning the death of Vlasov in The Mother. Such casting presumes
upon a received notion of propriety, an abstracted average type to
which a living human being is found to correspond naturally as closely
as possible. This is casting for a socially amenable plausible representation
of everyday life. Whilst Pudovkin held with this requirement for
surface realism, he found that non-actors did not generally suit his
working method: contrary to the citations in some editions of Pudovkin’s
writings, Inkhizhinov, like most of his performers, was a professional,
previously for eight years a tutor in biomechanics in
Meyerhold’s workshop.50
(see chapter one, above) In Sovetskoe ekran,
Inkizhinov speaks of the rigorous training undertaken for the ﬁlm, of
the need to cast off the ‘Russian pedestrian intellectual’ and to rediscover
his Mongolian self: stripped to the waist, he proudly displays his
sportsman’s physique, the result of much running, jumping and
climbing and (under the instruction of a cavalry ofﬁcer) riding conﬁdently
without stirrups, as if born ‘in the saddle of the steppes’.51
Even the prison guard in The Mother presented problems. Pudovkin’s
account is reminiscent of the difﬁculties of working with children and
animals for The Mechanics of the Brain. He also found that actors in
conjunction with non-actors did not produce a satisfactory effect on
ﬁlm:
. . . as soon as I began to work with non-actors I immediately discovered
that they are faced with a number of difﬁculties which
threaten to destroy the precious truth of their behaviour. The unusual
surroundings, the conventional demands made by the producer, the
presence of the camera – all this puts off and creates a stiffness
which they have to be helped to overcome. Here I discovered the
decisive importance, in getting a man to behave unselfconsciously, of
a simple physical task which completely absorbs his attention and
thus frees him from stiffness. It is particularly important to make
him believe in the reality of the task he is set . . . I was taking a ‘type’
in the part of a soldier on guard at the cell where the meeting of
Storm over Asia 127
mother and son takes place. Beside the soldier I set a plate with
remains of food in which a black beetle was stuck. I had thought at
ﬁrst that the juxtaposition of the vacant face of the soldier, of
Batalov behind the bars, and of the unfortunate black beetle hopelessly
caught in the mess of porridge would give a certain symbolic
emphasis to the general atmosphere of the scene. But the ﬁgure of
the soldier taken simply as a symbol would not merge with the truth
of the scene. In order to enliven the static ﬁgure of the sentry I
suggested to the non-actor chosen for the part that he should push
the black beetle into the porridge. He became extremely interested
in this task and performed it very naturally. The result was most
successful. Not only did the soldier come alive, but the very stupidity
written on his face was transformed into action.52
Conversely, Baranovskaia says that the ‘babushki’ in The Mother were
successful simply because they were required to do no more than be
themselves, to sit ‘vacant-faced’; the middling actresses from central
casting whom Doller had auditioned initially tended to act too strenuously,
wringing their hands and so forth, and quite stole the show.53
Eisenstein’s method, in contrast, persuaded him that he could use
non-actors in major roles, even to play the character of a real human
being who had actually existed. He duly cast a non-actor who looked
like Lenin to play the lead in October [1927]. Critical and popular
opinion judged the performance a failure: ‘I . . . protest in every
possible way’, wrote Mayakovsky, ‘against the portrayal of Lenin by
various similar-looking Nikandrovs. It is disgusting to watch someone
striking attitudes like Lenin’s and making similar body movements
when . . . behind all this exterior, you can sense complete emptiness, a
complete absence of thought . . . Nikandrov is not like Lenin but like
all the statues of him’.54
Eisenstein’s notion of typage in ‘Through Theatre to Cinema’, 1934,
also refers to a highly conventionalised theatrical tradition, but which
equally employs audience expectations of a character instantly called
forth by his or her appearance.55
Such, for instance, were the seven
stock types of Commedia dell’arte validated on stage by their reference
to and interaction with one another. In the conventions of Commedia,
the mask adopted by an actor at the outset pre-supposes and proscribes
a particular range of actions.56
In this these types are static. Eisenstein
applies a similar set of conventional associations in the zoomorphic
128 Vsevolod Pudovkin
caricatures in The Strike: monkey, bulldog, fox, owl. Eisenstein makes
no claim for a direct equivalence in the everyday. These ﬁgures are
introduced ‘to create ﬁrst and foremost an impression, the subjective
impression of an observer, not the objective co-ordination of sign and
essence actually comprising character’.57
Here, he casts for effect on his
audience and not necessarily for empirical verisimilitude, he relies more
on the immediate outward appearance than a process of performance
and volunteers a distinction between type and character and person-
ality.
Pudovkin observes that professional actors can function as stereotypical
ciphers in their own right if they assume characters originating
from elsewhere, not emerging ‘organically’ from the scenario:
How is a ‘star’ made use of and made in the bourgeois world? If
an actor has been accepted by the public in some ﬁlm owing to his
manner of acting, this latter being in most cases almost a trick,
then the producing unit does all in its power to preserve, as carefully
and rigidly as possible, all those properties in the actor that
appealed to the public, and to adjust to them, by any makeshift,
any material . . . the ‘star system’ means no more than that the
director presents the ‘star’ in his given discovered form, against
some background dictated by his employers. An example of the
kind is Adolphe Menjou, who acted brilliantly under Chaplin’s
direction. In a series of further, already desperately stupid ﬁlms,
mechanically preserving unchanged the appearance and general
scheme of his behaviour, he has gradually become a less and less
interesting empty doll.58
Being and becoming
Katerina Clark identiﬁes the Marxist spontaneity/consciousness
dichotomy as it is worked out in a number of Revolutionary novels.59
Similarly, the apportioning of nature and nurture in the development of
behaviour was a long-standing subject for debate in Russian science
and literature. ‘From the standpoint of reﬂexology’, says Bekhterev,
‘man is not only a living organism but a ‘‘bio-social being’’, acting in
dependence not only on the natural but also on the social environ-
ment’.60
Especially of concern was the determination of criminality in
an individual’s actions: Bekhterev continues:
Storm over Asia 129
Let us remember . . . the unfortunate problem of absolute freedom of
will, a doctrine which has led mankind into serious errors concerning
the eradication of criminality . . . I have shown the complete
dependency of the development of criminal actions on a totality of
factors inﬂuencing the person at the moment of the crime as well as
those which have inﬂuenced him earlier, even from birth, and lastly
those which in their inﬂuence on the ancestors have determined the
conditions of the conception of pre-natal life of that person.61
What could be attributed to malicious intent (which could be
punished) and what to ignorance (which would beneﬁt from instruction)
and what to innate wickedness (for which one could but offer
prayers)? Such, for instance, is the substance of Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment and Notes from the Underground, also of Levin’s dilemma in
Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky stages such a ‘set-piece’ discussion between
Porﬁry, Raskolnikov and Razumikhin of the circumstances for
culpability and describes the conclusions of the examining magistrate
and the judges at Raskolnikov’s subsequent trial.62
In Storm over Asia,
the temperament of Bair is I suggest, material to the course of events in
the ﬁlm. In Sovetskii ekran, soon after the release of Storm, Mikhail
Devidov contributes to the then current debate about ﬁlm heroes. He
complains of heroes who are oppressed, suffering, humble about
themselves and self-sacriﬁcing: these may appeal, he says, to the high
literary tastes of the intelligentsia. Devidov heralds the new heroism of
Soviet cinema, conceived of revolutionary and creative optimism63
(see
chapter six, below).
Bair is the product of his tribal lineage and the natural environment
which supports his tribe. The original silent version of Storm is considerably
longer than the 1949 sonorised edition now commonly available
in the West.64
The opening sequences celebrate the shapes and
atmosphere of the Baikal plains, the bare landscape, long, low horizons
and rounded hills.65
The trappers of the plains are shown laboriously
trailing and stalking their prey, patiently waiting for the kill. All of this
gives the ﬁlm something of the quality of Flaherty’s Nanook, released in
Moscow in 1924. ‘The mysterious barren lands – desolate, boulderstrewn,
wind-swep, illimitable spaces which top the world’, runs the
ﬁlm’s ﬁrst title. Of Nanook the Eskimo, Flaherty said:
Here is a man who has less resources than any other man in the
130 Vsevolod Pudovkin
world. He lives in a desolation that no other . . . race could possibly
survive. His life is a constant ﬁght against starvation. Nothing
grows; he must depend utterly on what he can kill; and all this
against the most terrifying of tyrants . . . the bitter climate of the
North, the bitterest climate in the world.66
Indeed, Nanook died on an unsuccessful expedition shortly after the
ﬁlm was made. Bair’s peaceful resilience is a natural adaptive trait,
borne of the material relationship of his people with their habitat.
Tacitly an analogy is drawn between Bair as an historical type, like the
boy in St. Petersburg and the Mother, shaped by signiﬁcant events in
which they participate actively, and Bair’s character, as a product of
temperamental disposition and experience. In Marxist terms, the conditions
of production (Bair’s life as a trapper) and contending productive
forces (the sale of the fur, as the product of his labour) establish a basis
for dramatic change.
There is propaganda value in this use of passive equilibrium and
resignation. The character of Bair is constructed such that his type of
temperament lends weight to the force effecting his awakening of
conscience. In The Deserter, Pudovkin goes yet further, effecting a
political conversion in the central typical ﬁgure67
(see chapter six,
below). On the one hand, in not resisting execution, Bair may be seen
to be offering himself as a signiﬁcant sacriﬁce. I tend to think that
Bair’s discounting of his individual self, his own self effacement,
renders him less of an original hero in the popularist, Stenka Razin
mould, and serves to make the later Bair all the more potent a ﬁgure.
‘Men make history’, says Plekhanov, arguing the case for the individual,
‘and therefore the activities of individuals cannot help being
important in history’.68
Such a device is by no means peculiar to the
ideological purposes of Soviet ﬁlm in the 1920s, endeavouring to afﬁrm
and maintain the state through a founding mythology in the recent and
distant past, but it does here carry particular political and historical
force.
The evolution of the character of Bair is effected as much in
reactions to him as in his own gradual arousal to rampant anger and
indignation: Mr Hughes’ ﬂoosie (the colonel’s daughter) screams and
quivers hysterically as Bair seizes the silver fox from her neck. Indeed,
the spectators’ sense of controlled rising tension renders the ﬁnal explosive
retaliation all the more forceful and emphatic. The camera is held
Storm over Asia 131
on Bair, the anger intensiﬁes as the condemned Mongolian calls to
him: ‘save me, my brother!’. An old man chews his lip in anticipation
of an outburst when Hughes derisively throws down his pieces of silver
for the fur: Bair looks down pensively, calmly, before decisively lashing
out. Pudovkin is not, I contend, merely using the conspicuous expression
in the reaction as an external sign juxtaposed with an inexpressive
model (pace Kuleshov); Inkizhinov’s taut reserve is signiﬁcantly
psychologised. The ﬁsh from the upset aquarium slither and squirm on
the carpet around his bandaged head, as though the inner turmoil is
forcibly restrained and bound. ‘General historical circumstances are
stronger than the strongest individuals’, says Plekhanov. ‘For a great
man the general character of his epoch is ‘‘empirically given necessity’’
’:
When the consciousness of my lack of free will presents itself to me
only in the form of the complete subjective and objective impossibility
of acting differently from the way I am acting and when . . .
my actions are to me most desirable of all other possible actions,
then in my mind, necessity becomes identiﬁed with freedom and
freedom with necessity; then I am unfree only in the sense that I
cannot disturb this identity between freedom and necessity, I cannot
oppose one to the other, cannot feel restrained of necessity – But
such a lack of freedom is at the same time its fullest manifestation.69
‘Concrete potentiality’, says Luka´cs, ‘is concerned with the dialectic
between the individual’s subjectivity and objective reality. The literary
presentation of the latter thus implies a description of actual persons
inhabiting a palpable, identiﬁable world. Only in the interaction of
character and environment can the concrete potentiality of a particular
individual be singled out from the ‘bad inﬁnity’ of purely abstract
potentialities and emerge as the determining potentiality of just this
individual at just this phase of his development . . . it is just the opposition
between a man and his environment that determines the development
of his personality’.70
In Storm over Asia, not all the oppressed
choose to seize the possibility for release; some of the Mongolians are
shown serving the forces of reaction. Bair marks a particular coincidence
of circumstance.
Storm over Asia’s attachment to reality goes beyond its use of genuine
locations, native actors and real events in the recent past, (the
132 Vsevolod Pudovkin
announcement in the intertitles of dates and known incidents). The
source for Brik’s screenplay in an actual anecdote is no more than
fortuitous. Whereas Vertov ﬁnds it sufﬁcient to screen real people from
everyday experience, Eisenstein expediently uses the real features of
these individuals as a ﬁxed and given type. The evolving process of
Bair’s enlightenment during the course of the ﬁlm imitates a concept of
historical reality as process. Storm stands between the theory of the
individual in Plekhanov and the development of the theme in Luka´cs.
Bair is at once historic individual and dynamic stereotype. Bair marks
a coincidence of concurrent scientiﬁc and historical reality, but is still
made to embrace a truth at the core of a myth.
Notes
1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [1865]; for a discussion of current
thinking on taxonomy see Marc Ereshevsky, ed. The Units of Evolution,
London 1992
2 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union,
Cambridge 1979, p. 23; see also V. M. Bekhterev, General Principles of
Human Reﬂexology, tr Murphy, London 1933, p. 206: ‘In 1924 the Leningrad
Congress of Psychoneurology passed a resolution to introduce
instruction in the science of behaviour of animals and man, studied from
an objective standpoint, and the fundamental content of this science must
be the investigation of those internal (biological, physico-chemical) and
external (physical and social) factors which determine the development of
the human being and his behaviour’
3 G. V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History [1898], London 1940,
pp. 58 and 60
4 for instance, the exhaustive study by Babitsky and Rimberg of heroes and
villains in Soviet ﬁlms arrives at an unremarkable conclusion: the majority
of cinema goers (some with tickets subsidised by the Red Army) and the
majority of screen heroes, are young and male: The Soviet Film Industry,
New York 1955, pp. 230–233
5 Maxim Gorkii, My Universities, tr. R. Wilks, Harmondsworth 1979, p. 41
6 for a discussion of the new Bolshevik woman (leather belted coat and
briefcase), as featured in Pudovkin’s updated adaptation, and her male
counterpart (leather jacket and Mauser) as seen at the end of Mr West, see
Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, London 1990, p. 86 and
Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture, Cambridge 1992
7 see Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs I, London 1930, p. 33 and
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Oxford 1989, p. 131; see also
Hosking: A History, pp. 93–96, enumerating the variety of peoples in the
empire
Storm over Asia 133
8 Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question, Columbus 1989, p. 26; for her
revised views of spectatorship, see Linda Williams, ed. Viewing Positions,
New Brunswick 1995
9 Barbara Evans Clements, ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’, Gleason,
Kenez, Stites eds Bolshevik Culture, Bloomington 1985, p. 220: ‘In 1920,
66,000 women were serving in the Red Army[2%]’; see also Beatrice
Farnsworth’s contribution to the same volume and Maya Turovskaya in
Lynne Attwood, ed. Red Women on the Silver Screen, London 1993
10 Evans Clements: ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’, p. 225
11 Jay Leyda, Kino, London 1960, p. 138, qu Huntley Carter
12 Rene´ Marchand and Pierre Weinstein, Le Cine´ma, Paris 1927, pp. 64, 79
and 118
13 Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks II, London 1992, p.
71
14 see Sovetskii ekran 31, 31 July 1928, p. 5: ‘Kak rabotal Pudovkin s
‘‘akterami’’ buriatami i kitaitsami’
15 Sergei Iutkevich, interviewed by Luda and Jean Schnitzer, Poudovkine,
Paris 1966, p. 159; see also Leonid Trauberg’s criticisms of Storm over Asia
in terms redolent of the 1928 Party Conference: ‘Eksperiment, ponyatnyi
millionam’ from Zhizn’ iskusstva 1 January 1929, FF, p. 251; N. Osinskii,
‘Potomok Chingis-khana’, 14 November 1928: the review ﬁnishes by
praising the ﬁlm as a whole: ‘On the release of The End of St. Petersburg, an
American critic asked: what can be given to the Russian ﬁlm industry, if at
the outset it can produce such a ﬁlm. Answer: it can already produce The
Heir to Genghis Khan and is fully conﬁdent that it shall produce even better
yet’ ; Buriato-Mongol’skaia pravda, 2 December 1928, repeats the Izvestiia
review virtually verbatim
16 L. Rusanova, Pudovkin, Moscow 1939, p. 26; see also ‘Opiat’ krizis v kino’,
Nina Glagoleva ed., Lunacharskii o kino, Moscow 1963, p. 138
17 see Golovnia, Svet v iskusstve operatora, Moscow 1945 and Jean and Luda
Schnitzer: Cinema, p. 146; for an appreciation of Golovnia’s work see
Fel’dman’s review of the ﬁlm in Rabochaia Moskva, 14 November 1928
18 Leon Trotskii, Literature and Revolution [1924], Michigan 1960, p. 230
19 Maxim Gorkii, The Mother, tr. Isadore Schneider, Secaucus 1977, p. 391
20 again, some of the stage business involving a puddle and puttees (Ronald
after the supposed shooting) and boots and planks (ofﬁcers crossing
puddles) is cut from the 1948 version
21 Osip Brik, ‘Theory and Practice of a Script Writer’, Screen 15.3, 1974
22 Babitsky and Rimberg: Soviet Film, p. 272; S. Ermolinskii, ‘Potomok
Chingis-Khana’, Pravda, 5 December 1928
23 the foreign powers were suspicious of and hostile to the Bolsheviks but did
not care for Tsarism either; for a discussion of the various interests
involved (and explanations as to why the depiction of British involvement
caused political embarrassment on the home front) see Louis Fischer: The
Soviets; Richard Luckett, The White Generals, London 1971, John Bradley,
Allied Intervention in Russia, London 1968; John Swettenham, Allied Inter-
134 Vsevolod Pudovkin
vention in Russia, London 1967; Arthur Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia,
London 1919 and Richard H. Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War,
Princeton 1968.
Screening of Storm was suppressed in Ontario and Australia, following a
request from the Colonial Ofﬁce: see Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored,
London 1994, p. 85
Is the image of the British ofﬁcer, silhouetted like a bronze statue against
ﬂames particularly tsarist, or rather a generalised symbol of imperialist
autocracy before which Hughes, a mere merchant, is cowed?
I think the latter.
24 VGIK archive, nos. 695 and 1711 ‘Potomok Chingis-khana’; Viktor
Shklovskii preferred Brik’s scenario to the ﬁlm as realised: see ‘Beregites’
muzyki’, Sovetskii ekran, 1 January 1929, FF p. 252
25 the 1930s, of course, did see the extraordinary suppression of national
culture and custom, not least in the Mongolian territories; foreign visitors
such as the liberal Kurt London, commented on the standardisation,
centralisation and russiﬁcation of culture in these years: see The Seven
Soviet Arts, London 1937
26 see Hosking, p. 43
27 James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, London 1993, p. 67; see also
Tolstoy, Bibikova, Cooke, Street Art of the Revolution, London 1984
28 Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., Inside the Film Factory, London 1991,
p. 166, an interview with Alexander Medvedkin: ‘We used comedy, circus,
lubok, farce . . . We had all sorts of interesting scenes, like a lubok’; see
also Jay Leyda, Kino, London 1960, p. 274
29 see Valentin Turkin, Kino-akter, Moscow 1929, p. 55; Sovetskii ekran 27, 3
July 1928, pp. 11–12
30 see Bernard Eisenschitz in La Commune de Paris/Nouvelle Babylone, Paris
1975, p. 124
31 see IM/BFI/SM item 4: notes to London Film Society 35th. season
programme. ‘The titling [in Storm over Asia] follows closely that of the
Russian version; it is customary, in most title lists to identify the soldiers
shown in British uniforms as Russian Whites (counter-revolutionary
forces equipped with old uniforms); it is obvious, however, from the
Russian titles in relation to the Colonel, referring to ‘imperial necessity’
etc. that the theme of the picture cannot credibly be interpreted in this
sense’. Also see item 7a, reply to IM’s query re ﬁlms dealing with the
Russian Revolution: minutes of exception issued by BBFC for Storm:
‘We think that the conduct of the British troops wearing British uniforms
is such as to make this ﬁlm unsuitable for exhibition in this country’;
‘this ﬁlm was produced to satirise the exploitation of undeveloped
peoples’
32 Leon Trotskii, Literature and Revolution [1924], Michigan 1960, p. 15
33 Suvorov, qu. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, Princeton 1985,
p. 228
34 Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, London 1987, p. vii
Storm over Asia 135
35 Marco Polo, The Travels, tr. Ronald Latham, Harmondsworth 1979, p. 93;
see p. 97 for a description of the nomadic and pastoral life of the Mongols.
Polo was in the service of Kubilai Khan in China and his account may not
be impartial; he is also so hedged about with mythology himself that he
may not be an entirely reliable source for quotation. The post-perestroika
and glasnost revival of Genghis Khan is worth noting; for instance, the
new monument in Delgerhann, Mongolia and the appeal of a millionaire
Chess-champion to the ascendancy of the Khans as a means of promoting
his political career; Genghis Khan is now ofﬁcially regarded as a great
strategist and unifying leader.
36 Halperin, pp. 104 and 107; see also his ‘George Vernadsky, Eurasianism,
the Mongols and Russia’, Slavic Review 41.3 (1982)
37 Dmitri and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, New York 1993,
p. 93
38 see von Geldern, p. 77 and Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture, pp. 31
and 57; also Alexander Dumas, Adventures in Czarist Russia [1858], London
1960, p. 174 and Phillip Longworth, ‘The subversive legend of Sten’ka
Razin’ in Vittorio Strada, ed. Russia, Turin 1975, p. 22: ‘The millenarian
content of the legend is considerable. Razin is often represented as a
messianic Christ-like ﬁgure, concerned for the people’s welfare; and
sometimes, like christ, he lives after death and is due to come again . . .
And legends speak repeatedly of his impending resurrection or immor-
tality’.
39 Leyda, p. 349 and Ian Christie and Julian Graffy, Protazanov, London 1993,
p. 77; for Pudovkin’s verdict on the 1938 interpretation see ‘Khoroshii
ﬁl’m, ‘‘Stepan Razin’’ ’, SS II, pp. 206–207
40 Brooks, p. 174
41 Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, New York 1969, p. 18; for the
reappearance of these ﬁgures in ﬁlms of the ’30s addressing Civil War
themes, see Richard Taylor in Inside the Film Factory
42 Brooks, p. 177
43 Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, New York 1992, p. 21
44 Valeri Inkizhinov, ‘Les Souvenirs d’Inkijinoff’, Cine´ma 167 (1972) p. 116, re
his father being enormously helpful on location; for further comments on
Inkizhinov as a ‘pure-blooded’ mongol, his background in bioMechanics,
stunning physical prowess and so forth see N. Kaufman, ‘Potomok
Chingis khana’, Kino-gazeta 9, 28 February 1928, p. 4
45 Gorkii, The Mother, pp. 21–22
46 Elena Barkhatova, ‘Realism and Document’, David Elliott, ed. Photography
in Russia, London 1992; there were also cheaper versions of such pictures,
more widely available: see Stites, Russian Popular Culture, p. 26: ‘A postcard
series called ‘‘Russian Types’’ offered images (often distorted) that helped
people ‘envision’ social categories’. These would appear to provide the
model for Kuleshov’s wonderful ‘Bolshevik Barbarities’ in Mr West
47 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard Taylor, London 1988, p. 200
48 see, for instance, Konstantin Derzhavin’s contribution ‘Akter ili natursh-
136 Vsevolod Pudovkin
chik’ in Art-ekran (1923) 5, p. 4 and Kino-front 9 and 10 editorials written a`
la Punin
49 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, London 1968, p. 135
50 see, for instance, Sight and Sound XXII (1953), referring to ‘Inkizhinov,
who had never acted before, the trapper-king of ‘‘Storm over Asia’’ ’
51 ‘Bair i ia’, Sovetskoe ekran 33, 14 August 1928, pp. 8–9
52 Pudovkin, ‘Stanislavsky’s System in the Cinema’, Sight and Sound XXII
(1953), p. 118
53 Vera Baranovskaia, ‘Akter dramy v kino’, Sovetskoe kino 38, 21 September
1926, p. 4
54 Vladimir Maiakovskii, ‘O kino’, FF, p. 174; see also Esﬁr Shub, ‘LEF i
kino. Stenogramma soveshchaniia’
55 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, New York 1949, p. 8
56 see David George and Christopher Gossip, eds. Studies in the Commedia
dell’arte, Cardiff 1993
57 Eisenstein,‘Film Form: New Problems’, Film Form, p. 127
58 Pudovkin, ‘Tvorcheskii kollektiv’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 235; in spite of the
theoretical protestations of Pudovkin and others against the system,
American stars enjoyed success with the avant-garde in the early ’20s and
with popular audiences (witness the ‘mobbing’ of Fairbanks and Pickford
in 1924; thanks to Richard Taylor for drawing to my attention to Viktor
Shklovskii’s account of Pudovkin’s meeting with the couple in Eizenshtein,
Moscow 1973, pp. 134–135): journals frequently featured American
personalities and were as interested in their lives both in and out of the
studios (see, for instance, Kino-zhurnal ARK’s account of Pickford and
Fairbanks, 4–5, 1925 and Asta Nielsen’s account of her average day in
Sovetskii ekran 17/18, 1926)
59 see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, London 1985, p. 15
60 Vladimir Bekhterev, General Principles of Reﬂexology [1923], tr. E. and W.
Murphy, London 1933, p. 33
61 Bekhterev, p. 63
62 Fedor Dostoevskii, Crime and Punishment [1866], tr. Magarshack,
Harmondsworth 1951, pp. 272 and 544
63 Mikhail Devidov, ‘Naschet geroev v kino i v literature’, Sovetskii ekran 50,
11 December 1928, p. 7; Devidov is contributing to a debate which has
been conducted over the previous few issues of the journal (see also
Sovetskii ekran 47, Viktor Shklovskii, ‘Sovetskaia shkola akterskoi igry’; 48
and 49)
64 Tatiana Zapasnik and Adi Petrovich, Die Zeit in Grossaufnahme, Berlin
1983, p. 624, give the 1928 version as 3092 metres, the 1949 as 2425
metres
65 Golovnia, ‘Operatoraia rabota v nekotorykh ﬁl’makh’, Svet v iskusstve opera-
tora
66 Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye, London 1963, p. 77; see also
I. Erenburg, Materializatsiia fantastiki, Moscow 1927, p. 13
67 for a discussion of this as a standard device in political ﬁlm-making see
Storm over Asia 137
Folke Isaksson and Leif Furhammar, Politics and Film, London 1971, and
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, New York, 1965
68 Plekhanov, p.23
69 Plekhanov, p. 16
70 Georg Luka´cs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, London 1962, p. 23
138 Vsevolod Pudovkin
6. A Simple Case and The Deserter:
the sound ﬁlm and sound ﬁlm
acting
Sound in Pudovkin’s Silent Films
Unlike Eisenstein, Pudovkin has little to say about the music which
accompanied his own silent ﬁlms, but the subject of appropriate
scoring was frequently and variously discussed in the journals: Khristanf
Khersonsky’s ‘Music in cinema’ in Kino-zhurnal ARK 3 is
concerned with the notion of melody, Sergei Budoslavsky’s contribution
to the same issue is highly technical; articles in Kino address the
appropriate characterisation and suitable proportioning of music to
ﬁlm and a 1923 issue draws together the views of a number of professional
commentators, including D. S. Blok and the conductor of the
Goskino orchestra, M. Z. Basov. Evgeni Mandel’s contribution to
Kino-zhurnal ARK 9, ‘Musical Illustration for Films’, discusses the
relative merits of written and improvised scores.1
Blok, who became
musical director at Goskino, composed a score in 1935 for The Mother
and Shaporin’s work on Pudovkin’s ﬁrst sound ﬁlm, The Deserter, is
mentioned in The Actor in Film and in ‘Asynchronism as a Principle of
Sound Film’. Sadly, in all of this, there is little precise information as
to what exactly was played, nor does Pudovkin seem to have been
sufﬁciently fussy or pedantic to specify a particular score for his own
ﬁlms. Marie Seton wrote to Ivor Montagu before the 1933 London
screening of A Simple Case:
I think Pudovkin has told you that he has no very deﬁnite ideas
about it. The enclosed suggestions are his, they may give you some
ideas: middle of the second part from the ﬁrst explosion in the
civil war episode to the moment when the young soldier is dead,
there must be no music; Pudovkin has not thought of any special
music and he leaves the choice to [you]; ﬁrst part (prologue): Bach;
second part beginning and end must have an epic quality; third part:
Beethoven.2
Golovnia is hardly forthcoming either:
. . . we always felt that ﬁlms like The Mother and more particularly
The End of St. Petersburg were perfectly understood by audiences,
especially when they had a good musical accompaniment . . . at that
time special scores were written for important ﬁlms and in the best
cinemas they were always shown with their proper musical accompaniment
. . . for The End of St. Petersburg several musical phrases
evoked immediate and very precise associations: in the scene of the
patriotic demonstration the music played was a slightly distorted
version of the national anthem: the two perceptions, visual and
aural, were linked and mutually reinforcing.3
Golovnia suggests that the success of Pudovkin’s ﬁlms with audiences
was due in part to the effective ‘cuing’ or ‘signing’ of the intended
reaction by the music. Sovkino advocated that producers and composers
work alongside one another ‘while making the ﬁlm and in particular
for them to agree ﬁnally on the musical scenario when the
picture is being put together’.4
Shostakovich, an erstwhile cinema
pianist himself, advocated that a composer should take no more than
the theme from a ﬁlm as an impetus to his own autonomous work. For
Sovetskii ekran, Shostakovich comments upon other methods of
working, such as using improvised scores which depend on the talents
and inspiration of the musicians, scores which draw on familiar themes
from Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann or, following the example of
Tchaikovsky, interpret by means of such instrumental motifs as the
trombone announcing royalty. He then describes how he set about
composing the music for The New Babylon [1929]: ‘Overall I was rarely
guided by any principle obliging me to illustrate each picture. I
proceeded from the essential form, from the main shot in one or other
of a series of shots’. Kozintsev agreed: ‘We had the same idea: not to
illustrate shots but to give them new quality and scope; the music had
140 Vsevolod Pudovkin
to be composed against external events so as to show the inner sense of
the action’.5
As Kozintsev had turned to Zola and Daumier as a historical
source for his starkly delineated caricatures of Paris in The New
Babylon, Shostakovich turned to Offenbach’s operettas and wrote a new
orchestration of an old French song and of the Marseillaise. However,
the orchestra and the audience proved resistant to their innovation. But
Shostakovich’s notion of producing a score as a counterpoint to the
ﬁlm was to become standard practice with sound ﬁlms. ‘Music must
retain its own line’, says Pudovkin, discussing the score for The
Deserter. Sound can run counter to the content of a particular image
and counter to the shape of the image track.
Eisenstein’s 1928 ‘Statement on Sound’ (to which Pudovkin and
Alexandrov were signatories) was not opposed to the introduction to
ﬁlm of sound per se; rather it resisted the naturalistic constraints on the
medium which the synchronisation of image with dialogue portended,
‘the line of least resistance’.6
Characteristically, Eisenstein argued the
case by asserting that it was montage, the quintessence of cinema, that
synchronisation placed under threat and that it was only in its potential
for developing and advancing montage techniques that sound was to be
welcomed:
In the ﬁrst place there will be commercial exploitations of the most
saleable goods, i.e. of talking pictures: those in which the sound is
recorded in a natural manner, synchronising exactly with the movement
on the screen and creating a certain ‘illusion’ of people
talking, objects making a noise, etc. The ﬁrst period of sensations
will not harm the development of the new art; the danger comes
with the second period, accompanied by the loss of innocence and
purity of the initial concept of cinema’s new textural possibilities can
only intensify its unimaginative use for ‘dramas of high culture’ and
other photographed presentations of a theatrical order.
Sound used in this way will destroy the culture of montage because
every mere addition of sound to montage fragments increases their
inertia as such and their independent signiﬁcance; this is undoubtedly
detrimental to montage which operates above all not with fragments
but through the juxtaposition of fragments.
Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-a`-vis the visual fragment of
montage will open up new possibilities for the development and
perfection of montage.6
A Simple Case and The Deserter 141
Equally, Pudovkin had argued in The Film Director and Film Material
that ﬁlm acting applied its own peculiar selectivity towards ‘indifferent
nature’, employing its own independent means, and that it was
spurious to construe the absence of dialogue as a regrettable ommission.
‘The idea that the ﬁlm actor should express in gesture that which
the ordinary man says in words is basically false. In creating the
picture the director and actor use only those moments when the word
is superﬂuous, when the substance of the action develops in silence,
when the word may accompany the gesture, but does not give birth to
it’.7
For Pudovkin, acting for silent cinema is not a matter of restoring
to a performance that of which it has of necessity been deprived, but
rather of transposing the narrative from a constative to a performative
plane, whereby the meaning of a gesture is its enactment. But, with the
advent of sound, Pudovkin is characteristically less concerned with the
preservation of artistic tenets inviolate, than with the capacity of sound
to enhance an effect: ‘The role which sound is to play in ﬁlm is much
more signiﬁcant than a slavish imitation of naturalism; . . . the ﬁrst
function of sound is to augment the potential expressiveness of the
ﬁlm’s content’.8
In practice, both Pudovkin and Eisenstein were to
work productively in sound, although Romm (possibly as an apology
for the formal and political ‘line of least resistance’ pursued in the late
ﬁlms) says that Pudovkin had difﬁculties adapting to dialogue.9
For A
Simple Case he attempted his ﬁrst experiments in the manipulation of
sound perspective; in The Deserter these were realised in such moments
as the slow trickling then close-up crashing of a chain on the ship’s
deck and the distorted whining of a palm-court orchestra. My point is,
that the early sound ﬁlms can be regarded as a continuation and development
of Pudovkin’s theoretical position rather than as a complete
break.
Of images which constructed in the spectator a sense of sound
accompaniment, Pudovkin praises Eisenstein for the ﬁgure of the
accordion player in The Strike, sustaining the impression as the characters
move off into the far distance with an elongated fanning shadow
from the bellows.10
The accordion underwrites a satirical edge to the
action (as do the tavern players in The Mother and the mechanical
organ in The Living Corpse), and provides an emphatic pace (brutally
interrupted by Vlasov’s attack on the bartender). Pudovkin praises also
the stone lion sequence in Potemkin, rising to the unheard sound of the
ship’s salvo in the bay. ‘It is not just, as Pudovkin says, that this effect
142 Vsevolod Pudovkin
can be ‘‘reproduced’’ in words with difﬁculty’ remarks della Volpe, ‘it is
impossible to reproduce it or translate it into words or verbal ‘‘values’’
without entirely losing its ﬁlmic-visual artistry’.11
Indeed, the addition
of a sound accompaniment to the sequence sometimes marred rather
than assisted its reception: at the ﬁrst London screening with the
Meisel score, the ﬁlm projection speed was slowed to match the tempo
of the music and, to the amusement of the audience, the lions
lumbered rather than sprang to attention.12
The dripping tap in The
Mother regulates a different tempo in the spectator’s perception: its slow
monotony effects the dull thud of her grief. ‘There is a law in
psychology’, says Pudovkin, ‘that lays it down that if an emotion gives
rise to a certain movement, by imitation of this movement the corresponding
emotion can be called forth’.13
Asked by a foreign reporter in
1929, how he would convey the same scene in sound, Pudovkin
answered:
If this were possible I would do it thus: the mother is sitting near
the body and the audience hears clearly the sound of the water dripping
in the wash basin; then comes the shot of the silent head of the
dead man with the burning candle; and here one hears a subdued
weeping.
That is how I imagine to myself a ﬁlm that sounds, and I must
point out that such a ﬁlm will remain international. Words and
sounds heard . . . could be rendered in any language.14
A Simple Case (Life is Very Good)
After criticisms of Storm over Asia and the damning in Russia of Otsep’s
The Living Corpse, sometimes for its ‘regression’ to theatricality,
elsewhere for its indulgence of bourgeois sensibilities, Pudovkin entered
what Karaganov terms ‘a difﬁcult period’. More generally, the March
1928 Party Cinema Conference marked a shift in the terms in which
ﬁlms were evaluated and discussed. Henceforth, the ofﬁcial requirement
that ﬁlms contain the ‘correct criteria of socio-political content’
and be ‘intelligible to the millions’ [na formu poniatnuiu millionam] is
routinely invoked against work which is judged and found formally
and artistically wanting.15
Alexander Rzheshevsky’s scenario for Life is Very Good [Ochen’
khorosho zhivetsia], based on a short story by Mikhail Koltsov, was
A Simple Case and The Deserter 143
submitted for approval in September 1928 and in November 1928
Sovetskii ekran reports that work has begun.16
For much of 1929
Pudovkin was abroad, partly in Germany for The Living Corpse. The
ﬁlming of Life is Very Good was not completed until late 1930 and
Pudovkin was required to account for the delay. He answers that the
period of preparatory work on the written scenario was long and that
the shooting schedule (103 days in total) was perforce interrupted by
bad weather: in one whole month, he says, they could work for only
four days.17
In December 1930 the ﬁlm was released, but to such a
hostile reception that it was withdrawn after only two days. The ofﬁcial
evaluation was scathing. The ﬁlm, it was said, was poorly co-ordinated
and assembled: ‘With the exception of the prologue and the ﬁnal
manoeuvres of the Red Army, nothing much in particular seems to
happen in this ﬁlm. This misarrangement of the theme is fundamentally
the fault of the scenario’:
The second failing, also arising from the cinematographic inadequacy
of the scenario, is the abundance of literary, wearisome and
boring dialogue delivered by the hero, who either sits in a room or
roams aimlessly around the streets of Moscow.
The third shortcoming of which we ﬁnd the scenarist and the director
culpable, is the patent deviation towards an already condemned
psychologism, especially dismal and theatrical, verging on naturalism.
In respect of silent cinema, this is undoubtedly a reactionary
phenomenon.
The fundamental and principal defect of the ﬁlm consists in the
absence of a topical subject, expressing actual life, to excite and
appeal to today’s mass audience . . . To put it another way, basically
the case in question appears unaware of the Party Conference directive
towards ‘a form intelligible to the millions’.
The character of the commander, Langovoi, is criticised for his preoccupation
with his relationship with Mashenka. ‘It is hard to imagine a
more distressing result for the picture of a great master, such as
Pudovkin’. But, deserving of a favourable mention, was the performance
of the actress in the role of Mashenka (played by the VGIK
student, Rogulina) the warm portrayal of comradeship and the
splendid photography of locations and of numerous details. The report
continues to accuse the ﬁlm’s authors of spending their budget on a
144 Vsevolod Pudovkin
ﬁlm for an extremely limited public, something which was to be
considered entirely inadmissable. A number of harsh comments from
working class viewers are then listed, such as ‘I didn’t understand a
single thing’; ‘The picture does not appeal to the working class
viewer’.18
After these searing attacks, Pudovkin endeavoured to re-edit the
ﬁlm, supplementing it with out-takes and new material. Pudovkin was
under pressure to complete the ﬁlm fast, such that it could be marketed
abroad.19
By 1931, he had started work on The Deserter. Kino
complained that Pudovkin had already made and re-made Life is Very
Good to no good purpose. After such vast expenditure of time and
funds, Mezhrabpom-Film, although pleading compliance with Pudovkin’s
wishes, should, says Kino, be required to release the ﬁlm immediately.
Furthermore, it is said, Pudovkin should heed the comments of
the worker critics of the ﬁlm, in order that his forthcoming production
be of ‘a high ideological standard’.20
Viktor Shklovsky had commented upon the deﬁciencies of
Rzheshevsky’s scenario as early as 1929, comparing it unfavourably
with the previous collaborations with Zarkhi.21
In April 1932 he
Mashenka
A Simple Case and The Deserter 145
submitted a list of amendments for Pudovkin’s attention, to add to the
seven pages of detailed corrections supplied following his ofﬁcial inter-
view.22
In December, the ﬁlm was re-released under the new title A
Simple Case, but, again, the reviews were unfavourable. Fevralsky,
writing for the Red Army paper, Krasnaia zvezda, praises the cinematography
and the actors’ performances but says that it is all the more to
be lamented that such achievements cannot disguise the ﬁlm’s basic
ﬂaws. Again, the reviewer routinely cites Pudovkin’s past credentials
as a measure of his failure. Liadov, in the Moscow evening paper,
Vecherniaia Moskva, says that individual frames are beautifully
composed but that the ﬁlm is not well constructed as a whole and that
it fails to convey ‘the pathos of the epoch of socialist reconstruction’:
Another misfortune for Pudovkin: a regrettable choice of scenario.
The scenario’s author and the author of the production speak in different
languages. The lyricism and romantic psychologism of Rzheshevsky
is apparently totally alien to the director of the monumental
epics, The End of St. Petersburg and The Heir to Genghis Khan.
Reaching for an historical-literary analogy, it is as if Stendhal suddenly
began to write in the manner of Chaˆteaubriand . . .
We shall look forward to some new success, which will completely
compensate for the time wasted on such a hopeless enterprise.23
A Simple Case (Life is Very Good) is an odd ﬁlm scarred by its original
ﬂaws and forced revisions. For Pudovkin it marked a radical move
away from the ‘hard skeletal’ structure with which he had worked
hitherto with Zarkhi and Doller, in favour of an emotional, symbolic
scenario. Meanwhile, Zarkhi returned to the theatre.24
On theother
hand, there is much in the imagery which is familiar from previous
ﬁlms although here (as critics were quick to point out)the ‘poetic’
elements were frequently poorly integrated with thesubject. For
instance, the opening of the ﬁlm recalls the depiction of the Volga
landscape at the beginning of The End of St. Petersburg: a man stands
with his back to camera in a ﬁeld, the furrows running diagonally top
left to bottom right of frame, with his shadow caststrongly right to left;
there is a close-up of the man’s hand turning slowly then of the man in
proﬁle. ‘A common story of the civil war . . . ﬁve years of hard living
and of struggle. . .’. His slow walk across frame is cut against a woman
running through woods, the shadows of the trees casting swiftly
146 Vsevolod Pudovkin
changing patterns on her face, the woman then shown in the distance
on a long winding path, rushing to greet the man.
Often A Simple Case uses overlays, as in The Mother and in The Living
Corpse, sometimes combining image with text, so that visual continuity
and ﬂow is not disrupted, sometimes using the sizing and setting of
type as a visual element. There is an abundance of imagery drawn
from nature, reminiscent of Pudovkin’s own Storm over Asia and of
Dovzhenko’s Earth [Zemlia, 1930]:25
rocks are split asunder, waters are
turbulent and fruit shrivels . . . but then life renews itself, the ground
erupts into life and the fruit swells. Pudovkin uses a sequence of iron
lattices and grilles moving horizontally across screen to show the train
carrying Mashenka speeding away (akin to the vertical ascent of the lift
shaft in The End of St. Petersburg).
A Simple Case (Life is Very Good) is also of interest technically, for
Pudovkin’s development of his notion of ‘Close-Ups in Time’. In his
essay of this title of 1931, he describes this as a means of guiding
the attention of the spectator to a particular purpose, akin to
shifts in the size of object in the frame, or to masking of areas of the
frame:
The hero returns to his ﬁrst wife
A Simple Case and The Deserter 147
When the director shoots a scene, he changes the position of the
camera, now approaching it to the actor, now taking it farther away
from him, according to the subject of his concentration of the spectator’s
attention – either some general movements or else some particularity,
perhaps the features of an individual. This is the way he
controls the spatial construction of the scene. Why should he not do
precisely the same with the temporal? Why should not a given detail
be momentarily emphasisedd by retarding it on the screen, and rendering
it by this means particularly outstanding and unprecedently
clear?
A short-length shot in ‘slow-motion’ can be placed between two
longer normal-speeded shots, concentrating the attention of the
spectator at the desired point for a moment. ‘Slow-motion’ in
editing is not a distortion of an actual process. It is a portrayal more
profound and precise, a conscious guidance of the attention of the
spectator.26
In Storm over Asia, the withdrawal of the Mongol, the gathering of his
strength before he strikes the white man, is fast-cranked and decelerated
for the viewer, the blow itself appears accelerated in force within
the context of the sequence; the movement is performed whole,
partially mechanically intensiﬁed thereafter. In The End of St. Petersburg,
clouds speed over the city, heightening the pace towards its
downfall. Before the train leaves in A Simple Case, there is a shot of
legs, rushing along the pavement: one pedestrian is sent skidding.
After the sequence of lattices and grilles there is an intertitle, ‘Three
minutes ago. . .’ and feet are shown in mid-shot, rushing down a ﬂight
of steps. Then there is another title, ‘. . . the long-distance train moves
away’ (and the same shot is repeated, slowed-down) then ‘. . . through
Kiev, Kazatin, Zhmerinku’ (and the shot of feet is shown again, even
slower). Similarly, Pudovkin uses a repetition of shots (possibly under
the inﬂuence of October) to indicate Fedia’s trepidation as he arrives at
the woman’s apartment: he fears that his friend and comrade at arms,
Pavel Langovoi, has accepted her invitation and betrayed Mashenka.
Fedia knocks on the door and the door is shown swinging open three
times, delaying what Fedia and the viewer sees. He looks severely
around the room and is told that Pavel has gone. The door quickly
swings tight shut. But Pavel comes out of another room and sees
Fedia leaving.
148 Vsevolod Pudovkin
For Iezuitov, this was a period for Pudovkin of ‘experiment and
diversion’. He says that Pudovkin initially intended to make A Simple
Case (Life is Very Good) as a sound ﬁlm, putting into practice his theory
of asynchronisation, outlined in the 1929 Kino i kul’tura article ‘On the
Principle of Sound in Film’ and developed further in 1934 in
‘Asynchronisation as a Principle of Sound Film’.27
The plan was not
realised, but Iezuitov describes certain sequences in detail:
Here is how he hoped to construct the scene in which Langovoi
and Mashenka say goodbye, before the departure of the heroine to
the countryside. In the frame: the motionless train, standing at the
platform. Mashenka’s face is visible in the carriage window. ‘I want
to tell you something’, she says to Langovoi. At this moment there
is the sound of a train moving and the accelerated chugging of its
wheels, whereas the picture shows the train motionless as previously.
‘What, then, what?’, Langovoi asks, to the accompaniment of shifting
carriages. ‘I’ve forgotten’. And these words of Mashenka are
barely audible in the midst of the feverish thundering of the wheels.
The train on the soundtrack picks up speed and we hear the end of
the sentence, ‘. . . you are taller than me. . .’. Then the sound of the
moving train breaks in. And on the screen, with the separation of
the couple Mashenka and Langovoi, the actual train leaves. In this
scene the sound track ran ahead of the image. For what purpose? In
order to create a greater strain in the scene of departure, in order to
summon up disturbance and agitation in the viewer towards the fate
of the heroine. From this we may draw the chief conclusion that, in
combining sensations of time, time is not necessarily just as it is
actually recorded but that we may feel that it stretches to the ﬁnal
second, that we can pack into it the experience of months.28
The Deserter
Nor was The Deserter completed entirely as planned. A co-production
between the German company Prometheus and Mezhrabpom-Film, it
was originally intended to be made in a Russian and a German
version: in practice, although the script for the latter survives, only the
former was realised.29
Other joint enterprises included Piscator’s The
Fishermen’s Revolt [Aufstand der Fischer, 1934, but not shown in
Germany until 1960]. However, the production was fraught with
A Simple Case and The Deserter 149
difﬁculties: Hanns Eisler, originally appointed as composer, received no
information from Piscator and returned to Germany; the greater part
of Erdman’s script was rejected; Piscator proved a maverick and costs
rose exponentially.30
Pudovkin and others praised the ﬁlm for its
realism and for its pathos in the depiction of a revolutionary theme,
defending it against criticisms in Kino and elsewhere.31
In spite of Pudovkin’s hopes for A Simple Case, outlined by Iezuitov,
Pudovkin describes The Deserter as his ﬁrst sound ﬁlm and it is
discussed as such by his contemporaries. It represents Pudovkin’s own
thinking on sound perspective and asynchronisation but may also be
compared (and sometimes contrasted) with Eisler’s work with Brecht
and Dudow on Kuhle Wampe [Germany, 1932] and Eisler’s later formulation
with Adorno of a theory of an appropriate Marxist practice in
sound ﬁlm: ‘The rhythm of ﬁlms’, they comment, ‘results from the
structure and proportion of the the formal elements, as in musical
compositions . . . but this rhythmical structure of the motion picture is
neither necessarily complementary nor parallel to its musical structure’;
the soundtrack, says Pudovkin, ‘should pursue its own line’.32
When in
The Deserter the German delegates leave Hamburg, a triumphant
chorus links the soundtrack over black leader to their arrival at the
May Day parade; as Renn travels by train back to Gemany, there are
unlinked snatches of music which recall the life he has left.
After the obscurity of A Simple Case, The Deserter marked a return to
a clear theme and a positive hero. Even so, reports Iezuitov, some
commentators descended like hawks upon the ﬁlm, seizing upon mere
snatches of dialogue, and failed to apprehend the devlopment of the
hero’s actions through the events of the ﬁlm, to appreciate the ﬁlm as a
coherent whole.33
But it restored Pudovkin’s reputation, with some
critics, at least: ‘Pudovkin reveals his mastery in this ﬁlm’, says the
reviewer for Vecherniaia Moskva, ‘to be precise, in the desertion of the
hero he portrays not the private psychology of an individual but rather
he consciously propagates a great socialist theme’.34
Pudovkin worked again with Golovnia and Kozlovsky, yet again
with Ivan Chuvelev (from The Mother and The End of St. Petersburg)
and Chistiakov (here as Fritz) and, for the ﬁrst time, with the Moscow
Art Theatre actor Boris Livanov as the docker Karl Renn.35
Although
Livanov had worked previously in silent cinema, his roles, even by his
own account, had proved unremarkable and it was The Deserter which
initiated his ﬁlm career proper.36
Renn is at ﬁrst at best attached to the
150 Vsevolod Pudovkin
Communist cause only half-heartedly, although the conditions of
labour are shown to be hard: dockers queue at the gate for work and
the inﬁrm and the old (men over 40 and women over 25) are rejected,
in favour of children as young as 13. Pudovkin plays a docker struggling
to carry a tea-chest on-board. He collapses under the strain and
his place is immediately taken by someone from the queue. When
Grete tells Renn of the coming of the strike breakers to Hamburg, he is
reluctant to rouse himself, then he arrives late at the strikers’ meeting
and listens to the leaders’ speeches impatiently. He is dismissive of
Fritz, the Communist leader. But he is nevertheless (or, rather, is strategically)
chosen as a delegate to Moscow.
Here Renn encounters a set-piece demonstration of Soviet achievement
(documented by Golovnia in May and November): a parade,
shot from above, of ﬂoats, smiling marching Pioneers, soldiers, sailors
and athletes. A formation ﬂy-past completes the spectacle, accompanied
by a triumphant chorus. A similar display serves as the grand
ﬁnale to Alexandrov’s The Circus [Tsirk, 1936]. As Eugene Lyons
describes the experience from the ground in the mid ’30s:
. . . the military display unrolled across the square, two and a half
hours of men, horses, cannon, machinery, uniforms . . . ﬁfty abreast
under clouds of red, singing, hurrahing . . . this is the world’s most
unique parade [the only one] in which there are no spectators.
Everybody marches . . . in Red Square parades are the substance of
history.37
Renn spends three months working in a diesel factory and discovers at
ﬁrst hand the dedication of Soviet workers. They set themselves the
task of fulﬁlling in 36 days the supply of light to the metal plant, but in
only 30 days of intensive work and 30 nights of constant vigil the task
is accomplished. There is a long sequence conveying the ﬁnal concentrated
effort: ﬁnally the perfectly regular rhythm of the sound track
indicates that all is well. Renn has become more calm and more
earnest. He is duly elected to the Presidium and is met with a
thunderous ovation (the children in the brigades clap so hard that their
hands sting and they spit on their palms; when the best workers are
named the Komsomol leader smiles in spite of himself).
When Renn returns to Germany, the city is as before, the same
policeman in white gloves conducting trafﬁc, still fawning to the
A Simple Case and The Deserter 151
bourgeoisie packed into their cars. But now Renn marches at the front
of the crowd of strikers: ‘Defend the USSR’, reads a banner, ‘the fatherland
of workers throughout the world’. There is heroic music (cymbals
and so forth) in spite of the strikers being shown blooded and beaten as
they clash with the police, echoing but superseding the kettle drums
which previously announced the arrival of the strike breakers. Similarly,
in Kuhle Wampe the slum district is shown to accompanying music
which is ‘brisk, sharp’, ‘contrasted with the loose structure of the
scenes, this acts as a shock deliberately aimed at arousing resistance
rather than sentimental sympathy’.38
The intention with the march in
The Deserter, says Pudovkin, was to render ‘the subjective attitude to be
adopted by the spectator towards the content of the events in the
image. Marxists know that in every defeat of the workers lies hidden a
further step towards victory’. He and Shaporin decided to render the
soundtrack in music only:
The score was written, played and recorded for the whole of the
sequence as a single-purposed unity, a workers’ march tune with
constantly running through it the note of stern and conﬁdent
victory, ﬁrmly and uninterruptedly rising in strength from beginning
to end . . .
By the time the banner of the demonstration appears, the music has
grown more and more deﬁnite, its signiﬁcance is clear to the spectator,
and it drags him into step with the workers’ mass now ﬁrmly
marching along the wide, suddenly emptied streets.
The police hurl themselves at the demonstrators, the battle begins,
but the brave music informed with the revolutionary spirit that
moves the workers and links them to spectator continues to grow.
The banner falls, but the music rises to a crescendo. . .
The banner is handed down the line to Grete. Like the Mother before
her, she is ﬁnally knocked down by mounted policemen . . . but the
banner is still waving aloft:
The demonstration is beaten, the hero perishes, but the music grows
. . . And suddenly, at the very last moment, the banner that blazes
up above the crowd synchronises in the ﬁnale with a maximum
strength of emotional intensity in a musical phrase crowning in one
topmost ﬂight of sound the whole sequence and the whole picture
152 Vsevolod Pudovkin
. . . It has been clear to me that the arousal of spectators cannot be
attributed to the component elements separately, such as the skilful
editing of the image or the high quality of Shaporin’s score. Ultimately,
the crux of the matter is . . . that the emotion derives from
far deeper elements integrated as a result of the combination of the
two lines – the objective representation of reality in the image and
the revelation of the profound inner content of reality in the
sound.39
For all that this was a new venture for Pudovkin, his ﬁrst sound ﬁlm,
there is much which bears comparison with the work of the ’20s.
Indeed, says Iezuitov, writing in 1938, in the early years of sound the
idea of montage still held sway, sometimes ‘preventing on screen the
representation of living, human characters’ (a stock phrase, indeed, of
Pudovkin’s own The Actor in Film). The chief concern was to direct
dialogue in such a way that it did not become merely theatrical.40
Sometimes, he says, the audience experienced such a conﬂict between
montage and performance as an impression of instability and uncertainty:
in The Deserter, viewers only just managed to grasp a sense, from
the tangle of montage, of the hero’s aspirations and of his ‘transparent
reality’.
Just as The End of St. Petersburg and Storm over Asia began by establishing
the environment of their characters, The Deserter opens with
concrete images (aural and visual) of a commercial and industrial city.
There is much which is familiar from the Big City ﬁlms of, for
instance, Kaufman, Vertov and Ruttmann: crowds, streets, trams,
machines and the mechanisation of labour, the sounds of hammers
and factory sirens (see chapter four, above). While the dockers queue
for a day’s work, an illuminated bill-board announces ‘Miss Detroit
has won the Beauty Contest’. A series of images is projected with
increasing speed, eventually overlapping.
The Deserter shows the comedy and tragedy of capitalism under
Social Democracy. There is the recurring image of a white-gloved
ﬂunkey, a ﬁnial on a pedestal, who conducts the trafﬁc to the strains of
a palm-court orchestra, a slow waltz with a heavy tuba bass line. There
is a held shot of a waiter bowing (as if in perpetuity) to a man sleeping
in a chair, who then wakes momentarily to place his order. But, at
night, one man is beaten up by the police and another decides to end it
all: he throws himself into the river and, in slow motion, is swallowed
A Simple Case and The Deserter 153
A policeman conducting trafﬁc
Fritz deﬁes the tanks
154 Vsevolod Pudovkin
up by the water. Tanks are sent in, even after the strikers have decided
to return to work. As they ﬂee (running left to right of frame) Fritz
runs back to save his comrade, Strauss. Fritz, too, is shot down and the
tank’s gun barrel clicks up, smartly, as though the job is now done . . .
but the moaning of the wounded left lying in the street (like the
agonising death in the trenches in The End of St. Petersburg) continues
then continues.
Konstantin Stanislavsky and The Actor in Film
In 1934, Pudovkin published the series of lectures which he had given
the previous year at the State Institute of Cinematography. In the
1920s, the subject of the actor in ﬁlm had frequently appeared in books
and journals, either as an aspect of ﬁlm schooling or in its own right:
one thinks, for instance, of Petrov’s What the Cinema Actor Needs to
Know, Turkin’s The Film Actor, Derzhavin’s ‘The Actor or the Model?’,
Sokolov’s ‘The Education of the Film Actor’ and Khersonsky’s ‘ On
dramatic techinique in the Role of the Actor’, as well as Pudovkin’s
own ‘Types instead of Actors’ (1929) and his remarks in The Film
Director and Film Material (1926). Theoretical questions about the
mastery of acting in ﬁlm, about the interrelation of theatre and ﬁlm
and the stage actor and the actor on screen, are, says Iezuitov in the
introduction to The Actor in Film, of pressing concern, ‘. . . the problems
of acting culture in cinematography are always vital’. Pudovkin’s observations,
he says, result directly from his own experiences with actors: ‘It
is especially opportune and useful now to set forth such practical
propositions, when the call for the creation of living, real and heroic
images in our own remarkable contemporary cinema of necessity
coincides with the growing art of ﬁlm acting’.41
By 1931, Pudovkin was renouncing publicly the earlier devotion to
montage as obsessive and ‘obsolete when considered in relation to the
rapid growth of Soviet ﬁlm technique’.42
His acknowledgement of a
preoccupation with formal issues, at the expense of character and plot
development, appears to endorse the position adopted by Dinamov
(and later Shumiatsky) and the leaders of the Central Committee who
had condemned Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Vertov for barren intellectual
aestheticism. ‘The overvaluation of montage’, said Shumiatsky,
chairman of the central Soviet ﬁlm organisation from 1930, ‘represents
the primacy of form over content, the isolation of aesthetics from
A Simple Case and The Deserter 155
politics’.43
In 1929 Pudovkin joined the Communist Party and in 1935
it was he, and not Eisenstein, who was decorated as the doyen of
cinematography.44
Judged by the self-proclaimed progressivist (but
arguably romantic and utopian) agenda set by the 1920s avant-garde,
does Pudovkin betray an artistic cause by his complicity with the
regime? Conversely, can Pudovkin’s espousal of Stanislavsky be
deemed opportune and progressive, in as much as the holism of the
System appears to render it amenable to work with speaking actors and
sound, superseding techniques speciﬁc to or concomitant with silent
ﬁlm? The System presents itself as a useful tool for the actor and
director faced with the exigencies of standard production procedure
(shooting out of sequence, multiple takes); the emphasis under
Shumiatsky on characterisation centred the director’s attention upon
the actor and required the skills of professionals.
Set against the agenda of the early 1920s, Pudovkin’s espousal of
Stanislavsky can be deemed regressive, in that it returns to a model
derived from the theatre, that art from which the ‘new’ cinema most
vehemently sought to distance itself and, more especially, from a form
of theatre regarded as outmoded. ‘All the younger generation and all
the innovators were on our side then’, recalls Eisenstein in 1927,
‘including the Futurists Meyerhold and Mayakovsky: ranged in bitter
opposition against us were Stanislavsky the traditionalist and Tairov
the opportunist’.45
In the mid 1920s, Stanislavsky was out of favour
with avant-garde artists and often with the state authorities: his 1927
production of Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro was slated for his
equivocally empathetic handling of the Count Almaviva.46
The innovators
were equally disdainful of pre-revolutionary ‘Film d’Art’ cinema,
for achieving nothing more than the mechanical recording of the ‘art
of the actor’. ‘The ﬁlm remained’, says Pudovkin in The Film Director
and Film Material, ‘but living photography. Art did not enter into the
work of him who made it’.47
The antipathy between cinema and theatre had been reinforced
originally by common academic and critical hostility, and Stanislavsky’s
own denial of cinema’s unique artistic status and scepticism as to
the possibility of the cinema becoming anything other than ancillary to
the legitimate stage. In 1912 he had written:
Theatre and cinema belong to different spheres and things by which
the theatre excites, attracts and charms us can never be provided by
156 Vsevolod Pudovkin
cinema . . . Theatre lives by the exchange of spiritual energy which
goes continually back and forth between audience and actor; that
contact of feeling that can unite actor and audience . . . That will
never and can never occur in the cinema where the living actor is
absent, where the ﬂow of spiritual motions is effected by mechanical
means.48
Meyerhold too had expressed resistance initially towards ﬁlm.49
However, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and the FEKS directors readily credited
Foregger and more signiﬁcantly Meyerhold and his pupil Eisenstein
with innovative and experimental work from which cinema drew its
own lessons or found complementary. Writing in 1934, on the occasion
of Meyerhold’s sixtieth birthday, Pudovkin says that he ‘brought theatre
just to the limit beyond which cinema immediately began’.50
Kuleshov
defers to the precedence of Eisenstein’s episodic presentation of Enough
Simplicity. . . .51
Osip Brik, in his 1926 Sovetskii ekran article ‘Cinema in
the Theatre of Meyerhold’ (illustrated with pictures of Igor Ilinsky as
Arkashy in Ostrovsky’s The Forest) says that the new theatre takes the
theme and spirit of a play and not necessarily the entirety of the literary
scenario; the play is conveyed by means of gesture, mime and intonation
and is pieced together from separate episodes as is a ﬁlm on the
editing table.52
In contrast, Pudovkin in The Actor in Film seems
content to lift wholesale Stanislavsky’s quotations in My Life in Art
from the old stage masters Coquelin and Karatigin.53
Pudovkin’s
advocacy of Stanislavsky cites his famous rehearsal of Turgenev’s A
Month in the Country under trees with Olga Knipper, experiments
conducted in the Pushkino barn and the Moscow Art Studio before the
Revolution and quotes from the System as it was taking shape in the
1920s rather than from Stanislavsky’s subsequent retractions and
revisions:
Owing to the closeness of the public and cast [in ‘The Loss of ‘‘The
Hope’’ ’] all exaggeration and gesture and intonation had to go and
every half-tone and subtle nuance acquired extreme importance. The
unusually intimate association between actor and spectator produced
a feeling of particular sincerity and directness . . . it revealed
to Stanislavsky new possibilities of altering existing theatrical forms
and transforming the stage performance into a more direct reﬂection
of real life.54
A Simple Case and The Deserter 157
The sensation of the audience in the cinema of proximity encouraged a
similar tendency in the ﬁlm actor, says Pudovkin.55
Ultimately, are the terms regressive and progressive useful towards
an understanding of Pudovkin’s work? Can the inﬂuence of Stanislavsky
and Kuleshov upon Pudovkin be respectively, decisively thus
represented or is this merely to repeat a prejudice rooted in an avantgarde
hagiography? Is the tacit conﬂation of political and artistic
credibility no more than a simplistic interpolation of Lenin’s insistence
on the necessity of the Party as the vanguard of the Revolution (see
introduction, above)? Does the division between two camps presume as
unbreachable the contesting claims of the various Soviet factions and
deny the number of possible positions that could be (and were) held
with equal sincerity? My contention here is that, while Pudovkin may
align himself theoretically on different occasions with one faction or
another, in practice he is something of a hybrid.
James Naremore, in Acting in the Cinema, consistently casts Pudovkin
as Stanislavsky’s ‘most ardent disciple’.56
Pudovkin maintains that the
relationship was more one of convergence than conversion. Indeed, his
claim that his position has been arived at gradually, through trial and
error and reﬂection upon personal experience suggests a mode of development
of which Stanislavsky himself would approve whole-heartedly.
Pudovkin called upon his experience not only as a director but also as
an actor (with Perestiani, Gardin, Kuleshov, Trauberg and Kozintsev
and Otsep). In Ivan the Terrible, says Eisenstein, Pudovkin committed
himself to his role so thoroughly that he made himself ill.57
Inkizhinov
says that, although a poor actor himself, Pudovkin worked by demon-
stration.58
‘Refracting theory through the prism of experience’, Stanislavsky
and Pudovkin become similar in tone as much as in content.
Pudovkin retains his belief as to what constitutes the aims of art but
apparently changes his mind about how this is to be best achieved. For
Pudovkin, writing in 1926, ‘the highest valuation of a work of art is the
experience of a real emotion’. that is to say, it is to be evaluated
according to its subjective effect.59
Montage is recognised by Pudovkin
as a powerful means towards this end: ‘editing is not merely a method
of linking separate scenes or pieces but is a method that controls the
‘‘psychological guidance’’ of the spectator’.60
Pudovkin continues in
the 1920s to acknowledge the observations of Kuleshov on speciﬁc
functions fundamental to their art, but begins to regard that which had
previously been uniquely celebrated as now deleterious to the aims of
158 Vsevolod Pudovkin
that art. Pudovkin acknowledges that montage can effectively create a
ﬁctive, purposeful geography or temporal unity (see chapter one,
above) and acknowledges also that ﬁlm montage allows the director to
construct the appearance of an entirely new human being who does
not exist in reality, by assembling a sum of parts shot in close-up
(creative anatomy). It is these individual shots which conﬁrm Kuleshov
in his attachment to reality. Pudovkin acknowledges that the performance
of an actor can be rendered effectively (in Kuleshov’s terms,
with speed and economy) by its differentiation into essential elements
taken separately and by their subsequent selective re-integration:
Between the natural event and its appearance on screen there is a
marked difference. It is exactly this difference that makes the ﬁlm an
art. Guided by the director, the camera assumes the task of removing
every superﬂuity and directing the attention of the spectator in
such a way that he shall see only that which is signiﬁcant and characteristic
. . . The will of the director transforms and subdues reality
in order to assemble the work out of it.61
In 1929, speaking to a foreign audience, Pudovkin stresses that the
exploration of montage is a course along which one might still usefully
proceed.62
However, in practice he had moved away from Kuleshov’s
example even if he had not yet wholly transferred his allegiance
elsewhere.
By 1934 and the publication of The Actor in Film, Pudovkin is
placing the unity of an actor’s performance, the reality and integrity of
the event, as a priority over efﬁciency. His respect for the ‘whole and
life-like image’ requires that technical obstacles to the rendition of an
actor’s performance as a whole be as far as possible counteracted.
Stanislavsky’s method is advocated as a means of achieving unity and
integrity of performance, of overcoming procedural interruptions which
correspondingly threaten an impression of wholeness in the audience.
Montage constitutes dismemberment of reality, Pudovkin adheres to
the totality. In 1934, Pudovkin writes: ‘The realism of a representation
increases as its approach to the complexity of an actual object and as
its deepening by detail, but at the same time it must portray the object
as part of a whole’.63
For Pudovkin, the actor acquires new signiﬁcance
and thereby priority as that unity through which emotion is at one and
the same time conveyed and aroused. The actor becomes a ﬁgure of
A Simple Case and The Deserter 159
communion, of ‘spiritual exchange’. Performance is accorded the
creative prerogative in the realisation of the scenario, rather than
editorial construction. Pudovkin criticises the earlier de-valuation of
the actor to the status of a mere shot-sign:
The actor became, so to say, shufﬂed, sorted out, used in effect, like
an aeroplane, a motor car, or a tree. The director, in searching for
the right methods of constructing a performance cinematographically,
failed to understand that to get the fullest value in a
performance, cinematographic or otherwise, by a living human
being, that living person must not only not be eliminated in the
process of shooting, not only preserved but revealed; and if not
accomplished in a realistic manner, that is to say, not uniﬁed and
alive, in the end the person in the ﬁlm would be a great deal more
lifeless than the aeroplane and the motor car (which, it has to be
said, is precisely what did happen in the ﬁlms of some directors).64
Pudovkin ﬁnds in cinema the fullest means of realising and validating
the intentions of Stanislavsky. It is as though Stanislavsky had been
frustrated and encumbered in his intentions rather than of his own
volition had elected to not use cinema, not to see in it the potential
recognised by Pudovkin. Pudovkin ﬁnds that the cinema close-up
maximises empathy between performance and audience; montage eyeline
matches, rather than being no more than a particular instance of
editorial concinnity, achieve the psychological communion and intensity
of Stanislavsky’s ensemble on stage.
Pudovkin records that his reservations had been expressed, and his
shift in position had been arrived at independently in practice, before
they became codiﬁed in the later paean to Stanislavsky. Vera Baranovskaia
remembered the trepidation with which she approached her work
on The Mother, unaccustomed as she was to the procedures of its
director (see chapter three, above). She identiﬁes the difﬁculty in ﬁlm
acting of overcoming its practical exigencies, shooting a role in
separate pieces and out of sequence, and says that the craft of the
professional actor is that which enables him or her to master ‘mosaic
work’. Pudovkin in 1934 repeats her formulation:
In the cinema, exactly as in the theatre, we immediately come right
up against the problem posed by the discontinuity of the actor’s
160 Vsevolod Pudovkin
work being in direct contradiction with his need for a continuous
creative ‘living into’ [vzhivanie] and embodiment of the image
played.65
In The Path of Artistic Cinema, Iezuitov maps a history which, in 1934,
proves fortuitous for Pudovkin. The terms of the comparison with
Eisenstein are simplistic but nevertheless favour Pudovkin (see chapter
three, above):
In those years, when the school of intellectual cinema was on the
rise, the school of Pudovkin also ﬁrmly established itself. In relation
to Eisenstein it adopted a distinct position. If Eisenstein renounced
the subject, Pudovkin made subjective construction the fundamental
principle of his craft. Eisenstein made ﬁlms of mass action, Pudovkin
of the activities of the hero. Eisenstein hardly ever resorted to
the assistance of the actors, orientating himself towards typage, but
Pudovkin could not conceive of a picture without the participation
of actors. ..It was natural for Eisenstein to renounce the representation
of the psychology of a person but with Pudovkin this was
afﬁrmed. The ﬁlms of Eisenstein were therefore akin to to physiology
whereas Pudovkin’s ﬁlms were more emotional. The difference
between the two directors extends to technique. Eisenstein made
use of montage as the basis of his work, that is to say, the collision
of pictures. Pudovkin coupled them together. In resolving the problems
of ﬁlm language, Eisenstein preferred blatant metaphors,
Pudovkin liked much more metaphors which were concealed . . .
The dispute between these two schools, the school of Eisenstein
and the school of Pudovkin, was similar to that which pertained
between the system of Meyerhold and that of Stanislavsky, between
the literary art of Mayakovsky and, for instance, the art of
Fadeev.66
The early writings of Kuleshov and Pudovkin can be said to be
products of a scientistic ‘Zeitgeist’ (see chapter one and chapter two,
above). ‘Our exercises, our training’, says Kuleshov, ‘were conceived
according to fundamental laws extracted from the analysis of the structure
of ﬁlm, the camera and the human mechanism of the actor’.67
In
such an atmosphere the writing of theoretical works was itself
construed as a practical, productive activity engaged in by the artist as
A Simple Case and The Deserter 161
worker. In order to enhance his credibility, Pudovkin stakes a similar
claim for Stanislavsky, forcing a comparison with the methods of
Pavlov in physiology and of Michurin in biology:
Before Stanislavsky . . . the majority had been content either to
depict personal emotions or to formulate general principles of a
poetic rather than scientiﬁc character . . . Stanislavsky’s great merit
lies in the fact that the results of his theatrical analysis, scrupulously
veriﬁed by experiment, have produced a number of objective principles
which can serve every actor and every producer as a basis for
methodical work . . .68
Ironically, Pudovkin urges the case much further than Stanislavsky ever
did on his own behalf: Stanislavsky’s identiﬁcation of the pressing need
for a grammar governing the actor’s work is reminiscent rather of the
ambiance of a previous age. Unlike Meyerhold, he concerns himself
with the actor rather than a systemitisation of the entire dramatic event
or experience (for instance, Meyerhold’s N=A1
+ A2
). Indeed, he often
felt the dichotomy himself between himself in a role and himself as his
own director. Equally, Stanislavsky is concerned that acting ﬁnds itself
distinguished from music and painting in the absence of a codiﬁed
technique, but is prompted more by a perceived lack in professional
standing than by an endeavour to ﬁnd some universal principle underpinning
all the arts collectively. On his own behalf, Stanislavsky says in
My Life in Art:
In a series of variegated exercises I tried to develop . . . the inner
rhythm of that unseen energy which calls out movement and action
. . . These are purely practical methods and theses . . . it would be a
mistake to look in them for any scientiﬁc bases from which I feel
myself to be very far.69
He is wont to stress that his initiation into the mysteries of his art has
developed with profound introspection and soul-searching:
The super-conscious is ruled by inspiration . . . is that miracle
without which there can be no true art and which is served by the
conscious technique of the actor which I tried to establish . . . My
system does good only when it becomes second nature of the actor,
162 Vsevolod Pudovkin
when he stops thinking of it consciously, when it begins to appear
natural as of itself . . .’70
Stanislavsky’s ﬁnal legacy to Pudovkin rests in his almost lyrical
exposition of the place of the ﬁlm actor himself as a living breathing
human being. For an audience the experience of watching a ﬁlm
should become, says Pudovkin in 1934, more like watching everyday,
ordinary behaviour. ‘the ﬁnal object of the actor and his performance is
to convey to the spectator a real person, or at least a person who could
conceivably exist in reality’.71
This is to say, that performance should
be judged by its mimetic authenticity and credibility, in reference to
something which resides outside the experience of the ﬁlm. Pudovkin
suggests also that the ‘magic IF’ of Stanislavsky is a means whereby
the actor can counteract the ruptures imposed upon the unity and
integrity of his performance by shooting out of sequence and by successive
takes. Signiﬁcantly enough, he never suggests a radical change in
the procedures responsible for the disruption. However, by the time
that Pudovkin writes The Actor in Film, it is as though the entire institution
is to be reproached for its removal from another ‘everyday’ life.
Pudovkin quotes the Diderot paradox. By the time that Pudovkin
writes The Actor in Film, his theoretical concerns appear to have shifted
from the act to the actor. When Pudovkin says that it is crucial that the
director have a proper understanding of ‘. . . the living individual, a
human being as a person, with his own profundity and complexity’, he
refers surely less to a role as an external given which the actor is
required to characterise than to the actor himself.72
Notes
1 see ‘Muzyka v kino’, Kino, October–December 1923, p. 19; L. Sabaneev,
‘Kino i muzyka’, Sovetskoe kino 2–3, May–June 1925, pp. 29–32 and
Vladimir Messman, ‘Muzyka v kino’, Sovetskoe kino 6–7, 1926; Khristanf
Khersonskii, ‘Muzyka v kino’ and Sergei Budoslavskii, ‘Metody postroeniia
kino-muzykal’noi kompozitsii’, Kino-zhurnal ARK 3, 1925 p. 17 and
pp. 18–19; Evgenii Mandel, ‘Muzykal’naia illiustratsiia k ﬁl’me’, Kinozhurnal
9, 1925; see also Aleksandr Pergament, ‘Kino i muzyka’, Art-ekran
4, 1923, p. 5
2 IM/BFI/SM item 89; there is a quantity of correspondence in the archive
indicating the size of orchestra which the Film Society employed, the
length of rehearsal time and its (often disputed) fee . . . but little information
as to the scores
A Simple Case and The Deserter 163
3 Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Cinema in Revolution, tr. D. Robinson, London
1974, p. 141; see also Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard Taylor,
London 1988, p. 188 re ‘correction’ of the religious dance sequence in
Storm over Asia by its musical accompaniment
4 Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, tr. Hobbs and Midgley, London
1981, p. 54
5 Dmitri Shostakovich, ‘O muzyke k ‘‘Novomu Vavilonu’’ ’, Sovetskii ekran
12 March 1929, p. 5; compare Eisenstein’s discussion of Prokoﬁev’s score
for Alexander Nevsky [Aleksandr Nevskii, 1938] in ‘Vertical Montage’,
Richard Taylor, ed. Selected Works II, London 1991
6 ‘Budushchee zvukovoi ﬁl’my. Zaiavka’ Sovetskii ekran 32, 1928, Zhizn’
iskusstva 5 August 1928, tr. Taylor, FF
7 Pudovkin, ‘Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I,
p. 121
8 Pudovkin, ‘Asinkhronnost’ kak printsip zvukovogo kino’, SS I, p. 158
9 Jean and Luda Schnitzer, Cinema in Revolution, London 1974, p. 190
10 Pudovkin, ‘Apparat zastavliaet zritelia videt’ tak, kak etogo khochet
rezhisser’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 126
11 Pudovkin, ‘Ekrannyi obraz’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 110 and ‘S.
M. Eisenstein (ot ‘‘Potemkina’’ k ‘‘Oktiabriu’’)’, SS II, p. 122; Galvano
della Volpe, Critique of Taste, tr. M. Caesar, London 1978, p. 223
12 Eisenstein, ‘The Music of Landscape’, Nonindifferent Nature, tr. Herbert
Marshall, Cambridge 1987, p. 314
13 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 71; he tacitly quotes William
James, Psychology, London 1892, pp. 277–279
14 Pudovkin, ‘Naturshchik vmesto aktera’, SS I, p. 184
15 see FF, pp. 208–215; Aleksandr Karaganov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Moscow
1973, p. 117 For an excellent discussion of the subsequent application of
this directive under Boris Shumiatsky, see Richard Taylor in Inside the Film
Factory, London 1991, pp. 193–216
16 VGIK Kabinet kinovedeniia 2955 and 5528; Pudovkin, ‘O iazyke
stsenariia’, Sovetskii ekran 48, 27 November 1928 pp. 6–7; see also ‘Nasha
kartina’ [1929], SS II, pp. 64–66
17 VGIK Kabinet kinovedeniia 695
18 Gosﬁl’mofond 759/2/1; see also ‘Vystuplenie na obsuzhdenii ﬁl’ma
‘‘Prostoi sluchai’’ na zarode ‘‘Manometr’’ ’, SS III, pp. 27–32
19 letter from Mezhrabpom – ﬁl’m to Glavrepertkom, January 1931,
Gosﬁl’mofond 759/2/1
21 see Viktor Shklovskii, ‘Beregites’ muzyki’, Sovetskii ekran 1 January 1929
and ‘Laboratoriia stsenariia’, Kino i zhizn’ 17, 1930 tr. Richard Taylor, FF,
pp. 252 and 294; Vale´rie Posener says that Rzheshevskii’s fate was ﬁnally
sealed by the hullabaloo over Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow: Vale´rie Posener
and Aı¨cha Kherroubi, eds. Le Studio Mejrabpom, Paris 1996, p. 80
22 Gosﬁl’mofond 759/2/1, 23 April 1931; ‘Prakticheskie predlozheniia po
peredelki kartine ‘‘Ochen’ khorosho zhivetsia’’ ’, 28 April 1931
23 VGIK Kabinet kinovedeniia 1711: A. Fevral’skii, ‘Rasskaz o prostom
164 Vsevolod Pudovkin
sluchae’, Krasnaia zvezda 16 December 1932; N. Liadov, ‘Sluchai s Pudovkinom’,
Vecherniaia Moskva 9 December 1932
24 RGALI 2003/1/84 ‘Pochemu ia pereshel iz kino v teatr’ 1932; for Zarkhi’s
thoughts on the sound ﬁlm scenario see RGALI 2003/1/82 ‘Rozhdenie
zvukovogo ﬁl’ma’ and ‘O teorii i praktike zvukovogo stsenariia’ 1930;
Iezuitov says that Pudovkin’s ‘classic’ ﬁlms should more properly understood
as the joint work of Pudovkin and Zarkhi together: Pudovkin,
Moscow 1937, p. 203
25 for Pudovkin’s thoughts on Zemlia see ‘Put’ Dovzhenko – pravil’nyi put’’
[1932] , SS II, p. 139
26 Pudovkin, Film Technique, tr. I. Montagu, New York 1949, pp. 148 and 153;
see also ‘Vremia krupnym planom’, Proletarskoe kino 1, 1932, pp. 30–32.
Pudovkin tacitly refers here to the explosion sequences in A Simple Case.
27 Pudovkin, ‘K voprosu zvukovogo nachala v ﬁl’me’ and ‘ Asinkhronnost’
kak printsip zvukovogo kino’, SS I
28 Nikolai Iezuitov, Pudovkin, Moscow 1937, pp. 174–175
29 RGALI 2060/1/4: this script is incomplete but is of great interest for
Pudovkin’s annotated sketches of the camera plan and choreography for
the mass scenes in the ﬁlm
30 Oksana Bulgakova, ‘Les rapports avec l’Allemagne’ in Vale´rie Posener and
Aı¨cha Kherroubi, eds. Le studio Mejrabpom, Paris 1996, p. 113
31 Pudovkin, Barnet, et. al., ‘Aufstand der Fischer’ in Tatiana Zapasnik and Adi
Petrovich, Die Zeit in Grossaufnahme, Berlin 1983, p. 560; for Osip Brik’s
criticism see Kino, 22 October 1934
32 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films [1947], London
1994, p. 68
33 Nikolai Iezuitov, Aktery MKhAT v kino, Moscow 1938, p. 91; on the classic
attributes of the positive hero, ‘his dryness, hardness and freedom from
sentimentality’, see Rufus W. Mathewson The Positive Hero in Russian
Literature, Stanford 1975
34 VGIK 429, ‘Vplenu chastnogo sluchaia’, Vecherniaia Moskva, 10 June 1933
35 for Golovnia’s thoughts on embarking on work on the ﬁlm see ‘Okno v
zhizn’’, Kino-Moskva, 30 September 1932 and in Svet v iskusstve operatora,
Moscow 1945
36 Nikolai Iezuitov, Aktery MKhAT v kino, Moscow 1938, p. 90
37 Eugene Lyons, Modern Moscow, London 1935, p. 212; see also Rosalind
Sartori, ‘Stalinism and Carnival: Organisation and Aesthetics of Political
Holidays’ in Hans Gu¨nther, ed. The Culture of the Stalin Period, London
1990
38 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, London 1994,
p. 26
39 Pudovkin, ‘Dvoinoi ritm zvuka i izobrazheniia’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, pp.
216–217 (where Pudovkin refers to Berlin although the shooting script,
and Montagu’s translation, locate the action in Hamburg); see also
‘Problema ritma v moem pervom zvukovom ﬁl’me’, SS I, pp. 163–166 and
‘Zvuk i obraz’, SS II, p. 67; on Pudovkin’s experiments with sound in The
A Simple Case and The Deserter 165
Deserter, see also Ian Christie in Inside the Film Factory, London 1991, pp.
176–192 and Kristin Thompson, ‘Early Sound Counterpoint’, Yale French
Studies 60, 1980, pp. 115–140
40 Nikolai Iezuitov, Aktery MKhAT v kino, p. 90
41 Pudovkin, Akter v ﬁl’me, Leningrad 1934, pp. 5–6
42 Pudovkin, ‘Scenario and Direction, Experimental Cinema 1.3, February
1931, p. 16
43 Richard Taylor, Inside the Film Factory, p. 196
44 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda, London 1979, p. 91
45 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard Taylor, London 1988, p. 74
46 Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski, London 1988, p. 276
47 Pudovkin, ‘Osobennosti kinomateriala’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS,
p. 95
48 Stanislavskii, qu. Benedetti, Stanislavski, London 1988, p. 193
49 Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, London 1969, p. 134
50 Pudovkin, ‘Meierkhol’d’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo 6, 5 February 1934
51 Ronald Levaco, ed. Kuleshov on Film, Berkeley 1974, p. 164
52 Osip Brik, ‘Kino v teatre Meierkhol’da’, Sovetskii ekran 20, 18 May 1926,
p. 6
53 Pudovkin, ‘Realizm akterskogo obraza’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 224;
compare Konstantin Stanislavskii, Moia zhizn’ v iskusstve [1926], Moscow
1962, pp. 66–67
54 see Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski, London 1982, p. 63; Pudovkin, ‘Rabota
aktera v kino i ‘‘sistema’’ Stanislavskogo’, Izbrannye stat’i, Moscow 1955, p.
207; The Loss of ‘The Hope’ was ﬁrst performed in the studio in 1913
55 Pudovkin, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 220; for Eisenstein’s memory of the studio
on Skobolevskaia, see Franc¸ois Albera and Naum Kleiman, eds. Eisenstein:
le mouvement de l’art, Paris 1986, p. 83; pictures of the studio survive in the
MKhAT archive in Moscow
56 James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley 1988, pp. 39 and 72
57 Eisenstein, Selected Works IV, Beyond the Star ed. Richard Taylor, London
1995, p. 236
58 Valeri Inkizhinov, ‘Les Souvenirs d’Inkijinoff’, Cine´ma, June 1972, p. 123
59 Pudovkin, ‘Material kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 100
60 Pudovkin, ‘Montazh kak orudie vpechatleniia’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 72
61 Pudovkin, ‘Metod kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 98
62 Pudovkin, ‘Naturshchik vmesto aktera’, SS I,
63 Pudovkin, ‘Realizm akterskogo obraza’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 222
64 Pudovkin, ‘Preryvnost’ akterskoi raboty v kino’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 195
65 Pudovkin, ‘Preryvnost’ akterskoi raboty v kino’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 193
66 Nikolai Iezuitov, Puti khudozhestvennogo ﬁl’ma, Moscow 1934, pp. 82 and 89
67 Ronald Levaco, ed. Kuleshov on Film, Berkeley 1974, p. 100
68 Pudovkin, ‘Rabota aktera v kino i ‘‘sistema’’ Stanislavskogo’, Izbrannye
stat’i, Moscow 1955, p. 210
69 Konstantin Stanislavskii, My Life in Art, tr. J. J. Robins, London 1948,
pp. 561; see also Eisenstein, regretting that these exercises prove so
166 Vsevolod Pudovkin
unsystematic, comparing them unfavourably with the spiritual exercises of
such ‘mystics’ as Loyola and Xavier
70 Konstantin Stanislavskii, My Life in Art, p. 483 and 528; see also Mikhail
Bulgakov’s satire on the method in action, in Black Snow [1965], London
1991, pp. 87 and 162: ‘Tell Veshnyakova’, Toropetzkaia read out, ‘that I
have solved the problem of the part of Xenia . . . I was standing with
Praskovia Fyodorovna on the bank of the Ganges and it came to me: the
answer is that Veshnyakova should not enter through the big double doors
centre stage, but from the side, near the piano. She shouldn’t forget that
she has recently lost her husband and in her state of mind nothing would
induce her to come in by the centre doors. She should walk like a nun,
looking down at the ﬂoor and holding a little bunch of marguerites: so
appropriate for a widow...’ ‘God, how true! How profound!’ cried Veshnyakova.
It’s true! Somehow I felt wrong coming through the big doors’ . . .
Ivan Vasilievich, after ﬁfty ﬁve years of work as a director, had invented
his famous ‘‘method’’, universally regarded as a creation of genius, which
prescribes how an actor should prepare himself to play a part. I don’t
doubt for a moment that the method really is a work of genius, but the
practical application of it reduced me to despair’.
71 Pudovkin, ‘Protivorechiia v rabote aktera’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 190
72 Pudovkin, ‘Preryvnost’ akterskoi raboty v kino’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 195
A Simple Case and The Deserter 167
7. The Eisenstein/Pudovkin
Controversy
Le´on Moussinac, surveying the Soviet scene in situ in 1928, famously
drew a comparison between Eisenstein and Pudovkin: ‘A ﬁlm by Eisenstein
resembles a shout; a ﬁlm by Pudovkin evokes a song’.1
The intention
here is to investigate any distinct principles underpinning their
evident stylistic differences and their reputed ‘feud’; to enquire whether
Pudovkin’s pronouncements on theoretical issues amount to an
independent theoretical stance (see chapter one, above); to examine
what was required of theories of ﬁlm-making and ﬁlm reception in the
context of the scientistic climate in which their own writings were
produced (see chapter two).
However, this task can be undertaken only with caution. To match
the literary output of Eisenstein with that of Pudovkin is hardly to
compare quantitatively like with like. In 1962, writing in the foreword
to Nizhny’s memoir, Ivor Montagu speaks of the available published
work of Eisenstein as ‘an iceberg-above-water fragment of the whole he
left behind’; in 1993, confessing his own less than complete knowledge
of Eisenstein’s writings, David Bordwell refers to the entire oeuvre as ‘a
baggy monster’.2
The six published volumes alone of the Selected
Works (1964–1971) run to more than ﬁve hundred pages apiece.
Against this, we have Pudovkin’s ‘basic primers’ (The Film Scenario
[The Theory of the Scenario] and The Film Director and Film Material and
the later The Actor in Film) together with the various and sporadic
articles and lectures concerned with these themes and with speciﬁc
ﬁlms, originally published in journals and some collected in the
Russian anthologies. Even the best-known of these works are not necessarily
(nor even intentionally) theoretically well-considered; much of
this material is anecdotal. It seems worth repeating the suggestion,
made in an earlier chapter, that this paucity is a measure of Pudovkin’s
reluctance to commit himself to paper, especially in a politically harsh
and unpredictable climate. There is in Eisenstein a marked tendency,
an impetus, an enthusiasm for theorising per se (even if the results are
not always wholly satisfying as theory). Pudovkin seemed increasingly
simply to lack the stomach for it. And all too readily he is prepared to
consign the work of a ﬁlm to the fate of its maker:
Everything said here regarding simple methods of taking shots has
certainly only information value. What particular method of shooting
is to be used, only his own taste and his own ﬁner feelings can
tell the scenarist. Here are no rules; the ﬁeld for new invention and
combination is wide.3
Pudovkin and Eisenstein devoted themselves in the 1920s to the
furtherance of the revolutionary cause. Pudovkin, before Eisenstein,
became a member of the Communist Party and stood as a Party candi-
date.4
They share the Marxist belief that experience may be rationally
directed by means of theory, but both defend themselves against its
fossilisation into dogma; indeed, the zeal which Eisenstein invests in
his theoretical work actively resists such a fate. They dedicated their
ﬁlm-making talents to propagandistic and consciousness-raising subject
matter (the work, Lenin said, of professional agitators) and sought,
although by different means, to address a wide and popular audience;
their writing, similarly, is directed towards utilitarian ends. ‘The
purpose of this study’, says Pudovkin of The Film Scenario, ‘is to
communicate what is, it is true, a very elementary knowledge of the
basic principles of directorial work’.5
Both were concerned with the
training of personnel to work in ﬁlm and Eisenstein, especially,
conceived plans for the better organisation of the industry as a whole.6
Pudovkin, especially, is given to acknowledge how much the ﬁnal
product owes to to the collaborative nature of its making. Pudovkin
wrote of the need to educate the public at large in ﬁlm literacy, to
make of the ﬁlm spectator ‘the ideal perspicuous observer’ [ideal’nyi,
ostreishii nabliodatel’]. Eisenstein became aware, to his cost, that
different audiences receive ﬁlms differently. However, their engagement
with less pragmatic theoretical issues was also recognised as a necessary
contribution. Far from being regarded as an idle indulgence (idle
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 169
speculation is a reprehensible bourgeois occupation, says Eisenstein)
this constructive work was equally valued and valid:7
Let us quote Engels’ remarks . . . on the question of the signiﬁcance
of theory in the social-democratic movement. Engels recognised not
two forms of great struggle (political and economic), as is the
fashion among us, but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a
par with the ﬁrst two.8
A polemical tone was adopted to fuel debate between various theoretical
factions, sometimes against major foreign theoreticians (Pudovkin’s
Kino-zhurnal ARK article ‘Fotogeniia’ was written in response to
Delluc; Eisenstein’s 1926 ‘Be´la Forgets the Scissors’ was written in
response to a lecture given by Be´la Bala´zs), sometimes against compatriots.
Eisenstein persistently introduced Pudovkin into the argument as
the butt of criticism, both as a director and as presumed theoretician,
in order to illustrate his own case more forcibly. He accused him, for
instance, of using hackneyed images dependent upon verbal metaphors
in Otsep’s The Living Corpse, contributed to the hostile reception of
Storm over Asia and, even in the late 1930s, can be found volunteering
improvements to The Mother.9
Certainly, there were genuine differences
between them, but Pudovkin nevertheless admired Eisenstein
enormously. In the 1920s he acknowledged that watching The Battleship
Potemkin had been an inspiration and even in the late 1940s still
proclaimed it to be one of the greatest silent ﬁlms.10
In turn, Eisenstein,
in 1928, praised The End of St. Petersburg as ‘the ﬁrst epic from an
individual psychological theme of the past . . . A hit in every way’.11
Although Lenin’s pronouncement sanctioned theory writing as a
worthwhile endeavour, Pudovkin locates his own contribution within
narrow limits. He accepts his place in the struggle as the given condition
of his ﬁlm-making activity but does not take issue with, nor interrogate
the necessity of, this circumstance: nor does he establish this as
a theoretical prerequisite for his own ﬁlm writing. Whereas Eisenstein
perpetually cites Marx, Plekhanov and Lenin (and, furthermore, the
precursors in a materialist intellectual and scientiﬁc tradition in which
Marxism was founded) there is in Pudovkin no evidence of a close
familiarity with these sources. Indeed, even the term ‘dialectic’ is a
license taken in the English translation, Film Technique, not present in
the 1926 originals.12
Eisenstein’s citations seem to serve as an appeal to
170 Vsevolod Pudovkin
a readership equally erudite and politicised, aware of the skill with
which the intellectual ‘tour de force’ has been accomplished; simultaneously
their unimpeachability lends weight and support to his
arguments. They contribute to the ranks of great names against which
Eisenstein pits himself and to which he is intent upon proving himself
a good match (as Jacques Aumont observes), if not their master.13
In
spite of the esteem in which Pudovkin was held as a practitioner he
never seems to have sought to present himself as a philosopher or
‘grand savant’. Pudovkin, referring in public somewhat scathingly to
the ‘galaxy’ of star names with which an Eisenstein paper was littered,
may well have been, with some justiﬁcation, intimidated and overawed
by the scope of the master’s enterprise.14
It may also be worth
suggesting that, although not entirely exempt from ofﬁcial criticism
himself, Pudovkin’s more modest intellectual ambition rendered him of
more immediate service as a Soviet cultural delegate under Stalin.
Nevertheless, while Eisenstein, like Pudovkin, is keen to foster that
area of practice which ultimately lies beyond the capacity of scientistic
theorising or regulation, Pudovkin’s romantic position was one which
he was also prepared to defend politically: ﬁlm production plans must
be ‘carried out by living people as a free development of creative individuality
and not as the execution of an order or commission’.15
The writings of the early 1920s of Pudovkin and Eisenstein are based
upon the observation of imported ﬁlms and on reports of ﬁlms which
had yet to be released. Consistently they seek to distance themselves
from any of the theatrical practices associated with the pre-revolutionary
‘Film d’Art’ movement. Pudovkin mentions ﬁlms on which he
served his apprenticeship with Vladimir Gardin (Locksmith and
Chancellor and Hammer and Sickle), but he makes no signiﬁcant claim
that the work of this old-school director extended any great inﬂuence
upon him and instead reserves public acknowledgement for Kuleshov
(see chapter one, above). Eisenstein later contrived analyses of his own
ﬁlms to illustrate conscious devices and constructs. Sometimes this
serves to give the impression that, in retrospect, Eisenstein was in the
artistic vanguard of correct thinking. Eisenstein acknowledges the
success of American stunt ﬁlms with audiences and the supremacy of
Chaplin. Pudovkin credited the Americans with the vitalisation of the
camera: ‘It acquired the faculty of movement on its own, and transformed
itself from a spectator to an active observer. Henceforward the
camera, controlled by the director, could not merely enable the
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 171
spectator to see the object shot, but could induce him to apprehend
it’.16
Pudovkin similarly praises Chaplin, as much as director as
performer. Pudovkin and Eisenstein draw their students’ attention to
popular American cinema (for instance Tol’able David, Daddy, Saturday
Night and Woman of Paris) even though Eisenstein, in particular, was
dismissive of their romantic and politically incorrect content.17
Eisenstein
complains that Pudovkin is unduly attached to the example of
Grifﬁth; certainly Pudovkin ﬁnds in Grifﬁth a combination of ‘the
inner dramatic content of the action and a masterly employment of
external effort (dynamic tension)’, certainly the breaking ice ﬂoes in
The Mother owe something to Way Down East, but Pudovkin concedes
that Grifﬁth is far from infallible – only the last part of Intolerance is
considered worthy, its ‘ponderousness and tiredness effaced its effect
for the most part’.18
Eisenstein also accuses Pudovkin of continuing
unthinkingly in the footsteps of his erstwhile teacher, although
Pudovkin himself does not ﬁnd Kuleshov’s ﬁlms entirely beyond
reproach.19
Eisenstein considered that it was not sufﬁcient to progress
by piecemeal adjustments in practice and criticises Pudovkin for failing
to advance theoretically Kuleshov’s concept of montage: by 1929, he
says, ‘thoroughly outmoded’.20
It could be suggested that Pudovkin’s
primer contents itself with the codiﬁcation of current practice, seeking
to extract from it a number of cogent principles which it is assumed to
contain. Pudovkin’s project, it could be suggested, grounds itself
conservatively in the normative acceptance of practical conventions; a
ﬁlm is, for instance, assumed to be a certain length, consisting of a
given number of reels projected at a given speed (see chapter ﬁve,
above). While never proscriptive (‘Here are no rules; the ﬁeld for new
invention and combination is wide’), Pudovkin rarely risks a deﬁnite
comprehensive hypothesis beyond the limits of individual experiments.
Both Pudovkin and Eisenstein defended ﬁlm’s artistic status.
Pudovkin rejected Vertov’s denunciation of ﬁlm as art; Eisenstein
accused him of making mischief in his manifestos against art.21
Eisenstein
and Pudovkin, along with Kuleshov, Timoshenko, Eikhenbaum
and others, agreed that montage was the speciﬁc property by which
ﬁlm art was to be deﬁned, governed and evaluated: ‘editing is the basic
creative force’, says Pudovkin, at the opening of the German edition of
The Film Director and Film Material, ‘the foundation of ﬁlm art’.22
‘Because of its methodology, shot and montage are the basic elements
of ﬁlm . . . To determine the essence of montage is to solve the problem
172 Vsevolod Pudovkin
of ﬁlm as such’, says Eisenstein , in 1929.23
For both, art is inextricably
bound to craft. But Eisenstein often judged the methods employed by
Pudovkin and found his art somewhat wanting:
What then characterises montage and, consequently, its embryo, the
shot?
Collision. Conﬂict between two neighbouring fragments. Conﬂict.
Collision.
Before me lies a crumpled yellowing sheet of paper.
On it there is a mysterious note:
‘Series-P’ and ‘Collision-E’.
This is a material trace of the heated battle on the subject of
montage between E (myself) and P (Pudovkin) six months ago.
We have already got into a habit: at regular intervals he comes to
see me late at night and, behind closed doors, we wrangle over
matters of principle.
So it is in this instance. A graduate of the Kuleshov school, he zealously
defends the concept of montage as a series of fragments. In a
chain. ‘Bricks’.
Bricks that expound an idea serially. I opposed him with my view of
montage as a collision, my view that the collision of two factors
gives rise to an idea.
In my view a series is merely one possible particular case.
Remember that physics is aware of an inﬁnite number of combinations
arising from the impact (collision) between spheres. Depending
on whether they are elastic, non-elastic or a mixture of the two.
Among these combinations is one where the collision is reduced to
a uniform movement of both in the same direction.
That corresponds to Pudovkin’s view.
Not long ago we had another discussion. Now he holds the view
that I held then. In the meantime he has of course had the chance
to familiarise himself with the set of lectures that I have given at the
GTK since then.
So, montage is conﬂict.24
It does not suit Eisenstein’s purpose here to mention the number of
possible exceptions in Pudovkin’s practice from the stance in which
Eisenstein represents him – for instance, where movement initiated in
one shot is not continued into the next (during the prison escape in The
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 173
End of St. Petersburg) or where an image is ironically paired with a title
(heralding the infant lama in Storm over Asia). This is to say, even
before his feud with Eisenstein in 1929 and his supposed change of
heart (supposed, this is, by ‘E’ and not conﬁrmed explicitly by ‘P’).
Pudovkin’s work is not entirely consistent nor commensurate. Signiﬁcantly
enough, Eisenstein does not re-examine the primers for contradictions
in this stance nor does he identify past points of contact
between Pudovkin and himself. For instance, although Eisenstein later
retracts, both he and Pudovkin had used the analogy of a shot
performing in sequence as a word serves in a sentence.25
Eisenstein’s notion of montage as conﬂict applies to ﬁlm a principle
derived from and extensible elsewhere: Eisenstein thereby appropriates
for his theoretical position a measure of ideological credibility and
approval:
In the realm of art this dialectical principle of the dynamic is embodied
in
CONFLICT
as the essential basic principle of the existence of every work of art
and every form.
FOR ART IS ALWAYS CONFLICT:
1. because of its social mission
2. because of its nature
3. because of its methodology.26
Eisenstein considers conﬂict not only as a mode of construction
between separate shots and the overall structure of a ﬁlm but also as an
antagonistic mode of address to the spectator: ‘In our conception a
work of art . . . is ﬁrst and foremost a tractor ploughing over the
audience’s psyche in a particular class context’.27
One is reminded of
Bukharin’s declaration of intent with regard to the intelligentsia,
‘ideologically conditioned in a deﬁnite way. Yes, we will put our stamp
on intellectuals, we will work them over as in a factory’.28
In ‘The
Montage of Film Attractions’, Eisenstein advocates that the audience
be subjected to ‘a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions’.
He here invokes Pavlov: ‘The method of agitation through spectacle
consists in the creation of a new chain of conditioned reﬂexes by
associating selected phenomena with the unconditioned reﬂexes they
produce’.29
For Eisenstein, the ordering of images does not of necessity
174 Vsevolod Pudovkin
correspond to a logical exposition of a pre-ordained plot pre-existent in
the director’s imagination nor should it correspond to a latent expectation
in the viewer.
By contrast, Pudovkin is altogether more mild and amenable, more
temperate and conciliatory and foregoes the model offered by
physiology. He speaks of the ‘psychological guidance’ of the spectator.
Already in his account of the making of The Mechanics of the Brain
Pudovkin presumes that the spectator’s interest in a simple narrative
or exposition will naturally follow a given course (natural, that is, in
the sense of the observation of a comparable everyday event) and
that it is to this potential, intentional view of an imaginary ideal
observer that, as a rule of thumb, the editing plan should corre-
spond.30
For the most part, Pudovkin suggests, the director concedes to
and complies with the presumed expectation and does not seek to
disrupt it; montage is a means of easing its course by the elimination of
superﬂuous detail and ‘insigniﬁcances that fulﬁl only a transitional
function’:
Imagine yourself observing a scene unfolded in front of you, thus: a
man stands near the wall of a house and turns his head to the left;
there appears another man slinking cautiously through the gate. The
two are fairly widely distant from one another – they stop. The ﬁrst
takes some object and shows it to the other, mocking him. The
latter clenches his ﬁsts in a rage and throws himself at the former.
At this moment a woman looks out of a window on the third ﬂoor
and calls, ‘Police!’ The antagonists run off in oppposite directions.
Now, how would this have been observed?
1. The observer looks at the ﬁrst man. He turns his head.
2. What is he looking at? The observer turns his glance in the same
direction and sees the man entering the gate. The latter stops.
3. How does the ﬁrst react to the appearance on the scene of the
second? A new turn by the observer; the ﬁrst takes out an object
and mocks the second.
4. How does the second react? Another turn; he clenches his ﬁsts
and throws himself on his opponent.
5. The observer draws aside to watch how both opponents roll
about ﬁghting.
6. A shout from above. The observer lowers his head and sees
the result of the warning – the antagonists running off in opposite
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 175
directions . . . Here we have approached closely the basic signiﬁcance
of editing. Its object is the showing of the development of
the scene in relief, as it were, by guiding the attention of the spectator
now to one, now to the other separate element.31
As with Kuleshov, it is important not only that the episode is broken
down for the sufﬁcient assembly of a logical sequence but also that this
sequence can be adequately constructed from individual, independent
bits shot in isolation; economical construction is advocated, the
minimum (in terms of number of shots) is promoted as the optimum.
Also like Kuleshov, it seems signiﬁcant that the example locates an
external observer, apportioning his interest between active protago-
nists.32
Elsewhere, Pudovkin suggests that the camera may also be
located in the scene subjectively, to considerable effect, to identify one
or another protagonist’s point of view. The montage is again dependent
upon narrative logic and diegetic contiguity.
Pudovkin sometimes speaks of montage as a more positively interventionist
and constructive procedure, obliging the spectator to become
‘the ideal perspicuous observer’: these methods he summarily lists as
contrast, parallel, symbolic, simultaneous or reiterative montage.33
Pudovkin here asserts that it is incumbent upon the director, in his
selection of shots and their assembly, their subject matter and manner
of cutting, to construct a non-naturalistic reality, ‘not as everyone sees
it’; montage speciﬁcally enables the bringing together of elements
which are not of necessity spatially or temporally contiguous:
The lens of the camera is the eye of the spectator. He sees and
remarks only that which the director desires to show him, or, more
correctly put, that which the director himself sees in the action con-
cerned.34
One must learn to understand that editing is in actual fact a compulsory
and deliberate guidance of the thoughts and and associations
of the spectator . . . If the editing be co-ordinated according to
a deﬁnitely selected course of events or conceptual line, either agitated
or calm, it will either excite or soothe the spectator.35
But even where the content of a shot is not unambiguously predicated
by the content of its precursor, Pudovkin seems to suggest that there is
a thematic or formal movement, a deﬁnite motivation for transferral of
176 Vsevolod Pudovkin
attention and that this impetus effects the serial connection which
Eisenstein seeks to shatter and replace with collision.
Contrast – Suppose it be our task to tell of the miserable situation of
a starving man; the story will impress the more vividly if associated
with mention of the senseless gluttony of a well-to-do man . . . On
the screen the impression of this contrast is yet increased, for it is
possible not only to relate the starving sequence to the gluttony
sequence, but also to relate scenes and even separate shots of the
scenes to one another, thus . . . forcing the spectator to compare the
two actions . . . one strengthening the other. . .36
In Pudovkin’s example of contrast, the idea of poverty is connotated in
the ﬁrst series of shots; the second series exaggerates the ﬁrst connotation,
throws it into relief, but nothing new is posited, no new idea is
produced spontaneously by the juxtaposition; the juxtaposition is not
theoretically presented as a union of opposites, it is not deemed to
effect a synthesis with antithesis.
Certainly, even though the experience of watching a Pudovkin ﬁlm
can prove conspicuously physically bombarding (Eisenstein’s example
of perfect metric montage, the patriotic parade in The End of St. Petersburg),
Pudovkin urges constraint upon the director and is anxious that
ﬁlm watching is an aesthetically pleasing and constrained activity – the
ﬁlm should not be inordinately long; tensions should be balanced such
that the spectator is not exhausted before the thematic climax; undue
use of certain technical devices (irises and shutters) should be
judiciously avoided for fear of trying the viewer; Pudovkin advocates
novelty as a phatic element, reviving and retaining attention rather
than forcibly shocking or ‘ploughing over the psyche’: ‘the spectator
should be preserved for maximum tension at the end’.37
In the same year of the reputed feud, Eisenstein wrote:
According to Kuleshov’s deﬁnition (which Pudovkin also shares as
a theorist) montage is the means of unrolling an idea through
simple shots (the ‘epic’ principle).
But in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive
shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision
between two shots that are independent of one another (the ‘dramatic’
principle).38
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 177
Neither in principle nor by method does Pudovkin allow of shots
which are independent: ‘In this preliminary paperwork must be created
that style, that unity, which conditions the value of any work of art’.39
Pudovkin is never indifferent to the pre-ﬁlmic event which the shot
preserves and there is always intentionality in the selection of material
and of the shot: the ﬁlm shown to the audience corresponds to the idea
of the ﬁlm from which the editing plan is drawn and the ﬁlm staged
and shot. When Pudovkin speaks of editing as creative he speaks as
much of the painstaking initial analysis into basic units (camera angles)
as the later synthesis of the whole. Eisenstein implies in his writing in
the period 1922–1926 that the ﬁlm is not known before the ﬁnal
process, that the ﬁlm as material art object and as idea does not exist
until it reaches the editing table; by the 1930s his teaching implies that
the initial process is equally signiﬁcant. Pudovkin sticks ﬁrmly
throughout to his triadic principle, which suited well his practice and
his ideal of ﬁlm-making as a collaborative venture, one in which all
participants fully comprehend the needs and tasks of their colleagues.
For Pudovkin, the creative work lies as much with the scenarist and
the director of the mise-en-sce`ne, holding the established idea of the
ﬁlm in their heads as they proceed, as it does with the editor. Through
this series of montage processes the ﬁlm is rigorously built, but the idea
of the ﬁlm is conceived beforehand.
Pudovkin’s pronounced position with regard to montage changes
with time. In the early 1930s he obligingly endorses ofﬁcial censure of
a past preoccupation with montage. Although he is, as ever, disapointingly
imprecise in his terminology, in this instance he may be understood
to mean the fast cutting for which Soviet silent cinema was
known abroad (Eisenstein averages less than 1.7 seconds per shot,
Pudovkin 2.5 seconds, Dovzhenko 3.5–4.5 seconds and Hollywood
5–6 seconds, says Bordwell).40
He intends also to identify a ﬁlmmaking
practice in which the editing process takes creative precedence
over all else, or, yet worse, a purely formal and autonomous exercise
which disregards the representational content of the image. Pudovkin’s
procedural principle allowed him to adapt relatively comfortably to the
new emphasis on the actor’s performance, a position at which he had
arrived, he maintains, through his work with artists from the Moscow
Art Theatre. Indeed, Eisenstein coincidentally corroborates Pudovkin’s
claim by saying that in 1924–1925 (that is, even in the silent period)
there was a prevailing trend ‘that living man could only be shown in
178 Vsevolod Pudovkin
ﬁlm in long dramatic scenes. And that cutting (montage) would
destroy the idea of real man’41
(see chapter three, above). In The Actor
in Film Pudovkin is keen to stress that ﬁlm preserves the real time in
which an actor’s performance was delivered before the camera; he
emphasises that the actor’s performance engages a fully psychologised
‘real lived experience’, a commodity which Eisenstein was wont to
despise. ‘The discontinuity of the actor’s work’, says Pudovkin, ‘must
never be ignored but always treated as a difﬁculty to be overcome’.42
The ideological shift of the 1930s towards individual consciousness and
effort, a turn away from the earlier determinism for which Pavlov had
seemingly lent support, met with ofﬁcial directives for ﬁlms with naturalistic
characters and linear plot development.
At this time, Pudovkin urges Ivor Montagu not to republish the
‘basic primers’ in the absence of an apologia accounting for the milieu
in which they had been written (see introduction, above). ‘Types
instead of Actors’ proves embarrasssingly incompatible with the tenets
of ‘The Actor in Film’; Pudovkin now wishes to stress that editing is
the foundation of ﬁlm art but that art is not constituted by montage
alone.43
By the 1940s, Pudovkin is making cursory additional references
to ‘dialectical thinking’ and appears to have extended the connections
which he ﬁnds acceptable in principle to include those which he
had himself effected in practice (thereby resolving some of the earlier
anomalies); but essentially he repeats the examples of correct logical
construction given previously:
A myriad of methods of connection may exist between the highly
ideophilosophical connection and the externally-formal connection,
but all of them must be present in the shots being joined in order
that montage create an action on screen which develops without
interruption, is understandable and is completely meaningful. Two
shots cannot be joined together if one of them in some manner or
aspect does not continue the other. This of course must be understood
to include the widest range of possible forms of connection
including sharp contrast or contradiction, which are sometimes the
best ways of joining two or more shots in a continuous development
of a single idea.44
Essentially, this is mere tinkering. One has little sense of Pudovkin’s
engagement with theoretical issues consolidating or developing with
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 179
time, with changing technical opportunities or with the vicissitudes of
the political climate, beyond his reappraisal of the actor. Here I think,
is where the real difference with Eisenstein lies; if one is the hedgehog
(P) then the other is the fox (E). Pudovkin logs his sound experiments
on A Simple Case and The Deserter but there is nothing comparable to
the thoroughness of Eisenstein’s commentary on Nevsky. For Eisenstein,
montage serves as a ‘fulcrum of analysis’ much as the reﬂex serves
Bekhterev and Pavlov. It is his consistent attachment to montage as a
theoretical key (to art, to nature, to social progress) which bestows
upon his writing the considerable coherence it commands over its vast
surface. Montage provides the hypothesis in which Eisenstein sets out
to prove an equivalence between ﬁlm-making and viewing: variation in
one function is matched with a corresponding reformulation in the
other. For Eisenstein, theorising is the means of perceiving reality more
closely, more astutely, more correctly. Pudovkin presents a number of
worked examples rather than an attempt at theory. Pudovkin’s classiﬁcations
are fuzzy (albeit not as unsatisfactory as some critics, to suit
their own agenda, have suggested) and his thinking sadly vague;45
Eisenstein’s categorisation and recategorisation and cross-referencing
has real intellectual status and force even where it tends towards
pedantry. Sometimes the structure in place allows him to accommodate,
integrate and exploit new technologies of production: undaunted
by the advent of sound and in spite of the well-founded fears of the
1928 manifesto, Eisenstein’s ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’
develops ideas expounded in 1924. He recognises crucially that in
sound cinema the focus of attention reverts centripetally into the shot
rather than concentrating on the connections between them. The
theory develops towards collision within the shot (hidden editing) such
that in his discussion of Crime and Punishment with Nizhny he argues
for a method hitherto considered ‘unﬁlmic’.46
Montage provides the
means whereby Eisenstein reconciles himself theoretically to the
ofﬁcial revival of Stanislavsky and the methods of the Moscow Art
Theatre (my erstwhile ‘deadly enemy’).47
Certainly these shifts and
turns were opportune (Eisenstein had often openly declared his hostility
to naturalistic performance and psychologism hitherto) but there is
more at stake than personal vindication, I think.
Amongst the ‘galaxy of stars’ referred to by Eisenstein there are
numerous eminent scientists. He is familiar with contemporary research
and its historical and theoretical context; he apprehends Marxism, too,
180 Vsevolod Pudovkin
as a science which, as such, can be dismantled to discover fundamental
laws of matter beyond the conﬁnes of the discipline. Eisenstein
seemingly appreciates the full force of J. B. S. Haldane’s deﬁnition of
correct methodology: ‘the dialectical method in science is to push a
theory to its logical conclusion and show that it negates itself’;48
this is
to say, he appreciates Marxism as science but also recognises what
might be required of a science thoroughly informed by Marxism.
Marxism as a discipline (‘referring to systematic scholarship offering a
coherent interpretation of a set of phenomena’), grounds itself as much
in natural science and a science of cognition as in philosophy. To Marx
and Engels, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a vindication of the
dialectical process: ‘to Marx and Engels, Darwin’s theory of evolution
was an important illustration of the principle of transition of quantity
into quality’.49
Lenin reproached Plekhanov for deviating from the
materialism of Marx and Engels in positing his notion of the ‘hieroglyph’.
In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism he asserted the primacy of
matter and that this view is scientiﬁcally corroborated; ‘natural science
instinctively adheres to the materialist theory of knowledge’.50
But
Eisenstein’s extensive and eclectic reading includes not only scientists
working in the approved materialist tradition, but also those often
disparaged by later Soviet commentators as idealist or bourgeois (or
simply foreign). Freud (whose writings were translated and widely
available by this date), was a source of inspiration for Eisenstein’s
writing in the 1930s and contributed to a teaching syllabus at VGIK
which included also Pavlov, William James, Helmholtz and Darwin.51
The course structure suggests that he found something of use in all of
them. Eisenstein was familiar with the early treatises of Bekhterev and
often couches his theorising in language redolent of reﬂexology. This,
too, develops with time away from the basic mechanistic model of the
early 1920s: in ‘Perspectives’ (1929), he speaks of:
A complex of conditioned reﬂexes grown wise with experience. And
the direct passion of conditioned reﬂexes.
In the crucible of the dialectic a new fact in construction has been
smelted.
A new social life has been forged.
Or again:
There is no way in which we can produce within ourselves a
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 181
revision of our perception of the act of ‘cognition’ as an act with
immediate effects. Even though reﬂexology has adequately demonstrated
that the process of cognition means an increase in the quantity
of conditional stimulants that provoke an active reﬂex reaction
from a particular subject
Which means that, even in the actual mechanics of the process,
there is something active and not passive.52
In ‘Beyond the Shot’ Eisenstein turns to the psychologist Luria for
support for an argument that the close-up affords an exceptional
magniﬁcation, equivalent to the scale of its signiﬁcance in the mental
image of an event.53
‘A new trend in Soviet psychology became
discernible by the end of the 1920s’, says Loren Graham, ‘this
stemmed from the realisation that with the defeat of subjectivism and
introspection . . . the greatest danger was now from militant materialists
who hoped to swallow up psychology in a purely physiological understanding
of mental activity. The defenders of psychology rallied around
the concepts of psyche and consciousness’.54
However, it seems to me
that David Bordwell over-simpliﬁes the situation and exaggerates his
own case when he designates a shift in Eisenstein’s epistemology (and
hence his theorising) between an early period inﬂuenced by Pavlov’s
mechanism and a later period, in which Pavlov had fallen from ofﬁcial
favour, which sought to accommodate the work of Luria’s master,
Vygotsky. Ben Brewster and Trevor Whittock cast doubt on this thesis;
Aumont and Taylor argue persuasively for consistency and coherence
over shift.55
In any case, Vygotsky likewise did not enjoy ofﬁcial
approval and remained unpublished until the 1960s.56
It seems to me that Eisenstein seeks rather to identify points at
which the extant theoretical structure can expand to incorporate the
new material, and that, again, this indicates development rather than
rupture. Eisenstein engages with potential moments of negation, rather
than avoiding or ignoring them.
‘Science has its ‘‘ions’’ its its ‘‘electrons’’ its ‘‘neutrons’’. Art will
have – attractions!’, writes Eisenstein in 1945.57
Pudovkin drew an
analogy between the methods of his ﬁlm practice and the process of
calculus, one with which, as a chemist, he was very familiar: ‘For
every event a process has to be carried out comparable to . . . ‘‘differentiation’’
– that is to say, dissection into parts or elements . . . there
follows . . . a combination of the discovered separate elements into a
182 Vsevolod Pudovkin
whole – the so-called ‘‘integration’’ ’.58
The process welcomed a recasting
by ideologues (Lenin not least among them) in dialectical
mode; Pudovkin does not make this easy manoeuvre.59
Again, unlike
Eisenstein, he does not assert the ideological correctness of his formal
practice before applying it to the afﬁrmation of a particular political
reality, even though, in the 1930s, he of necessity opens lectures by
declaring the political allegiance: ‘We, as Marxists. . .’.60
Indeed, the
absence of a conspicuous self-examination may have helped Pudovkin’s
‘basic primers’ to the success which they enjoyed abroad. Lewis Jacobs’
appraisal of their reception in the United States is conﬁrmed by Steiner
and Hurwitz:
It did not concern itself with basic dramatic principles common to
all the theatrical arts. We made the error of overlooking the fact that
Pudovkin was presupposing this base and we considered it a Bible
of ﬁlm principle rather than a series of collected essays on ﬁlm tech-
nique.61
Even more remarkable, it seems to me, given Eisenstein’s patent and
fashionable enthusiasms, is the absence in Pudovkin’s writing of the
1920s of any acknowledged reference to current scientiﬁc research; the
1926 publications, The Film Scenario and The Film Director and Film
Material, appeared without footnotes to support any such attachment.
Although Pudovkin occasionally mentions, anecdotally, his work on
The Mechanics of the Brain, he never seeks to underpin whatever principles
of ﬁlm and cinema he presents by extrapolating from what he
evidently understood well, from ﬁrst principles, of Pavlov’s work on
higher nervous activity, even though it might have lent considerable
ideological buttressing and credibility to his own position. Unfashionably,
in an article of 1938, Pudovkin mentions in passing Pavlov’s
hypothesis of language as a second order function (see chapter two,
above), in support of his own thesis of gesture as the primary form of
expression. But neither in Mechanics, nor in his writing about this ﬁlm,
nor in his writing about ﬁlm principles in general does Pudovkin allow
himself the holistic indulgence of Eisenstein. Equally, given Pavlov’s
own resistance to misinterpretation by those who sought to extract
political and ideological capital from his work, the comparative
reticence of The Mechanics and of Pudovkin’s account of it thereafter,
may well have contributed to Pavlov’s own eventual reconciliation to
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 183
the project. As a constructive model for ﬁlm and cinema principle,
Pudovkin is more concerned with the procedures whereby the experiments
are conducted and the proof effected than by the cognitive
ramiﬁcations of Pavlov’s results. Pudovkin states that montage both
corresponds normatively to naturally motivated observation and that,
as a rhythmic mode, it can serve a conducive auxiliary function (it
‘soothes or excites’) or that its content can function to form an
impression (either emotional or intellectual) – but he is far from
explicit as to the distinct physiological and psychological bases of his
suppositions. He provides his reader with the vaguest and most general
of references:
There is a law in psychology that lays it down that if an emotion
gives birth to a certain movement, by imitation of this movement
the corresponding emotion can be called forth.62
The urgency with which Eisenstein perpetually wills himself to classify
and identify discrete qualitative processes (by 1929, deﬁned as metric,
rhythmic, tonal and overtonal montage) was directed towards an
ambitious project, the creation of a cinema in which the distinct
elements of his enquiry eventually would be resolved:
Intellectual cinema will be the cinema that resolves the conﬂicting
combination of physiological overtones and intellectual overtones,
creating an unheard of form of cinema which inculcates the Revolution
into the general history of culture creating a synthesis of
science, art and militant class consciousness.63
This revised thesis of cinema integrates a re-formulation of the viewer
along with a developed, more complex notion of ﬁlm-making. The utilitarian
agenda had required ﬁlm-makers to examine the reception of
their ﬁlms with a general audience, both in terms of the thematic
content, the types and characters represented, and the formal effects
employed. The ﬁrst edition of Sovetskoe kino includes an article on
observation exhorting ﬁlm personnel to watch audiences assiduously
and Eisenstein reports the reception of the Kerensky sequence in October
and cites the exacting efforts of the research laboratory for audience
psycho-physiology: the construction of the Soviet new man and woman
was dependent upon a formulaic quantitative and qualitative appraisal
184 Vsevolod Pudovkin
of the base material.64
Eisenstein, together with many commentators in
ﬁlm journals, very soon discovered that audiences were not homogenous
nor consistent in their reactions and that the viewer could not be
equated as a tabula rasa on which the ﬁlm simply operated. The butchering
sequence in The Strike made no impression upon rural audiences;
provincial audiences found it harder to follow fast and complex
montage than their metropolitan counterparts, more accustomed to
ﬁlm viewing:
. . . on a worker audience the slaughter did not have a ‘bloody’ effect
for the simple reason that the worker associates a bull’s blood above
all with the processing plants near a slaughter-house!
While on a peasant, used to slaughtering his own cattle, there will
be no effect at all.65
Pudovkin’s description of ‘audience’ is more generalised in the primers
and this address more generalist. Pudovkin’s characteristic relative
taciturnity and caution as an ideologue and theoretician proved politically
fortuitous; but this still does not imply that the intellectual
gymnastics by which Eisenstein re-articulated his position were politically
motivated, even if they were nevertheless advisable.
Soviet doctrine dedicated itself to the improvement of society but
recognised that this would be achieved only through the fabrication of
the new Soviet citizen, by educating the citizen’s awareness of his or
her position in Nature, Labour and Society.66
Pudovkin’s appeal for
education in ﬁlm literacy is situated alongside this wider campaign for
basic schooling. Cinema was pressed into service as a tool of enormous
signiﬁcance in the pedagogic project. In their ﬁlms, Eisenstein seems
more determined upon didacticism than Pudovkin (the gods and
Napoleon sequences in October, for instance). Pudovkin was, indeed,
amongst those who, when circumstances required a condemnation,
found Eisenstein guilty of pitching his ﬁlms above the heads of his
audiences:
Young Eisenstein produced The Strike . . . ﬁlled with mere formal
tricks. Instead of showing a serious and important stage in the
history of the Russian labour movement, the formalistic freaks of
the author led spectators away from real life, confused and sometimes
distorted the link of the ﬁlm with actual historical reality.67
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 185
Pudovkin speaks of ‘compulsion’, of the director ‘infallibly leading’ the
viewer, but thematically Pudovkin’s major ﬁlms re-afﬁrm a known
course. He is concerned for and achieves an effectively orchestrated
conceptual and emotional appeal to the audience. However, he is less
than eloquent theoretically as to how this reaction is articulated in the
mind of the viewer. It is for elucidation and support on precisely such
issues that Eisenstein turns to Luria and Freud and to classic treatises
on aesthetics such as Schopenhauer and Christiansen. Eisenstein is
keen to understand the various theories advanced of cognitive and
psychological mechanisms and development in order that ﬁlm may be
employed all the better to affect and impress his audience, to manufacture
a newly receptive, newly aware audience in the process of ﬁlm
viewing. Here again, Pudovkin’s position seems more conservative. He
seems rather to accept his ﬁlm audience as a given, the ‘literacy’ being
accomplished preparatory to the viewing. The audience of a Pudovkin
ﬁlm may be roused, inspired to undertake great deeds but Pudovkin
does not postulate that the experience of ﬁlm viewing itself can effect
an organic change in the viewer.
Engels believed that the unity of theory and practice was connected
with the problem of cognition . . . the most telling evidence against
idealistic epistemologies was that man’s knowledge of nature resulted
in practical beneﬁts, man’s theories of matter ‘worked’ in the
sense that they yielded products for his use.68
Theoretical writing aspired to be scientiﬁc in its concerns with social
utility and also in the methodology which it attempted to espouse. This
conﬁdence in the beneﬁcent workings of science was not unique to the
Soviet Union, but it received there a particular impetus, aptly
paraphrased by Lenin: ‘communism equals Soviet power plus the
electriﬁcation of the entire country’.69
Soviet theorising was equally
scientiﬁc in the inductive model it adopted for itself. It could not afford
to entertain any suggestion that its theses were not empirically veri-
ﬁable.70
Hence the frequent occurrence of syllogisms, intrinsic to
theories of a totalising aspect: Eisenstein demonstrates his theses by
recourse to constructions which already consciously employ the terms
of his proof. The interest and use lies in the process, in the working-out.
Pudovkin is broadly attached to the notion that Marxism is demonstrably
socially progressive and adopts this as the major theme or
186 Vsevolod Pudovkin
‘supra artistic concept’ of his ﬁlms. Marx believed himself to be
labouring in accordance with scientiﬁc precedence; producers of
Marxist of art frequently imitated what they understood of a more
strictly correct scientiﬁc method and perception. Here again, Pudovkin
is curiously out of vogue. His early publications neither affect the
jargon nor the scientistic typography familiar in such as Punin, Meyerhold,
Timoshenko and (occasionally) Eisenstein, presenting their theses
as tables or mathematical equations or diagrams.71
He does not
assume Eisenstein’s somewhat forced pose, employing his own ﬁlms as
an exemplary objective test case for his own hypotheses (for instance,
in ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’). Pudovkin equally lacks Eisenstein’s
attentive identiﬁcation of differences, his taxonomy of distinct
entities as a means of analysing phenomena clearly and
recognising process. He also is less willing to explore I think, the
cinematic relationship between the ﬁlm and its audience. Pudovkin’s
efforts are directed at calculating the product which he delivers in
respect of given common sense appraisals of reception. Even where
Eisenstein’s writing is wildly unsystematic and eclectic, unable to
conﬁne itself to the matter of a particular discipline, there is an urge
towards rational explanation and the discovery of a rational direction
in experience. Not only is Eisenstein fond of locating his own
Timoshenko’s diagrammatic rendition of Kuleshov
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 187
practice and theory metaphysically, he also relishes historical systems
which have striven for all-encompassing totality. He cites the pure
number ratios of Pythagoras, the visual and acoustic harmonies of the
Golden Section and censures Pudovkin for his neglect of such universal
truths:
This sort of work has a very special effect on the person who contemplates
it – not only because it raises itself to the level of natural
phenomena, but also because the law which governs those who
contemplate the work, to the extent that they themselves are part of
organic nature – the contemplator feels himself organically bound to
a work of this type, united, conmingled with it, exactly as he feels
himself united and conmingled with the surrounding organic milieu
and with nature.72
Eisenstein not only recognises the urgency of his political circumstances
but also acknowledges an explicit ideological structure as the
context within which he works: ‘these concepts are not tools’, observes
Jacques Aumont, ‘they are completely inseparable from the very way
in which they are formulated’.73
Certainly Pudovkin advances his case more by commonplace
assumption and in answer to immediate social and political demands
made of him and his fellow Soviet ﬁlm workers, than by rigorous proof
of such connections. But he is equally less attached to a logical theoretical
structure per se than is Eisenstein; signiﬁcantly again, the shifts
and piecemeal adjustments in Pudovkin’s theorising are justiﬁed in his
own reckoning by his gains in practical experience, rather than in a
theoretical recognition of problems as yet unaccounted for, or in any
attempt to consolidate ontological, epistemological and aesthetic
propositions. Pudovkin is little interested in theory for its own sake.
Pudovkin’s basic primers provide a manual which appears of more
immediate practical use (he was in his own practice notoriously methodical),
and which has predictive power only in as much as his axioms
endorse convention and rely on the equilibrium of the viewer with the
ﬁlm; he allows for change in practice and perception in the most
general terms but offers little indication as to how its course can or
should be determined. The themes which concern Pudovkin (the
centrality of the actor; the material, spatial and temporal means
speciﬁc to cinema; cinema and didacticism) are shared with contem-
188 Vsevolod Pudovkin
poraneous ﬁlm commentators in Russia and elsewhere. Pudovkin did
not initiate the subjects of debate which his writings address and often
his contributions are not original nor unique; sometimes he contributes
simply a codiﬁcation of current means and ends. Pudovkin’s theorising
is very much the circumspect product of a particular set of historical
circumstances, to which he responds pragmatically and expediently.
Eisenstein, however, endeavours to provide the foundations of an
ambitiously inclusive theory of cinema which accounts for qualitative
transformation: that is to say, a truly revolutionary theory.
Pudovkin’s writing may fail to fulﬁl satisfactorily some of the
criteria one might reasonably level at a consolidated ﬁlm theory, but
this is not to say that the writing is of no theoretical or utilitarian
value. Rather than censuring Pudovkin for the objective incoherence
of his theory and the inconsistency between his theory and his
practice, it seems to me to be worth recognising the speciﬁc historical
circumstances in which it was produced. Theory, for Pudovkin,
proved itself useful as a contingent resource, and his theory and
practice were mutually informing rather than immediately correspondent.
Pudovkin’s ‘theory’, at any given time, is perhaps never more
than a provisional hypothesis. Pudovkin’s strength, it seems to me, lies
rather in the ﬁlms themselves and in the example which they continue
to afford as experiments in the manipulation and ordering of material,
spatial and temporal means.
Notes
1 L. Moussinac, Le Cine´ma sovie´tique, Paris 1928, p. 161
2 Vladimir Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein, London 1962, p. xi; David
Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, London 1993, p. xiii
3 Pudovkin: ‘Prosteishie spetsial’nye priemy s’emki’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 69
4 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda, London 1979, p. 91
5 Pudovkin: ‘Predislovie’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 53
6 see, for instance, ‘Give us a State Plan’ 1927 and ‘The Twelfth Year’ 1928
in Eisenstein, Selected Works I, ed. Richard Taylor, London 1988
7 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 61
8 V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done?, tr. Robert Service, Harmondsworth 1988, p.
93
9 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 177 and II, London 1991, p. 264
10 see Pudovkin: ‘Ekrannyi obraz’, Kino rezhisser i kino material, SS I, p. 110
also, Pudovkin and Smirnova, Puti razvitiia sovetskoi khudozhestvennoi
kinematograﬁi, Moscow 1950, p. 8
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 189
11 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 112
12 IM/BFI/SM, translator’s note; by 1934, Pudovkin is employing the
approved terminology: ‘Naturalism, idealism and realism in art stand in
the same relation to one another as do mechanism, idealism and dialectical
materalism in philosophy’ Pudovkin, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 224
13 J. Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, tr. Hildreth, London 1987, p. 12
14 actually, Eisenstein can often be caught out in his references; it seems that
his erudition was sometimes more affected than real but that he certainly
liked to convey the impression of being well-informed and thoroughly au
courant
15 Babitsky and Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry, New York 1955, p. 316
16 Pudovkin, ‘Metod kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 96
17 for Eisenstein’s thoughts on Woman of Paris (a much discussed ﬁlm in
Russia in the mid ’20s) see Eisenstein, Selected Works I and for Pudovkin’s
original and revised views see Kinostsenarii and Akter v ﬁl’me; for Eisenstein’s
teaching from Tol’able David and for Pudovkin on this, Daddy and
Saturday Night (and its ‘slight content’) see also V. Kepley jr. ‘Pudovkin
and the Classical Hollywood Tradition’, Wide Angle 7.3 (1985)
18 Pudovkin, ‘Tema’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 55
19 Pudovkin, ‘Siuzhetnoe oformlenie temy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 60: ‘the
dynamically saturated earlier reels are easy to look at and grip the
spectator with ever-increasing excitement. But after the end of the third
reel, where the cowboy’s adventures came to an unexpected end, the
spectator experiences a natural reaction, and the continuation, in spite of
the excellent directorial treatment, is watched with much diminished
interest’.
20 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 163
21 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 62
22 Pudovkin: Film Technique, tr, Montagu, pp. xiii and xv; ‘Predislovie’
[1928], SS I, p. 131
23 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 163
24 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 144; for Pudovkin’s response in 1930 to a
direct question about his differences over a question of montage, see
‘Lektsia na rezhisserskom fakul’tete GIKa’, SS III, p. 205
25 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 46
26 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 161
27 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 62
28 qu. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility, Cambridge 1979, p. 84
29 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 45; Eisenstein later suggests that he did not
know of Pavlov at this date; see ‘How I became a ﬁlm director’ 1945 in
Selected Works III, p. 289 and in Izbrannie proizvedeniia I, p. 104: ‘Thus was
born the term ‘‘the montage of attractions’’. If I had known of Pavlov at
that time I would have called the montage of attractions’’ ‘‘the theory of
artistic irritants’’ [teoriia khudozhestvennykh razdrazhitelei].’
30 see Noe¨l Burch, ‘ Film’s Institutional Mode and the Soviet Response’,
October 11 (1979) pp. 86–87
190 Vsevolod Pudovkin
31 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy obrabotki materiala’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 70
32 Pudovkin’s example corresponds to an ‘experiment’ of Kuleshov, shown at
the Pordenone festival in 1996, in which a man crawls up to a balustrade
and is watched by another man.
33 Pudovkin, ‘Montazh kak orudie vpechatleniia (montazh sopostavliaiushchii)’,
Kinostsenarii, SS I, pp. 72–74
34 Pudovkin, ‘Material kino’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 100
35 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy obrabotki materiala’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 71
36 Pudovkin, ‘Montazh kak orudie vpechatleniia’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 73
37 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 72
38 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 163
39 Pudovkin, ‘Predislovie’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 53
40 Bordwell, Eisenstein, p.46; see also Bryher, Film Problems of Soviet Russia,
Territet 1929, p.15 and Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology, London 1992,
pp. 172–173 for further comparison
41 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 178
42 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 47; Pudovkin: ‘Protivorechiia v rabote
aktera’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 191; see also the discussion of Mae Marsh’s
hands in Intolerance (chapter four, above)
43 V. I. Pudovkin, ‘Film Acting: Two Phases’, Theatre Workshop 1.1 (1936)
pp. 53–67, in which Pudovkin volunteers criticisms of Kuleshov’s ﬁlms and
procedures, including the rehearsal of ﬁlms without ﬁlm
44 qu. Peter Dart, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York 1974, p. 163,
taken from ‘O montazhe’, Izbrannye stat’i, Moscow 1955 (this article dates
from after 1945)
45 for instance, see Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, London 1958 p. 82 and fn.
33 above; it seems clear to me that Pudovkin refers to events simultaneous
in the course of the dramatic action in the class ‘parallelism’ and not
simply to a method of cutting insufﬁciently distinct from ‘contrast’.
Arnheim cursorily summarises Pudovkin and Timoshenko before volunteering
his own new, improved schema
46 Nizhny, p. 97
47 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 74
48 J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Beyond Darwin’ [1939], On Being the Right Size, Oxford
1985, p. 13
49 Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, London 1973,
pp. 52 and 54
50 V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism [1908], London 1952, p. 37
51 Nizhny, p. 154 and Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, London 1952,
p. 483
52 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 155; see also ‘Overtonal Montage’ (1929)
53 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 141
54 Graham, p. 365; this shift was not peculiar to the U.S.S.R.
55 see Ben Brewster’s reply to Bordwell’s ‘Eisenstein’s Epistemological Shift’
in Screen 15.4 (1974–1975) and Trevor Whittock, Metaphor and Film,
Cambridge 1990, p. 102
The Eisenstein/Pudovkin Controversy 191
56 Graham, p. 368 re Vygotsky’s 1934 ‘Thought and Language’; also David
Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History, Oxford 1989
57 Eisenstein, Selected Works III, p. 289
58 Pudovkin, ‘Analiz’, Kinorezhisser i kinomaterial, SS I, p. 102
59 V. I. Lenin, On the Question of Dialectics [1915], Moscow 1980, p. 10
60 for explicit reference, see for instance, Pudovkin, ‘Dvoinoi ritm zvuka i
izobrazheniia’, Akter v ﬁl’me, SS I, p. 217
61 Lewis Jacobs in Pudovkin, Film Technique, New York 1949, p. iv; Steiner
and Hurwitz, qu. Vlada Petric´, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America’,
Ph. D. thesis, New York University, 1973, p. 459
62 Pudovkin, ‘Priemy’, Kinostsenarii, SS I, p. 71; Pudovkin tacitly quotes
William James: see Psychology, London 1892, pp. 277–279
63 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 194
64 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 125
65 Eisenstein, Selected Works I, pp. 65 and 201; see also Viktor Shklovskii,
‘K voprosu ob izuchenii zritelia’, Sovetskii ekran 50, 11 December 1928,
p. 6
66 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union,
Cambridge 1979, p. 20
67 Pudovkin, Aleksandrov, Pirev, Soviet Films: Principle Stages of Development,
Bombay 1951, p. 6
68 Graham, p. 62
69 a much quoted phrase, quoted by Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams,
Oxford 1989, p. 49
70 see Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientiﬁc Discovery, London 1972, p. 40,
presenting an argument against induction: ‘. . . inference to theories from
singular statements which are ‘‘veriﬁed by experience’’ . . . is logically
inadmissable. Theories are therefore never empirically veriﬁable . . . I shall
certainly admit a system as empirical or scientiﬁc only if it is capable of
being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the
veriﬁability but the falsiﬁability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of
demarcation . . . it must be possible for an empirical scientiﬁc system to be
refuted’.
71 see, for instance, Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, London 1969, p. 50:
‘N=A1
+A2
(where N= the actor; A1
= the artist who conceives the ideas
and issues the instructions necessary for its execution; A2
= the executant
who executes the conception of A1
; see also Punin’s ‘First Cycle of
Lectures’. John E. Bowlt, ed. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, London 1988,
p. 171: S(Pi+Pii+Piii+ . . . P#)Y=T,where S = sum of principles (P),
Y=intuition, T=artistic creation
72 qu. Aumont, p. 64 and Eisenstein, Selected Works I, p. 187
73 Aumont, p. 25
192 Vsevolod Pudovkin
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of Cinematography, Moscow (VGIK); the Cinema Museum,
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Index
Actor in Film, The, x, xvi, xxv, 74, 139,
153–4, 155, 157, 179
Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the
Bolsheviks, The (Kuleshov), 2, 12, 14,
16
Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein), 124, 180
Arhheim, Rudolf, xxi, 17, 24, 73
Arsenal, The (Dovzhenko), 92
Bala´zs, Be´la, 9, 57, 97, 100, 170
Ballet me´canique, Le (Le´ger), 100
Baranovsaia, Vera, x, xvi, xxv, 17, 59, 69,
70, 74–76, 160
Barnet, Boris, 11, 12, 17
Batalov, Nikolai, xvi, xxv, 17, 72, 74
Battleship Potemkin, The (Eisenstein), xii,
59, 76, 142–3
Bazin, Andre´, xxv, xxvi, 20, 105
Bekhterev, Vladimir, 39, 43, 47, 81–84,
129–30, 180–81
Bergson, Henri, 84–85
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
(Ruttmann), xxii, 96, 168
Brik, Osip, xv, 118, 158
Bukharin, Nikolai, 30, 166
Burch, Noe¨l, viii, 21, 103
Chapaev (Vasilievs), 114
Chess Fever, 14, 17–9, 20
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 32, 62
Chistiakov, Alexander, 10, 74, 150
Christie, Ian, xiii
Darwin, Charles, 11, 33, 45, 47, 111, 181
Death Ray, The (Kuleshov), xvi, 4, 16
della Volpe, Galvano, xiv, 143
Delluc, Louis, 4, 88, 89, 170
Delsarte, Franc¸ois, xvii, 4, 15
Deserter, The, xxiv, 4, 74, 145, 149–55, 180
Diderot, Denis, 13, 163
Doller, Mikhail, xxv, 146
Dovzhenko, Alexander, xxiv, xxvii, 155
Dura Lex (By the Law) (Kuleshov), 101
Eggert, Konstantin, 20
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 9, 20, 23, 172
Eisenstein, Sergei, xiv, xxi, xxiv, xxvii, 17,
23, 58–9, 89, 155; and typage, 126, 128
and sound, 141; and montage,
169–189
End of St. Petersburg, The, x, xx, 17, 19, 37,
87–106, 131, 146, 153, 170, 174, 177
Engineer Prait’s Project (Kuleshov), 4, 17
Eye of Glass, The (Lily Brik), xxii
Fairbanks, Douglas, xiii, 18, 105
FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor:
Kozintsev and Trauberg), xvii, 11,
15, 157
Film Director and Film Material, The, xv,
xxi, xxv, 2, 21, 48, 56–7, 97, 172, 183
Film Scenario, The, xv, xxv, 2, 20, 21, 48,
57, 183
Fogel, Vladimir, 17
Forty-First, The (Protazanov), 113
Freud, Sigmund, 34, 38, 43, 181, 186
Gardin, Vladimir, xiii, 1, 11, 62, 92
Gastev, Alexei, 14
Gay Canary, The (Kuleshov), 3
Golovnia, Anatoli, x, xxii, xxv, 36, 59,
90, 95, 106, 115–6, 125, 151
Gorky, Maxim, 61–64, 67–70, 113, 117,
124
Grifﬁth, David Wark, viii, x, xxv, 9, 57,
71–2
Groys, Boris, xii, xiv
Hammer and Sickle, The (Gardin), 1, 2
Harvest, The, xxiii
Hunger . . . Hunger . . . Hunger (Gardin), 2,
92
Iezuitov, Nikolai, ix, 2, 40
Iampolsky, Mikhail, 15
Inkizhinov, Valeri, xvi, xxv, 17, 76, 125–6
Intolerance (Grifﬁth), 1, 76, 93
Iutkevich, Sergei, xxiv
Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein), xxiv, 158
James, William, 33, 44, 83, 181
Kepley Jr., Vance, 98
Khokhlova, Alexandra, 3, 5, 14, 15, 16
Kerensky, Alexander, 119
Kiss of Mary Pickford, The (Komarov), 18
Kuleshov, Lev, i, xv–xvii, 2–20, 23, 47,
57, 91, 100, 101, 161
Kuhle Wampe (Dudow), 150, 152
Lenin, Vladimir, xii, 30, 32, 35, 82–3,
119, 169, 181, 183
Life is Very Good (A Simple Case), xxiv, 22,
74, 114, 139–147, 180
Living Corpse, The, xvi, xxiv–v, 9, 74, 142–
43, 144, 170
Locksmith and Chancellor (Gardin), 1, 92
Lunacharsky, Anatoli, 30, 35, 72–3, 85,
117, 125
Mariamov, A. M., ix, 36, 38, 63
Man With a Movie Camera, The (Vertov),
97–8
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, xx, xxiii, 22, 61,
120, 128, 156
Mechanics of the Brain, The, x, 2, 18, 22,
29–49, 127, 175, 183
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, x, 13, 14, 56–8, 86,
156, 161–2, 187
Montagu, Ivor, xv–xix, 37, 74, 105
Moscow in October (Barnet), x, xx
Mother, The, xiv, xxiv, 37, 55–77, 92, 96,
113, 120, 121, 142–3, 147
Moussinac, Le´on, i, xiv, 4, 11, 36
Mozzhukhin, Ivan, 6
Mu¨nsterberg, Hugo, 43, 55
Admiral Nakhimov, xxiii, 4, 29
Nanook (Flaherty), 130–31
New Babylon, The (Kozintsev and
Trauberg), 113, 120, 140–1
Nilsen, Vladimir, xxi
October (Eisenstein), x, xx, 128, 148, 184
Pavlov, Ivan, 8, 29–49, 81, 98, 174, 180–2
Perestiani Ivan, 1
Piotrovsky, Adrian, viii, 71–2
Plekhanov, Georgi, 111, 131–9, 170, 181
Podobed, P. A., 4, 13, 17
Poggioli, Renato, xi, xii
Preobrazhenskaia, Olga, 1, 124
Protazanov, Iakov, xiii, 4, 17, 20, 62, 124
Pudovkin, Vsevolod: as an actor, xvi,
xxiv, 1, 3, 9, 17, 74–5;
on acting, x, 2, 11, 12, 16, 17, 104,
125, 127, 142, 153–5, 159;
on non–actors, 4, 17, 74, 126–7;
and montage, xxii, xxvi, 1, 2, 5, 21,
24, 44–47, 58-9, 87–92, 98–9,
142-4, 158, 168–89; Kuleshov
experiment, 6–10
Razumny, Alexander, 8, 63, 66, 73
Rodchenko, Alexander, xxii, 14, 101, 103
Romm, Mikhail, 35, 142
Rotha, Paul, xxiv, 36
Ruttmann, Walter, xxii
Sadoul, Georges, ix, xxiii
Sechenov, I. M., 31–35
Shipulinsky, Feofan, 1, 9, 20
Shklovsky, Viktor, xiii, xiv, 60, 63, 72,
105, 145
Shpikovsky, Nikolai, 18, 20
Shutko, Kirill, 23
Simple Case, A (see Life is Very Good)
Soviet Toys (Vertov), 125
Stalin, Joseph, xii, xiv, xxiv, 119, 171
Stanislavsky, Konstantin, xvii, 2, 13, 18,
74–75, 156–62, 180
Stenberg brothers, xxii
Storm over Asia, xi, xxiv, 18, 37, 58, 70,
111–38, 174
Strike, The (Eisenstein), xvii, 57, 129, 142,
185
206 Index
Suvorov, xxiii, xxiv, 29
Taylor, F. W. and Taylorism, 13
Taylor, Richard, xiii, 182
Timoshenko, Semion, 187
Ten Years (Shub), xx
Tisse, Edouard, 2
Tolstoy, Lev, 58, 61–4, 72, 76
Trotsky, Lev, 65
Tsivian, Yuri, 9, 96
Turkin, Valentin, xv
Vachnadze, Nata, 9
Vertov, Dziga, xiv, xxi–xxiv, 45, 60, 97,
120, 155–6, 172
Woman of Paris (Chaplin), 95, 172
Zamiatin, Evgeny, 12, 33
Zarkhi, Natan, x, 2, 62, 65–70, 88, 145–6
Zemtsova, Anna, 14, 15, 29
Zavattini, Cesare, xxvii
Index 207
List of Illustrations
Back cover: Pudovkin photographed in Proletarskoe kino, Moscow 1925,
p. 9
Front cover: Borisov and Zhukov poster for Otsep’s The Living Corpse,
1929; Pudovkin in the role of Fedia
Chapter one: The old regime and the new
Fedia (Pudovkin) and the Gypsy in The Living Corpse 10
Zhban’s ﬁnger crooking (The Extraordinary Adventures of
Mr. West . . .) 12
Mr. West (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West . . .) 15
Gardin shot patterns, a` la Delsarte 16
Mr. Trotsky (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West . . .) 19
Chapter two: The Mechanics of the Brain
the unconditioned reﬂex in a newly born baby 41
white coated lab. technicians 46
Chapter three: The Mother
Pudovkin as a police ofﬁcer 68
Chapter four: The End of St. Petersburg
the church and autocracy (the statue of Nicholas II) 90
St. Petersburg’s shaking foundations 94
the Petrograd side housing blocks 99
Chapter ﬁve: Storm over Asia
Deni poster, 1918 120
Valerii Inkhizhinov as Bair, the Mongolian trapper 125
Chapter six: A Simple Case and The Deserter
Mashenka 145
the hero returns to his ﬁrst wife 147
a policeman conducting trafﬁc 154
Fritz deﬁes the tanks 154
Chapter seven: The Eisenstein/Pudovkin controversy
Timoshenko’s diagrammatic rendition of Kuleshov 187
List of Illustrations xxxv