11. Historical-MaterialistNarration
TheSovietExample
In its widest scope,leftist political cinema
has no pertinence as a mode of
narration. Political fiction films can
appeal to classicalnarrationalnorms (e.g., the work of Costa-Gavras)or to conventions
of the art-cinema mode (e.g., Man of Marble, 1976). But within left-wing
filmmaking we can discern one clear-cut narrational tradition. Although this
traditionhasinfluencedboth classicaland art-cinemanorms,itpossessesadistinct
set of narrational strategies and tactics. These originate in the Soviet "historicalmaterialist"cinemaof
the period I925-1 933. I will take twenty-twofilms asprime
instances of this mode: Strike (Ig25), Potemkin (Ig25), The Devil's Wheel(Ig26),
Mother (1926), Moscow in October (1g27), The End of St. Petersburg (1g27),
October (1928), Zvenigora (1928), Lace (1928), Storm over Asia (1928), Arsenal
(1g2g), The Ghost That Never Returns (~gzg),The New Babylon (1g2g), Fragments
of an Empire (1g2g), Old and New (~gzg),GoluboiExpress (1g2g), Earth
(I~so),Mountains ofGold (1g31), Ivan (1g32),A Simple Case(1g32), Twenty-six
Commissars (1g33), and Deserter (1933). (Certainly By the Law (1926), Bed and
Sofa (1927), Alone (1g31), and others might be added to the list, but the above
seem to me the least disputable cases.) After consideringthe Soviet variant, I will
sketch out how the mode changed in later years.
ation as Rhetoric "The StrikeIs Prolonged"; "Engineering a Massacre"; "Liquidation."
The film concludes:
uch Soviet art of the 1920s, the historical-materialist Extreme close-up: Eyes stare out at us.
s a strong rhetorical cast. It uses narrational princi- Expository title: "And the strikesin Lena, Talka, Zlatovst,
devices opposed to Hollywood norms for purposes Yaroslavl, Tsaritsyn, and Kostroma left bleeding, unforgetfrankly
didactic and persuasive. Within Soviet cul- table scars on the body of the proletariat."
enerally, artists and political workers debated how Extreme close-up: Eyes stare out at us.
practices could be translated into utilitarian ones. Expository title: "Proletarians,remember!"
tion, exemplifiedby the extreme left wing of Con- The film's argument works by appeal to example; the narrativism,calledforan
end to "art," a hopelesslybourgeois tivecause and effectdemonstrate the necessityforthe workory.
But on the whole, both artists and politicians ing classto struggle against capital.Whilelater filmsdid not
ed to maintain "the aesthetic" as a distinct (ifsubordi- utilize the nakedly argumentative structure of Strike, they
)space. Some,likeKuleshov,sawtheir work aspart of a did rely on the presupposition that the narrative should
-range process of basic research; pursued in the scien- constitute an exemplary case forMarxist-Leninistdo~trine.~
c spirit, their experiments could eventually reveal the Furthermore, Strike's exampleis ahistoricalone; the fabula
s of socialist art. Other creators made art obedient to is based on fact. Other Soviet films take up this referential
al command." Here the artwork was endowed with impulse, creating a' "realistic" motivation for the fabula
ediate utility as "agitprop." Patriotic music, the mass events.
tacles celebratingthe OctoberRevolution,and much of The most obvious result of "rhetoricizing" the fabula
akovsky's poetry are examples. No matter how practical world is the changed conception of character. Narrative
nd, the social-command view clung to a conceptionof causality is construed as supraindividual, deriving from sotinctly
aesthetic. "Art,." wrote Lunacharsky and Sla- cialforcesdescribedby Bolshevikdoctrine. Characters thus
in 1920, "is a powerful means of infecting those get defined chiefly through their class position, job, social
us with ideas, feelings, and moods. Agitation and actions, and political views. Characters alsolose the uniqueganda
acquire particular acuity and effectiveness ness sought to some degree by classical narration and to a
they are clothed in the attractive and mightyforms of great degree by art-cinema narration; they become proThus,
the instrumental aim provided-at least for a totypes of whole classes, milieux, or historical epochs.
-an acceptable framework for experiment. Diego's existential crisis in La guerre est finie would be
oviet cinema, the double demand of poetic and rheto- unthinkable in Soviet historical-materialistcinema. As M.
apesbasicnarrational strategies.Thereisthe tendency N. Pokrovsky put it, "We Marxists do not see personality as
at the syuzhet as both a narrative and an argument. the maker of history, for to us personality is only the instrut
cinema is explicitly tendentious, like the roman a ment with which history work^."^ The single character may
e; the fabula world stands for a set of abstract proposi- count for little, as seen in some films' attempt to make a
whose validity the film at once presupposes and reas- group of peasants or workers into a "mass hero." Such an
.Strike offers a very clear instance. Not only is this the approach to character had already been evident in Soviet
of a single strike, it is a discourse on all the Russian revolutionary literature and theater of the 1918--1929 era.4
s that occurred before 1917. The exact locale and time True, the Soviet cinema recognized degrees of individuaunspecified;
instead, the film is broken into six parts tion: the anonymous agents of Moscow in October, Eisencitly
labeled as typical stages: seething.inthe factory; stein's physicallyvivid but generally apsychologicalcharacmediateCauseof
the Strike";."The.Factory StandsIdle"; , ters like the sailor Vakulinchuk, the more detailed delinea-
H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
tion of individual behavior in Pudovkin, and the intensely group in his struggle against adver~aries.~Such is Marfa in
subjective characterization in Room's films. Nonetheless, Old and New, or the Chinese cooliein GoluboiExpress.This
psychological singularityremains quite rare. Sometimes,as structure provides a fairly traditionalcurve of dramatic conin
October,themorepsychologicallymotivated the-character flict.There isalsothe "structure of apprenticeship"in which
(e.g., Kerensky, with his Napoleonic lust for power), the the typical individual moves from ignorance to knowledge
surer the character is to be denigrated as a bourgeois. and from passivity to a~tion.~The specific shape which this
Character types find their roles within specific generic dramaticdevelopment takes in Sovietliterature of the period
motivations. There is the genre of "studies of revolution," has been summarized by KaterinaClark. Shepoints out that
either in historical or contemporary settings. Here the film the Socialist Realist narrative often centers on.a character
tells a story of successful struggles (Potemkin,October,The who moves from a spontaneous, instinctive form of activity
End of St. Petersburg, Moscow in October, Zvenigora) or to a disciplined, correct awareness of political ends and
currently emergent ones (Storm over Asia, Mountains of means.7Mother, as both novel and film, is the canonic inGold,
The Ghost That Never Returns, Goluboi Express, stance. The mother acts spontaneouslybut incorrectly,and
Twenty-sixCommissars).The revolution film may alsopay her positivequalitiesareoffsetbythe danger sheposes tothe
tribute to heroic failures (Strike, Mother, Arsenal, The New revolution. By accepting the tutelage of her son and the
Babylon). A second genre portrays contemporary problems Party,sheisabletobecome amartyr toconsciousrevolutionin
Soviet life, usually involving remnants of capitalist or ary activity. The result of this pattern is that potentially
feudal behavior (Fragments of an Empire, Lace, The Deuil's affirmative characters are shown initially in a rather bad
Wheel). There is also a genre that matches the literary for- light: they may be naive (Mother, the sailor in The Devil's
mula of the "production" novel: a dam must be built (Ivan), Wheel, Filiminov in Fragments of an Empire) or worseor
the countryside must be collectivized (Old and New, cowardly (Renn in Deserter), lascivious (Pave1in A Simple
Earth). Some films combine genres: A SimpleCase (histor- Case), rowdy (the delinquents in Lace), treacherous (the
ical revolutionand problems of contemporarylife) or Deser- peasant in TheEnd of St. Petersburg)or greedy (the peasant
ter (emergent revolution plus production goals). All these in Mountains of Gold). The cause-and-effect chain then
genres evidently give the film an opportunity to create a works to convert the character(s) to disciplined socialist
fabula that will make each character emblematic of forces activity.The drama-and the spectator'shypotheses-come
within a politically defined situation. to be based on how and when the apprentice's conversion
One task of tendentious narrative art is to create conflicts will take place.
that both prove the thesis and furnish narrative interest. In To some extent, the didactic aim of the Soviet cinema
thesefilms,theviewerislikelytoknow,orquicklyguess,the created a storehouse of topoi, or argumentative commonunderlying
argument to be presented and the referential places, which the filmmaker could use to structure the
basis of the fabula world. (There can be no doubt that the syuzhet. But these were not so narrow that they stifled
October Revolution will succeed.) Most of our interest thus exp&rimentation.The narrative-plus-argumentpattern was
falls upon the question of how history takes the course it open topoetic exploitationin manyways. The use of character
prototypes-the sturdy worker, the activist woman, the
In a general sense, the Soviet historical-materialist film bureaucrat, the bourgeois"man outof time'-allowed stylisanswers
this by adhering to the two schematic patterns tic embroidering. "The figure of a cinematic character,"
which Susan R. Suleiman identifies in the roman a th2se. declared Pudovkin, "is the sum of all the shots in which he
There is what she calls the "structure of confrontation,"in appear^."^ It was up to the directornot to gve the character
which a psychologically unchanging hero represents a individuality but to use film form to make the type vivid.
off and the other begins. Rhetorical demands pro- "Realistic" though such filmsas Potemkin and TheEnd of
ably employed many more dialogue titles than exposi- (fig. 7.50-7.55). The figures will often be placed in unnatunes-usually
four to twelve times as many. In some rally static poses as well. While Dovzhenko made the most
of the late 1920s, there are no expository titles at all. systematic use of this, we find the device in other films as
reason is obvious: an expository title creates a self- well: in The Ghost that Never Returns, characters freeze in
228 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S OF N A R R A T I O N
I I . I . Potemkin
the propensity for frontality of body, face, and eye in these
films.We have seen how the classicalfilmfavorsa modified
frontality of figure placement; our sight lines are marked
out, but the characters seldom face or look directly toward
us. The Soviet cinema tends to stage the action much more
frontally.Furthermore, the characters frequentlylook out at
the camera. Sometimesthis is motivated as another character's
point of view, but not nearly as often as it would be in
Hollywood. And at some point, frontality becomes an unabashedly
direct address to the camera. Again and again
characters turn "tous" without the slightestrealisticmotivation.
The end of Strike, with its staring eyes, is probably not
the best example, since such concluding confrontations
form a minor convention of classical epilogues too.1° But
when, in the middle of a scene, a soldier gazes out and asks
us, "What am I fighting for?" (End of St. Petersburg), or
when a character confides in us (Zvenigora),or mugs and
winks at us (Lace), or asks whether it is all right to kill the
enemy (Arsenal), or turns to us for help during a fistfight
(Twenty-six Commissars), we must acknowledge that
narrationisnot simplyrelaying some autonomouslyexistent
profilmic event. Now the narration overtly includes the
profilmic event, has already constituted it for the sake of
specific effects. Ideas of montage within the shot, montage
"before filming," and montage "within the actor's performance,"
so current in the late 1920s, testify to filmmakers'
notion that narration should include self-consciousmanipulation
of the profilmic event, the material that normally
pretends to go unmanipulated. This narration is not only
omniscient; it announces itself as omnipotent.
What brings togetherfilm techniqueslikeintertitles, cinematography,and
mise-en-sceneis the key conceptof Soviet
film theory and practice: editing,usually called montage.As
conceivedin Soviet artistic practice during the 1920s,montage
in any art implies the presence of a creative subject
activelychoosinghow effectsare tobeproduced. Summarizing
the views of many practitioners,FeliciePastorellowrites
aptly: "Montageis an act (and not alook),an act ofinterpreting
reality. Like the engineer and the scholar, the artist
constructs his object, he does not reproduce reality."" In
objecting that Sovietmontage "did not give us the event; it
alluded to it," Bazin was putting his finger on exactly this
refusal to treat film technique as a neutral transmitter.'=The
didactic and poetic aspects of Soviet cinema meet in a technique
which insists, both quantitatively and qualitatively,
upon the constant and overt presence of narration.
It comes as no news that Soviet montage films rely upon
editing, but some comparative figures may spruce up the
obvious.The Soviet films I am consideringcontain between
600 and 2,000 shots, whereas their Hollywood counterparts
of the years 1917-1928 typically contain between 500 and
I ,000.(I am countingintertitles asshots.) Hollywoodcanonized
the average shotlength asfive to six seconds,yieldinga
commonfigureof 500-800 shotsper hour. The Sovietfilms,
however, average two to four seconds per shot and contain
between goo and 1,500shotsper hour. Thismeans that only
the very fastest cut Hollywood films of the teens (such as
Wild and Woolly) approach the Soviet standard, while the
fastest-cut Hollywood films of the 1920s fall at the slower
end of the Sovietscale.And nowherein Hollywoodfilmmaking
of any period can one find editing as quicklypaced as in
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST N A R R A T I O N
tes on intertitles: in October, the narration chops been considering since Chapter 4.
ontage makes the narration self-conscious in yet an- More unusually, the syuzhet will "flash back" without the
r way: through rhetorical tropes. The Soviet films fur- motivation of character memory, as when at the closeof Old
an anthologyof both "tropes of thought" and "tropes of and New the narration givesus glimpses of earlier scenes of
h." Theformerare buried or ellided formalarguments, Marfa's struggle. The narration may also overtly anticipate
as the schematic argument-from-examplethat under- what will happen later in the film. The most strikingexamthe
Soviet film and the tendency of the narration to ple comesfromthe opening of Storm over Asia, where shots
by analogy (as when crosscutting links two social ' of landscapes are interrupted by near-subliminalflashes of
s and makes us infer a shared motive or political view: the saber that the protagonist will wield in the last scene.
urgeoisielpolice, proletariantpeasant). Tropes of speech, The narration likewise has no need to just@ spatialmanip-.
240 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
ulationsby characterknowledge:wecan cut toanylocale. In
Potemkin, as the marines prepare to fire, the narration cuts
away to the bugle, the imperial crest, and other objects
which yield ironic juxtapositions. In The End of St. Petersburg,
the narrator can situate the political activityin relation
to lyrical landscapes. In The Ghost That Never Returns,
when the police agent fireshis pistol, the narration prolongs
suspense by holding on such details as drifts of sand and a
hat rolling in the wind. In Lace, a quarrel is interrupted by
cutaway shots of a poster on the wall.
Communicativeness. The narration's authority rests in
part on its refusal to withhold what the mode defines as
crucial fabula information. Such information includes the
story's historicalcontext, political arguments, and character
background. The film's fabula action consists either of the
struggle of a protagonistto achieve a goalor of the growth of
a spontaneous protagonist to socialistdiscipline and awareness.
It is this linearity that the narration respects. The
syuzhet does not equivocate about characters' motives or
behavior. The exposition is concentrated and preliminary,
furnishing relevant and valid information about the characters'
pasts; there will never be what Sternberg calls "anticipatory
caution," let alone a "rise and fall of first impressions."
The narration, in fact, takes the opportunity to be
"overcommunicative" by using many devices that ensure
redundancy: conformityof character totype, of type to situation,
or of situation tohistorical-politicalpresuppositions. In
Ivan, a street loudspeakerwill oftenreiterate the narrational
information already supplied by other means. The celebrated
overlapping editing of Soviet practice displays not
only the narration's authority(ability torestage the profilmic
event, to "remount'' it in editing) but also the narration's
urge to insist on certain gestures. Scenes like that of the
woman running through the doors in Ivan and the cream
separatortest in Old and New resembletraditionaloratorical
amplifications of set topics (grief, success).
Self-consciousness. We have already seen the extent to
which camera position and lens length, frontality of figures,
static poses, to-camera address, and the constant use of
montage all create the sense of a self-conscious address to
the audience. The expositorytitle can focus this effect. The
narration can interject maxims (a quotation from Lenin in
Potemkin), slogans("All power to the Soviets!" in October),
and rebuttals (in Goluboi Eqress, a reactionarycries, "Stop
the train!" and an expositorytitle shootsback: "But can you
stop a revolution?"). The narration will also usurp the characters'
own voices. In many Soviet films, information that
could easily be given in dialogue titles wiU be supplied by
expositorytitles, asin the beginning of TheEnd ofSt.Petersburg,
when the peasant family must send somemembers to
work in the city. In one episode of Twenty-six Commissars,
the narration becomes a witness's testimony to the action.
And some titles could plausibly comefrom the fabula world
but, because they are not signaled as quotations, instead
suggest that the words are routed through the narration.
Moscow in October intercalates an orator and expository
titles, while in Arsenal, we cannot locate a speakerfor such
lines as "Where is father?" Nothing could be stronger evidence
for this tendency than the insistence on retaining
exhortatory expository titles after the anival of lip-synchronized
sound. In the remarkable Mountains of Gold,expository
titlesrepeat what we have alreadyheard acharactersay,
and they even arguewith a speakingcharacter! Unlike their
contemporariesin Europe, who envisioned the titleless film
as the goal of a "pure" experimental cinema, the Soviet
filmmakers saw the linguistic resources of the expository
title as an instrument for rhetorical narration.
Attitudinal properties. The very constitution of genres
and the didacticismof the narration in this mode make the
narration openlyand unequivocallyjudgmental, often satirically
and ironically so. Judgments can be carried by intertitles,
especially in the exposition: how many Soviet films
begin by rendering an oppressive state of affairs in the irnages
and then interjecting ironic titles ("All is calm. . ."
etc.)? The narration throws its voice to cheer for the opposition
or quotes characters to mocking effect (the figure
known to classicalrhetoric as"transplacement").In Goluboi
Express, decadent bourgeois proclaim, "Ah, Europe, culture,
civilization"; later the narration intercuts the same
phrases with statues,policemen, and troops. In October, the
materialist cinema created a distinct organization of narration,
with effects on cinematic style already discussed.
Another result was an idiosyncratic approach to the spectator,
one that is neither as "totalitarian" as liberal-humanist
criticsoftenassume nor asradical as somerecent theoristsof
textuality have claimed. The films' mixture of didactic and
poetic structures callsforviewingprocedures which deviate
from classicalnorms yet remain unified by protocolsspecific
Broadly speaking, the viewer brings to these films a few
highly probable schemata. Already-known stories, drawn
from history, myth, and contemporary life, furnish a fairly
limited range of options for the overall cause-effect chain.
Knowledgeof the different genres, especiallywhen the film
treats a historical subject, further limits what can plausibly
happen. The viewer alsopossesses a sense of how the mode
creates character and signals salient conflicts. And the endne
plus ultra of this process may be seenin the intercut- narrational difficulties presented by these films cannot be
of battlefield and stock exchange in The End of St. explained under the rubrics of realism or subjectivity; the
rsburg, in which the same phrases ("Forward!" "The problems are clearly marked as proceeding from the selfis
over!" "Both parties are satisfied!") apply with brutal consciousnarration. On the whole there islittleroom for the
characterwill survive,move to correctconsciousness,and so
forth. The syuzhet may assume that because the historical
event or rhetoricalpoint is alreadyknown,not allof the links
redictable Fabula, Unpredictable Narration need to be shown. In Deserter,the processof converting the
German worker Renn from a traitor to a good proletarian is
treating the syuzhet as an argument by example,and by completely skipped over; the narration simply assumes that
hering a powerfulrhetorical thrust, the Soviet historical- a stayin the Soviet Union sufficesto bring him around.The
242 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
end of Potemkin neglects to mention that the rebelling
sailorswere eventuallycaptured, but the vieweris supposed
tounderstand that whateverthe outcomeof this episode,the
entire Igo5revolution was a harbinger of I917. Moreover, if
there are politicaldisputes within Soviet communismabout
the case considered, it is often wiser for the filmmaker to
omit explanationthan to risk being criticized.Vance Kepley
has shown that many elliptical moments in Dovzhenko's
filmsresult from skirtingsensitiveissues.14Weshalllater see
how The New Babylon tries to avoid disputes aboutwhy the
Paris Commune failed. Again, the omnipotent narration
works as a reliable guide: any "permanent" breaks in the
causal chain signal not a lack of communicativenessbut a
tacit appeal to the audience's referential schemata.
The historical-materialistfilm compensatesforits limited
narrativeschemataby unusuallyinnovativespatialand temporal
construction. If the story outline is often predictable,
stylistic processes often are not. At the barest perceptual
level, narration willjolt the spectator.Consider the opening
of Twenty-six Commissars:
I. Long shot: Oil field
2. Title: "Baku"
3. Explosion
4. Title: "1918"
5. Explosion
6. Explosion
This is our introduction to the revolutionarybrigade. Strike
begins with abstract shots of the factory, including silhouettes
and an upside-down, reverse-motion reflection of the
factoryin apuddle. The narration of Deserterestablishesthe
river docks in a lyrical tranquillity before startling us with
shots of chains dropped from ships-shots that intersperse
black frames with bursts of imagery and thus create an
almost annoying flicker. The conventionality of the largescale
narrative articulations promotes a moment-by-moment
"microattention" to the unfolding syuzhet. Like the
orator embroideringa commonplace, the narration takes for
granted that we understand that part of World War I was
fought around Baku, that Strike will be about a workers'
walkout, that Deserter is set in a dockyard. The task is to
make these givensvivid, or as the Sovietdirectorswerefond
of saying, perceptible.
Whatrenders these stylisticprocessesmore unpredictable
than the procedures of classicalnarration? Most obviously,
the Sovietfilms I am consideringdefine themselves against
many spatial and temporal norms of classical Hollywood
narrative.AU theproceduresof titling,cinematography,editing,
and mise-en-scene I have alreadymentioned constitute
an alternativestylisticparadigm. Eyelineswill not necessarily
cut neatly together; characterswill not necessarilyignore
the audience; framing will not necessarilybe symmetricalor
centered. Similarly, principles of spatial and temporal continuity,
of tight linkage of cause and effect, and so forth do
not hold in this mode. As in the art cinema, style becomes
more prominent here because of its deviationfrom the classical
norm.
To the extent, however, that the Soviet devices function
within a paradigm, the viewer can apply schemata based on
this extrinsic norm to make sense of the films. But this
processis more difficult than in the classical mode because
of the greatemphasis the Sovietsplaced upon deviatingfrom
extrinsic norms. Again as in the art cinema,variations often
proceed from authorial differences: Dovzhenko is more
likely to use slow motion than Eisenstein is, Room is more
apt tomatch shots"classically" than are his contemporaries.
Still, nothing in Strikeprepares us for the alternating of two
successivescenesin Old and New; nothinginMotheranticipates
the montage of black frames in Deserter. It is not just
that the filmmakers developed; the search for ever more
"perceptible" effects pushed them to try new devices in
every film. In general, narration became more elliptical,
images became briefer, gaps became greater, fabula events
underwent more expansion and amplification.Virtually any
device-soft focus,sloworfast motion, upside-downcamera
positions, single-source lighting, handheld camera movement-could
create a film's distinctive intrinsic norm. It
wouldbe up to theviewer tomake senseof the unpredictable
procedure by slottingit into accustomed syuzhet functions
and patterns. We have already seen this at work in our
examplesof spatialdiscontinuityinEarth and TheEnd of St.
H I S T O R I C A L - M A T E
burg in Chapter 7.Because each film strives to attain
s. The task, as in art-cinema narration, is to grasp
s unique reworking of the paradigm. This is done
onproceduralschematathat urge: when in doubt,
a fabula event as perceptuallyforceful and politihey
play a major role at the level of temporal and
construction.
ky put itin describingintellectualmontage,the editdirectors
never canonized the over-the-shoulderres
we are often presented with no clear information
characters' distances or angles of interaction. Thus
the cutting pattern violates the 18o-degree rule of
R I A L I S T N A R R A T I O N 243
I I . ~ .Earth
front of the lens. The spectator will infer a unified space
based on assumptionsaboutreal spacesand aboutthe sortof
space that filmsusually present. The more radical discovery
was that viewerscould be asked to unlfy spacesin physically
impossible ways. Supplied with strong spatial cues, such as
character eyelines or earlines, the spectator will infer an .
"abstract" space that couldnot exist empirically. In Twentysix
Commissars, the Bolshevik prisoners are massacred in
the desert. A wounded man staggers to the top of a hill and
shouts: "Be calm, comrades!"Thereisacut tothe oilfieldsof
Baku, many miles away. Suddenly workers in the fields
freezein place, asif hearing his cry. Therefollowsa seriesof
shotsin which a striker at Baku "watches" the executionof
the commissars.And after the massacre, the workers stand
in silent homage before a spectacle they could not possibly
see or hear. Comparably "abstract" spaces can be found in
many Soviet films; as we shall see, The New Babylon relies
on them to a considerabledegree.
The spectator must fill in temporal gaps too. Here is a
passage from Earth:
I. Medium shot: In his house the father bellows (fig.
I 1.3).
244 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
-
11.4. Earth
11.5. Earth
11.6. Earth
11.7. Earth
11.8. Earth
11.9. Earth
11.10. Earth
11.11. Earth
2. "Ivan!" <
3. Long shot: Against sky, he calls,rightward (fig. I I .4).
4. "Stephen!"
5. Medium shot: He calls, rightward (fig. I 1.5).
6. "Grigori!"
7. Medium close-up: He calls, leftward (fig. I 1.6).
8. "Have-"
9. "you killed-"
10. "my-"
11.11).
Thenarration has created a spatialgap-the abrupt transition
from the house to the outdoorsin shots I-3-and some
temporalones. If the father shouted "Ivan!"in the house, we
must assume that he consumed time in getting out to the
hillside. Yet the rhythmic alternationof title and image suggests
that perhaps "Ivan!" was shouted outside too. This
yields an ambiguityabout the frequencyof the fabulaevent.
Later, after the father has hollered and amarentlv gottennoA. , "
response (shots I 2-1 3), another cut takes us immediately to
a group of three men (shot 14)-presumably those he summoned
by name. Without warning, the cut has skippedover
the fabula duration required for the group to assemble. But
when the father turns and walks away,shot 15reveals that a
fourth man is present-Khoma, the youth who did lull Vassily.
His arrival has been withheld for the sake of surprise.
Dov~henko's'st~leis unusually oblique, but his reliance on
elhpsesis only an extension of a general Soviet tendency to
ask the spectator to see any cut as embodying a possible
break in fabula time.
Because these Sovietfilms suggest that we fill in missing
piecesof spaceand time,the spectatormust tolerateadegree
II.12. Potemkin
I I . 13. Potemkin
about exactly what is happening; the narration
ed us abruptly into a stream of details. We must
y trust that the narration will eventually clanfy or
what seems unsettled. Early in Old and New we see
asp(thanks chiefly to an intertitle) that brothersare
their propertyby sawingthe familyhousein two. In
the fight for possession of the locomotiveis interera
and leaping up; cut back to the locomotive;only
s do we get a shot that establishes the woman at the
h key in a railroad office. It is as if the narration,
to give us the emotional core of the situation,later
ack or not?), troops firing (on the Bolsheviks or on the
ionally we wait and never see. Some spatiotemporal
can nevercloseat anydenotativelevel.At the end of
essa Steps sequence in Potemkin, the baby carriage
ers down the steps, intercut with shots of the staring
man with the pince-nez. Then:
I. Medium shot: The carriage begins to flip over (fig.
pince-nez. Reasons: shots 2-6 can be construed as a group,
11.14. Potemkin I I . I 6. Potemkin
I I , 15 Potemkin I I . I 7. Potemkin
at the baby in the carriage. Reasons: shots 1-5 hang the cossack slashing, and the wounding of the woman are
together; the cossack is observed from a low angle,befitting unconnected events, crosscut. Reason: all the inadequate
his assault on the carriage; the woman has earlier been seen and incompatible cues present in (A) and (B). (D) The
some way up the steps; the woman's wound is not plausible cossack slashes at both the carriage and the woman: an
as comingfrom a saber. (C) The baby carriageoverturning, "impossible" profilmic event. Rather than decideon a single
n" spacefromwhich can be selectedmaximallyforceful Besidesfillingin gaps, the spectatormust link and distine
act of fillingin must then include our willingness to ities and dissimilarities among images weigh more in this
his boss in two locales at once (The End of St. individuals out of a smooth passage of movement (even
unified at the denotativelevel, the spectatorwill look for construct one movement out of several overlapping repreays
to unify it connotatively. Thus ideologically defined sentations onscreen. And some films, in particular Pudov-
H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
11.20. MOSCOWin October
11.21. Moscow in October
11.22. MOSCOWin October
over ~sia-featuresa celebrated sequence in which the British
commander and his wife prepare to visit the Buddhist
temple. The narration crosscuts the couple's preparationshaving,
washing, dressing-with functionaries scurrying
around cleaning the temple. More than temporalsimultaneity
is evoked here. The narration draws analogies between
objects in each line of action: the temple feather duster is
likened to the wife's powder puff, the priest's collar to her
necklace. Expository titles remark ironically, "There are
ceremonies/ and rites / among allraces." Sincethe immediate
causal function of the sceneisminimal, the fact that itis
given extensive treatment invites the viewer to dwell on its
rhetorical implications. The spectator must take the visual
similaritiesbetween the British and the Buddhistsas cues to
a conceptual likeness; the intertitles reinforce the link. The
rhetorical effect is double: to satirize fastidious upper-class
hygiene, as solemn and self-righteousas a religious ritual;
kin's, utilize devices which lie on the very threshold of a d tomock the churchasathingof thisworld, asvain asthe
perceptual discrimination, such as sporadic black frames, decadent imperialists. Like many crosscutting episodes in
single-framemontage, and barely discerniblejump cuts. Soviet film, this sequence asks the viewer to liken "unlike"
The spectator's ability to draw likenesses and contrasts things. Conceptual parallelism replaces causal logic as the
can work closelywith the rhetoricalaimsof themode. Storm basis of the syuzhet. Ultimately,however,these argumenta-
H I S T O R I C A L - M A T E R I A L I S T N A R R A T I O N
the complicityofrulers tobe exhibitedduringthe action or by tense emotional confrontations;the rapidly cut
' visit to the temple. battle scene or police attack is a convention of these works.
ocus classicus of this abstract tendency is the noto- Just as often, though, accelerated rhythmic editing funcserts
an image of the maggoty meat that had precipitated
e'mutiny. Such a shot becomes what one theorist of the
H
I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
tervention and thus links Feks to more montage-oriented
directors. The Devil'sWheel (1926) was an attempt to integrate
such staging with Soviet editing techniques. By the
time of The New Babylon (1g2g), Kozintsev and Trauberg
were able to achieveoriginaleffectswithin the norms of the
Soviet historical-materialistmode.
That oneof the two books which Lenin carriedinto hiding
in Finland was Marx's Civil War in France suggests the
importance he attached to the lessons of the 1871 Paris
Commune. After 1917, the Commune passed into official
mythology as a principal antecedent of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The subject was thus eminently suited for a Soviet
film. The New Babylon portrays highlights of the FrancoPrussian
war of 1870 and the Commune which sprang up
the following year. The film's opening presents the war
hysteria manifesting itself in emotional farewells to the
troops, buying sprees in a department store, and frenzied
celebrationin a cabaret. In the firsttwosequences thenarration
introduces Louise, a salesgirlat the New Babylon store;
her boss;various workers;a cabaret singer; a member of the
Chamber of Deputies; and a journalist who bursts into the
restaurant with news of French defeat. Eventually the
French capitulate to the Prussians, but proletarian women
prevent the French soldiers from taking the cannons to
Versailles. Later, after the Commune occupies Paris, the
boss, the deputy, and the singer encourage the Versailles
troops to fire on the city. Soon the Commune takes to the
barricades, and after a fierce battle the French forces capture
Paris. Communard prisoners are assaulted by the
bourgeoisie, with the boss leading the charge. At the film's
close, Louise and her comrades are executed.
The film shares with others in its mode a use of historical
referentialityand stock types. Louise the salesclerk resembles
Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin" of the Commune.The
emphasis on women as active fighters is faithful to most
accounts of the civil war. The film's very title plays on a
historical reference: there apparently was a New Babylon
department store, but at the time Paris itself was known as
the "Modern Babylon," celebratedfor decadence and frivolity.
More generally, the film expects the viewer to supply
historical background and toidentlfyemblematicmoment%
When the boss catches the deputy wooing the singer backstage,
his pledge of silence in exchange for a state subsidy
can be taken to symbolize what Marx denounced as the
Second Empire's "joint-stock government . . . the undisguised
subservience of government to the propertied
~lasses."'~Nonetheless, the conventionalroles of bourgeois,
politician, and worker are given morevividnessby the film's
referential exactitude. Kozintsev and Trauberg drew ideas
for costume and typage from caricatures of the period. The
tableau of Victorious France in the cabaret is especially
evocative of the spirit of Commune and anti-Commune
broadsides of I870-1 871.
The New Babylon is notable for the episodic quality of its
organization. The syuzhet's eight parts correspond to the
film's projection reels (common enough in a country whose
theaters often had only one projector), but most Sovietfilms
which dividethemselvesintodistinct actsremain somewhat
tighter-knit than this. Sequences skip from the autumn of
1870 to January of 1871 (the moment of surrender) to 18
March, when crowds swarm over the Montmartre troops,
and the film concludes in late May, with the battle for Paris
and the execution of the Communards. The first two parts
concentrate on depicting the decadence of the Second
Empire, while the later portions show the Commune as
doing little more than meeting, fighting, and suffering.
These gaps in referential time can be explained by the fact
that Soviet thinkers were not agreed upon the Commune's
political significance.By I929,historianshad begun toquarrel
about whether the Commune overratedpurely democratic
reforms, whether it paid too little attention to military
strategy, and whether it failed for want of a central state
machinery (this last being a favorite Stalinist view). On
these points of controversythe filmremains silent, choosing
simply to condemn the bourgeoisieand eulogize the revolutionariesaccordingto
generic convention. (The film is more
direct in drawing on already-canonized interpretations. In
one very brief scene, a worker suggests to the leaders that
the Commune seize the factories and banks, but the proposal
is rejected in favor of a peaceful solution. This inter-
made by Engels in 1891and Lenin in 1917.) rhetorical clarity.
graves for the victims. The usual pattern would be overtly and unambiguously from the narration. (Contrast
to shift from spontaneous feeling to political con- the way that the opening of La guerre estfinie motivatesits
sness, as Louise does; but instead Jean remains impo- imageryby the play of Diego's consciousness.)Crosscutting
and terrified, more romantically interested in Louise conventionally signifies simultaneity, but the sequence
ess and a refusal of action.20More specifically,Jean the troop train, so the couplesin the cabaret applaud the skit
an ideologicaldifficultyfor the film. Toportray him as enacting France's crushing of Prussia (figs, I I .23-I I .24)
y villainous would be risky at a moment when Stalin and one slogan-"Death to the Prussians!"-appears in
at pains to celebrate the peasantry; to portray him as both. The train and the cabaret are linked to the department
ng the Communewould gainsay a historicalinterpreta- store by the stress on buying (titles 10, 20); later, chants of
going back to Marx. The solution is to make Jean an "Bargain!" and "Buy!" will echo through the New Babylon's
table element whose presence conforms to ideological aisles. At the same time, the store's display of parasols and
The New Babylon: Opening
1. "War!"
2. "Death to the Prussians!"
Railroad Station Cabaret
3. Locomotive 11. Couple applaud
4. Four women applaud 12. Stage: France victo-
5. One woman cheers rious
6. "Scatter their blood 13. Stage: Prussia crushed
to Berlin!" 14. "Death to the Prus-
7. Cheering women sians!"
8. "Scatter their blood!" 15. Stage: Three singers
9. Long shot: Train and 16. Stage: France
crowd 17. Long shot: Stage and
10. "War! All the places crowd
are sold!" 18. Stage: Woman and
crown
19. Couple applauds
25. "The boss"
26. Drumroll
27. Medium close-up: The
boss, seated
Department Store
20. "War! Prices have
risen!"
21. Displays of umbrellas
22. Fans on display
23. "The Department Store
'New Babylon' "
24. Stairs and goods for sale
Workers' quarters
28. Young women at
sewing machines
29. Cobbler
30. Washerwomen
31. Woman at suds
fans (fig. 11.25) and the frantic women customers (fig.
I 1.26)recall the cheering women at the station.
From the New Babylon we cut back to the cabaret; the
shift is motivated by the fact that the store's owner is there,
finishing his meal. Finally, the shots of workers-seamstresses,
cobbler, and washerwomen-are justified not only
as an expected antithesis in this mode but also by the fact
that these workers make and maintain the clothes sold at
such stores and worn at the cabaret and the station: they
form the infrastructure of the fashion-conscious Second
Empire. Although the workers we see will become causally
significant (the cobbler is Louise's father, one washerwoman
her mother), they are introduced as prototypes of
exploited labor; their class identity overshadows their personalindividuality,asis
suggestedby liningup thefiguresin
ranks into the depths of the shot (figs. 11.27-1 1.28). In
general, the effect of the crosscutting is to create an omniscient
survey of a society that treats war as spectacle and
commodityconsumption.The tone of the expos6isof course
accusatory:shots21 and 22 (figs. I 1.29-1 1.30)comparethe
objects on display with those wielded by the customers, a
drumroll announces the entry of the boss (fig. I I . ~ I ) ,and
the first two expository titlesmake the narration participate,
by ironic ventriloquism,in the war whoops.
t I A L I S T N A R R A T I O N 253
Louisefurtively gnawingapiece of bread and the bossordering
dessert. Louise works before an immense mannequin,
who in stance and drapery recalls the cabaret tableau of
Victorious France (fig. I I .32).(The shallowfocusmakes the
dummy in fact a backdrop for Louise.) Then the manager
254 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
invites
Louise tojoin the boss at the ball later; significantly,
the omniscient and self-conscious narration has explicitly
linked the saleswomanand her bosslong before the two will
meet.
Louise, the manager, and a salesman take up a frantic
spiel, which becomes the occasionfor the most rapid shifts
so far. From one salesman's "Buy!" we cut to the railroad
station, repeating the analogy between commerce and war.
Then back to another salesman shouting, "For sale!"; back
to the cabaret skit personifying France-now also an object
L objec
H I S T O R I C A L - M A T E R I A L I S T N A R R A T I O N 255
Then a couplein the cabaretapplaud.Cut tothe crowdat the
station applauding the soldiers with the old cry, "Scatter
their blood!" The sequence closes with a shot of the train
identical to the opening image (shot 3).
My description makes crosscutting the most obvious device
here, but the abstraction of the fabula space is accomplished
by other means as well. Within locales, characters
are never defined in an establishing shot, so that even the
long shots of the cabaret or the stationdo not unequivocally
"place" the characters. Louise and the sales staff are never
situated with respect to the customers, and the workers are
never shown in any single locale. What links characters
within most settings is one component of the Kuleshov
effect: the eyeline match. On the basis of glances, we
assume that the train (shot 3) is the object of the women's
applause (shot 4), that Crowned France (shot 18) is the
object of the couple's delight (shot ~ g ) ,and that Louise isaddressing
the customersin her harangue. Thiscueis somewhat
helped by a frontality of figure position even more
self-consciousthan in most Soviet shots. Characters' bodies
Iand faces are turned almostcompletely tous; only their eyes
"just miss" addressing the camera. Consequently,when we
see Lady France very frontally and then see a shot of a
couple, also frontal, we will construct an eyeline running
''between" them, onwhich we sit. But sincethe spacewithin
locales is defined only by eyelines and figure position, it
becomes possible for crosscutting to exploit these cues to
create an abstract space of spectacle. Hinted at in shot I I,
the effect emerges most clearly near the close of the sela
quence. The narration cutsfrom the department store salesman
to cabaret customers, looking off slightly left and
laughing and rocking asifwatching the sale that occursin a
wholly differentplace. The narration cuts from an applauding
coupleat the cabaret to applaudingwomen at the station,
creating a metaphoricsign of equality-as if the couplewere
cheering the train, as if the women were egging on the
on sale;cut from the daemonicsalesmantomen in the performance (figs. I I .33-I I .34).
et; "Buy!" Cut to the laundress, exhausted over her In this respect, Feks was carrying on approved preceing
tub;her imagereiterates the contrastbetweenrich dent. The Civil War in France portrays the Second Empire
poor, and the following shot of the boss reinforces it. bourgeoisie asentranced by spectacle.Marx describespolite
256 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the
"vile multitude," but a phantom Paris, the Paris of the
francs-fileurs, the Paris of the Boulevards, male and
female-the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle
Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its
literary boh2me, and its cocottes at Versailles, St.-Denis,
Rueil, and Saint-Gennain; considering the civil war but
an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on
through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon,
and swearing by their own honor and that of their
prostitutes, that the performance was far better got up
than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men
who fell were really dead; the cries of the wounded
were cries in good earnest; and besides, the whole
thing was so intensely hi~torical.~'
By creating "eyeline matches" acrossimpossiblespaces,the
o~enine:seauence of The New Babulon depicts the bour-- . geoisie
as Marx did: as feckless spectators.
The film's second segment reinforces the intrinsic norm
while presenting some amplifications.The setting remains,
almost to the end, the cabaret. The viewer must now construct
a more concrete sense of place out of the fragments
supplied by montage: men and women toasting "Gay Paris,"
dancers on and offstage, the singer's act, the boss's table,
couplessitting at varioustables, and the boss and the deputy
striking their bargain backstage. Thus when the chanteuse
sings,"We allneed love,"and the narration cuts to a seriesof
couples--old rake and young woman, young man and old
woman, a girl ravenously eating while an old man slobbers
over her neck (fig. I 1.35)--we are to understand these commentaries
on the cash nexus of romance as arising from the
depictionof a fairlystablenarrativespace.These couplesare
allin the cabaret. Moreover, Louise's presence helps anchor
the scene: the shots of her and the boss approach conventionallong
shots and over-the-shoulderreverse angles (figs.
I 1.36-1 1.37). Against the quite conceptual space of the
ladies watching mob atrocitiesfrom a balcony. He cites an opening sequence, the relative contiguity of these elements
English reporter on the bourgeoisie's addiction to cabaret, becomesapparent. But thenarration stillopensup this space
even under shellfire.And Kozintsevhas quotedone scathing to a considerable extent by exploiting devices which were
passage as the source of Feks's approach: subordinate during the first episode.
11.37
plane of action and the rearward space that we cannot get
any sense of where couples sit or stand in the set. (In this
respect, the uniformly blurred backgrounds constitute the
functional equivalentof the neutral sky in other Sovietfilms
or the bleached walls of Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne
&Arc.) The narration strives to keep all action played to us;
so that when the journalist isinformed of the French defeat
(fig. I I .38), he rises from his table to address the crowd in
the background, turning from the camera (fig. I 1.39).But
then we cut to a frontal shot, with as great an extent behind
him now as there wasin the previousshot (fig. I I .40).In the
absence of an establishingshot, the cabaret becomesindefinitely
large, elastic, always stretching out to infinity behind
whatever we see; and yet a paucity of depth cues makes the
cabaret hang as flatly behind the characters as does the
sunbeam backdrop setting off Crowned France.
The cabaret sequence goes beyond frontality of body and
For one thing, the sharp disparityof foreground and back- face by making characters look more or less directly to the
oundis givennew emphasis.Nomatterwhat character we camera. The very first shot (fig. I I . 4 ~ )announces the
e, she orhe isin the foregroundand the rest of the cabaret saliency of the device, which recurs almost every time a
s a vague flat. (There is never anything between the customer toasts Paris (fig. I 1.42). By combining relatively
amera and the figure.) So absoluteis the split between the flat backgrounds with self-conscious eye contact, the se-
H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
quence makes the cabaret a very "open"locale.This ismost 136. As (133): women.dance to the camera.
evident when Louise is watching the frenzied dancing: I37. Louise turns to look off right.
133. Women dance the cancan to the camera. 138. Men and women dance the cancan diagonally left.
134. Top-hatted men dance to the camera. 139. An old man and somewomen dance diagonallyleft.
135. Louise turns to look behind her. 140. Medium close-up: Louise turns to look left.
shot:A diner raises his glass to the camera. As the second sequence develops, its space is further
shot: An old man raises his glass. pans linlng this localeto the cabaret), and then shotsof the
Prussian horsemen charging. The narration now asks us to
After treating the cabaretasthe bourgeoisie'sdreamof Paris,
to the left in shot 149. Rather than take this as a space onto a wider political context: a class dancing on the
H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
!1'1/ 1 the first reel and as a self-consciousnarrational aside. (The
comedy is over.) The device of plucking an image from an
earlier moment in the film, creating a flashback without
benefit of character memory, will become emphasized in
later segments.
"Parisisunder siege."Thefilm's third sequence displaysa
clear obedienceto Sovietmontage norms. The fabula action
consists of an account of life under the siege and a lengthy
scene in which the peasant Jean, as a member of the National
Guard,meets Louise and her family.The narration is
constantly
tionalized
tlefield, life
overt, employing many extrinsically convenprocesses.
Crosscutting juxtaposes the bat!
in the streets, the sufferingsof a washerwoman
and her daughter, and meeting ofu the journalists and
Louise'sfamily.Thenarrationironicallyrecallsphrases from
the previous scene: "Gay Paris"/A woman washing clothes/
"Carefree Paris" 1A sick girl lies in bed. The narration also
/ti111, permutes the cutaway image of the battlefield landscape,
adjusting the composition each time (e.g., fig. 11.45). And
the narration routes its own commentarythrough character
speech. When the French surrender ii announced, wamings
issue first from the journalist. Then subsequent dialogue
titles link characters in different spaces, so that we
have toassumea collectivereaction manifestedby the narration.
In general,however,the spaceofproletarianlifeismore
unified than that of the bourgeoisie in earlier scenes. Now,
contraryto the most probable expectationsin this mode and
this film, a medium shot isplaced within a total space (figs.
I I.46-II.47).Later,~ean'stroubled acceptanceof the workers'
comradeshipisrendered in a coherent 180-degreespace
I!l1 1 with homogeneous eyeline matches (figs. I I.48-I I .49), 4
even though, a la Kuleshov, there is no establishing shot.
Segment 4, "18 March," initiates a return to the more
conceptual space and time of segment I. On a hillside,
proletarian women confront the army and strive to keep the
Montmartreartilleryin Paris. Meanwhile,in the cabaret the uncertainties in the syuzhet issue from our realization that
boss and the deputy watch the chanteuse rehearse a new any piece of information may reinforce or undercut what
operetta.The narration isable toexploitallthe doublemean- went before. or mav oDerate in different rhetorical senses.
iigs latent in the parallel situatiois, asking us to draw out For instanck, after'tkee shots of the rehearsal, the title
rhetorical analogies and differences. Moment-by-moment "Preparations" refers back to the show and forward to the
next image, the beginning of the army's attack on the can- when, as the workers' militia succeeds in seizing the cannon
guards. Again, exploits in the political sphere are nons, the boss will shout that the show is done for. .
likened to spectacle and associated with bourgeoismanipu- This sequence also prolongs the "false vision" we
lation. As the singer croons, "We allneed love," the cannon glimpsed in the first sequence when cafe clients seemed to
sentry falls dead. The spectacle motif will come to a climax be applauding the troop train. Now a sustained "dialogue"
262 H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S OF N A R R A T I O N
to
the boss and the politician. When an old soldier flings
downhis rifle tojoin the workers' militia, there is a cut to the
boss, furiouslyrising fromhis seat. Laterthejournalistlooks
right and shouts,"Tothe H6teldeVille!"(fig. I I.~o),and the
deputy answers (in aperfectif impossibleeyelinematch) by
shouting, "To Versailles!Wehave to startover!"(fig. I I.51).
Denotatively, the deputy means that they must retire to
Versailles for more rehearsal, but the narration asks us to
construe this as an emblem of the bourgeoisie's emigration
from Paris. Overall, we must be prepared to accept physical
impossibilities-such as the causalinterplay of independent
locales-for the sake of intensified narrational comment.
In the art cinema, overt narration emerges intermittently
toplay a game of ambiguitywith the spectator.In the Soviet
historical-materialist cinema, thanks to the pervasiveness
and the discontinuityof the montage, the narration tends to
be constantly overt; but it seldomcreates connotative ambiguity.
In general,the Sovietfilmschoosesimplytovary their
narrational tacticswithin well-defined bounds,recombining
them in differentportions of the film. The New Babylon is a
good example.We have already seen how sequence I relies
upon crosscutting to establish the possibility of an abstract
conceptual space,while sequence 2 uses frontalityand foregroundlbackground
interactions to create an "open" space
within the cabaret. The third sequence develops a more
intimate and less disjunctive space, associated with the
workers and the future Communards. And we have seen
how sequence 4 goes further than any earlier episode by
building character interactions across impossibly great distances.
Because each narrational option was latent in the
first scene,we cannot saythat later foregroundingsstartleor
puzzle the viewer (in the way that, say, Diego's ambivalent
conversation with Nadine in La guerre est finie is foregrounded
as a deviationfrom the film's norm). In the same
way, the last half of the film develops and recombines dearises
between disparate spaces. When the officer says, vices that we have already encountered.
"Morehorsesand we'reready," the narrationcuts to the boss The fifth segment, that of the Commune's occupationof
and the deputy applauding, as if congratulating him on the Paris, is structurally and substantially similar to the first
capture. Soon Louise's mother asks the officer, "Whom do episode. Seven distinct locales are crosscut: Paris exteriors,
you serve?"He turns abruptly, and the narration again cuts the workers' space,the Communards'meetingroom,a bar at
7
H I S T O R I C A L M O D E S O F N A R R A T I O N
chauvinist spectacleisfirmlyclassified with the earlier ones. scene2.Thenarration givesus three shotsof the target-the
The singer then kisses the bayonet and calls for blood (fig. women workers-before a quickmontage of firingcannons,
I I .52).The officer on the hillside, asif hearing her call (fig. blaring trumpets, roaring drums, and the boss's expression
I I .53),turns abruptlyfrom the camera and ordershis troops concludes the sequence.
"on to Paris" (fig. I 1.54), an echo of the Prussians' cry in The sixth principal episode brings to a climax the specta-
I A L I S T N A R R A T I O N z65
tional analogy. Louise is ransacking the New Babylon for
material for the barricades.
798. Long shot: Louise looks for goods (fig. 11.55).
799. Mediumclose-up:Themannequinislifted outof the
store (fig. I I .56).
800. Louise grabs lace and begins to unwind it (fig.
11.57).
801. Plan ambricain,low angle:Ayoungwoman wearing
lace and twirling a parasol looks left (fig. I 1.58).
802. "On the hill of Versailles, the bourgeoisie watched."
803. Medium shot: The boss looksdown to the left, holding
a parasol (fig. I I .59).
804. Medium shot: The singer, seated, watches through
binoculars (fig. I I.6o).
Shots 798-801 build toward an equation of the dummy in
white and the bourgeois woman (shot 801), with lace as a
cle motif that has run through the film. The Comrnunards, connecting factor. But the intertitle and subsequent shots
I realizingthat allislost, take to the streets.The Battle of Paris emphasize that the bourgeoisieareliterallywatching-ifnot
is rendered through another recombining of intrinsically Louise's pillaging of the store, then at least the Commune's ,
normalized devices-crosscutting and the "impossible" activities. (Again, the citation is to Marx, who described the
eyeline match. The result at first seems only another narra- bourgeoisie as "considering the civil war but an agreeable
diversion, eyeing the battle going on through tele- (the locales are for once proximate) and abstract (the
scopes. . .") No small-scale spectacles now; the civil war bourgeoisie could not, on empirical grounds, see all the
becomes the ultimate cabaret show, to be enjoyed from a incidents that we see).
distance. Correspondingly, the narration produces the most And the battle indeed becomes both spectacle and diagrandiose
conceptual space in the film-at once concrete logue. The bourgeoisie call across the chasm for blood, and