The Other Revolution

Approaches to the Avant-Garde, Soviet Cinema and Theatre of the 1920s (Part 5)

Cinema in the Theatre: Eisenstein

I think I must first acknowledge my debt to the fundamental principles of the circus and the music hall, which I passionately admired since childhood. Under the influence of French comedians and of Chaplin (of whom I had only heard), and of the first news about the foxtrot and jazz, this youthful love grew steadily. The music hall element was indispensable at that moment for the birth of a way of thinking based on montage. The variegated Harlequin costumes expanded to cover all the structures of the program, eventually becoming the very mode of producing the spectacle.
S. Eisenstein

The origins of the artistic and theatrical production of the man who would become the greatest of Soviet film directors begin already during the Civil War, when the young engineering student Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein took part in organizing a drama studio at the theatre of Velikie Luki, at the frontlines, where he worked from February to May as director and set designer. Some notes in the draft text of his memoirs provide details about his work there:

“Semionov acts in The Storming of the Bastille. Count Suzor, a Russified Swede, and I paint the backdrops... ‘amateur set designers.’ Averchenko’s play The Good One; Peich plays the servant. I stage it... The commissar’s play. I act and wildly overact. I meet Eliseiev, the set designer of Ivanov Pavel! The performance of Marat. I appear as Tuvache. Horrible! Peich leaves for Polotsk and Eliseiev and I are dismissed [...]. In the margins of my technical drawings are sets and sketches for the staging.”

However, in the same biography we find a fact the future director remembered as decisive: the building of a pontoon bridge across the Izora, a tributary of the Neva, in 1917. The construction, with precisely timed operations—"slow and fast, interwoven and intersecting"—the "rhythmic web of time" already foreshadow the Meyerholdian biomechanics he would later study as well as his own explorations. In Eisentein’s words:

“No, it wasn’t models of classical productions, or transcriptions of exceptional performances, or the complicated orchestral scores or complex evolutions of dancing shows that first made me feel the intoxication stirred by bodies moving at different speeds across the dismembered space chart.”

His move to Moscow to study Japanese would mark the true beginnings of his theatrical career. Once in the capital, he devoted himself to painting and theatrical decoration and passed the entrance exams for the GVYRM, where he met fellow set designer Yutkevich. His entrance into GVYRM meant studying and learning under Meyerhold, and many of Eisenstein’s ideas during this period are practical applications of his teacher’s biomechanics.

Previously, Eisenstein had already participated in the production of The Mexican, a play directed by Valentin Smishliaev and Boris Arvatov based on texts by Jack London, at the workers’ theatre of Moscow’s Proletkult. Tasked with stage direction, this was effectively his first directing job. The play revolved around a boxer trying to raise funds for the workers’ cause by fighting in a match. In the initial plan, the boxing scene would have taken place offstage, in keeping with old theatrical tradition. Eisenstein, however, decided to build a real ring on the proscenium and trained the two actors to box:

“Eisenstein wanted to oppose the allure of bourgeois diverting art with a sports spectacle in its purest form.”

After taking part in various stage, costume, and design projects for Foregger’s theatres, in 1922 he collaborated with Yutkevich and his friends—future FEKS directors Kozintsev and Trauberg—on the show Columbine’s Garter, inspired by Donati’s pantomime Columbine’s Shawl, which Meyerhold had staged in 1912 with the painter Sapunov dealing with the scenic elements, and which the avant-garde theatre director Alexander Tairov had also staged under the title Pierette’s Veil. The play blended commedia traditions with an attempt to "urbanize" and "modernize" them. In the first act, in Pierrot’s attic, a vertical structure was built: the room’s enormous window occupied the entire stage space and served simultaneously as the stage itself. Characters had to move vertically toward the backdrop. The second act took place in Harlequin’s house, was accompanied by jazz music, and featured a dance master who was not a person but an automaton, inspired by Picasso’s costumes for Cocteau’s Parade. In Eisenstein’s concept, Harlequin was to appear on stage from the auditorium on a wire, like a tightrope walker—an idea he would later reuse in Wiseman. The play, dedicated to his teacher (“To Vsevolod Meyerhold, master of the shawl, from the apprentices of the Garter”), is the first example, in line with the eccentrism and “montage of attractions” models that both Yutkevich and Eisenstein would later develop and was titled Columbine’s Garter. Discovery of Scenic Attractions by Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich. However, the play was never staged.

After becoming Meyerhold’s assistant director on The Death of Tarelkin, Eisenstein undertook his major work of the period and the first for which he was officially credited as director: Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man by Alexander Ostrovsky (renamed in his staging as Wiseman), in collaboration with the poet Sergey Tretyakov. The adaptation was a somewhat ironic subversion of 1923 directive from Narkompros we encountered before which encouraged stagings of the Russian classical playwright to mark his centenary. In the words of Victor Shklovsky:

“It was the show of how a show is staged; it was like a specter; it was a parody of Ostrovsky, a parody of theatre in general and of the theatre of reminiscing in particular, a parody of the very idea of connection between the various episodes.”
The stage used for the production “took the form of a circus ring, enclosed by a red barrier and surrounded on three-quarters of its perimeter by the audience. The remaining side was closed by a curtain, in front of which stood a small raised platform.” Using Ostrovsky’s text only as a general skeleton and greatly altering the characters—turned into “clowns” and “acrobats”—the play interwove a varied sequence of “attractions”:

“Emotions were expressed through spectacular physical feats. In one scene, Strauch showed his anger toward a caricature by diving through the portrait with a somersault. The shifts in action were so abrupt and the depiction of situations so deranged that every performance had to begin with Tretyakov reading a summary of the plot” (Bordwell, 1999).

Acrobatic stunts played a major role: lead actor Grigori Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s lifelong collaborator and future filmmaker, drew on his training with the Rudenko brothers’ circus troupe—his character walked a tightrope and climbed a trapeze. “As the production took shape, it became more ‘heavy’; the volume of material grew, we needed trapezes and wires, and movements became increasingly complicated.”

The main actess Janukova, for her part, “climbed a pole, a massive pole carefully balanced by another actor. It was an acrobatic stunt with real danger” (Shklovsky, 1973: 80). The play ended with firecrackers exploding under the spectators’ seats.

“It is usually said that my film career began with directing Ostrovsky’s comedy Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (...), which is at one and the same time both true and false. False if based only on the fact that this production included a short comic film made for that staging (not separate, even at the montage level, from the theatrical show). More accurate if based on the nature of the staging.”

Beyond the influence of commedia and circus, this mix of grotesque clowning and mechanized acrobatic exercises (in a line similar to Meyerhold’s contemporary productions, FEKS’s The Wedding by Gogol, the works of Sergei Radlov and Alexander Tairov) reflected the influence of American silent cinema. A joint 1922 article by Eisenstein and Yutkevich points in this direction:

“The films of Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Arbuckle, as well as other Hollywood actors, offered ‘opportunities for genuine eccentricity’” (Bordwell, 1999: 26).

The structure of the montage can be seen in the relationships between characters. The plot centers on Glumov, a brazen social climber courting Mamaeva, whom her husband Mamaev has tasked him with watching, while trying to marry Mamaev’s niece, Turusina. In the staging, Mamaev (Maksim Strauch) interacted with the lead actor at floor level, while Mamaeva’s scenes (Janukova) were performed from the raised platform. Instead of scene changes, Glumov ascended and descended between platforms, taking lines from one scene and interrupting them with lines from another. This alternating raised the tempo.

Eisenstein executed a “revolutionary modernization,” turning the characters into clownish equivalents of current socio-political figures: thus, Mamaev became Milyukov, Krutitsky became Joffre, and Golutvin a NEP-man. A key plot device is Glumov’s diary, in which he records his escapades. This diary is what constitutes the “short comic film,” imitating kino-pravda.

In keeping with the avant-garde’s anti-psychological acting style, the protagonist-adventurer is treated in an “eccentric” fashion through onstage costume changes. In the film-diary, they went even further:

Through a daring jump and a dissolve, Glumov transformed into whichever object a character desired. Thus, he became a machine gun in front of Joffre-Krutitsky, who thundered, dressed as a clown, atop a tank in the courtyard of the Military Academy (...). In front of another clown, Milyukov-Mamaev, a sermonizing buffoon, Glumov became a donkey at the zoo. Finally, before the aunt who burned with passion for her young nephews, he transformed, via dissolve, into the small Inkijinoff (...). These shots had nothing to do with cinema as such, even though they included close-ups, panoramas, and even the beginning of an adventure film, where Alexandrov, in black tails, jumped from rooftops and fell from a plane into a speeding car, arriving at the entrance of the Proletkult theatre just as the screen went dark and he appeared in the auditorium, shouting and holding the film reel” (VV.AA. 1975: 53–54).

Glumov’s diary, along with the entire production, was a fertile example of theatre-cinema collaboration—foreshadowing Meyerhold’s future “cinematizations,” alongside contemporary productions like FEKS’s Hymen, Gardin’s The Iron Heel, and Piscator’s “epic theatre” stagings in Germany.

In the spirit of the time, the performance was followed by a theoretical counterpart justifying its formal practices: Eisenstein’s manifesto Montage of Attractions, published by Tretyakov in the journal LEF. In it, aside from polemicizing against the theatrical lines of the Proletkult, Eisenstein defended the characteristics of a new theatre that should be structured as a sum of “attractions,” whose ultimate goal is to direct the spectators in a given direction (“agitation, propaganda, public health education”). And what is meant by attraction?

“An attraction (in its theatrical aspect) is any aggressive moment in theatre; that is, any of its elements that places the spectator under a sensory or psychological impact, experimentally verified and mathematically calculated to provoke specific emotional shocks in the perceiver—shocks which, taken together, constitute the only condition under which the ideal moment of the performance can be perceived, the final ideological conclusion (the path to knowledge ‘through the living play of passions,’ which is specific to theatre).”

It was therefore a theory intimately linked to propagandistic aims, to agitprop, and reflected the strong influence that Pavlovian reflexology had on Soviet artists of the 1920s.

The proposal of a theatre of attractions was posed as an assault on traditional theatre models. Although the attractions could be threaded into a common and general framework—even one based on a specific literary text with a coherent narrative plot—it was clear that the attractions themselves, without preference for “theatrical” or “literary” elements, would be the main focus (“both Ostuzhev’s ‘recitative’ and the color of the leading lady’s waistcoat, both a tympanum strike and Romeo’s monologue”), and that ideas like “the discovery of the playwright’s intentions,” “faithful interpretation of the author,” “truthful historical reconstruction,” etc., would be disregarded.

Beyond the manifesto, the montage of attractions would become a key element in Eisenstein’s first film productions, which would largely continue to follow this model.

Another important aspect, foreshadowing the director’s career, was his obsession with liberating theatre entirely “from the game of ‘illusory figuration’ and ‘representativity,’ hitherto decisive and unavoidable, in order to move toward the montage of ‘real’ things”, an interest in reality that would remain one of his self-justifications when transitioning from theatre to cinema.

From November 1923 comes his second staging with the Moscow Proletkult theatre, again in collaboration with Tretyakov: a piece of agit-guignol written by the latter, titled Do You Hear, Moscow? The subject addressed were “the communist uprisings in Germany and Hungary,” via a schematic mix of melodrama and Grand Guignol. With its grand abstractions and caricatured figures (Pound the financier, the artists Grubbe and Grabbe), the play resembled the protest pieces of German Expressionism. Tretyakov and Eisenstein reduced the number of attractions and designed each scene to have a simpler and more unified performance. According to reports, the public responded to the provocation: spectators heckled the actors and roared loudly when, at the climax of the play, the title was shouted (Bordwell, 1999: 27).

The stagings were geometrically conventional. From these two productions, according to Eisenstein, emerged new fundamental elements of expression (and the path toward cinema): to avoid the danger of falling into purely plastic displacements, the mechanical and the exact, they began to work on cinematic mechanisms related to staging within a frame—what he called Mizankdr (or mise en cadre). In contrast to the theatrical mise en scène—the reciprocal relationship of people acting—the mise en cadre was the visual composition of shots, reciprocally dependent within a montage sequence.

The contradictions arising from these attempts to graft theatre onto a new format surfaced in Eisenstein’s last theatrical production for the Proletkult: Tretyakov’s play Gas Masks, premiered in the spring of 1924.

“This time, the performance took place in the workshops of the Moscow gas company (...), now the audience sat on benches, surrounded by machines, among objects, sounds, and the smells of a factory, while watching the actors crawl among turbines and run along catwalks. This ‘agit-drama’ featured as its protagonist a bourgeois factory manager who squandered the safety budget; as a result, there were no gas masks when a leak was discovered. The workers managed to fix the leak. At the end of each performance, the company’s real workers entered, turned on the turbines, and lit up the factory” (Bordwell, 1999: 27–28).

For Shklovsky, Gas Masks was a spectacle “immersed in reality (...), an attempt to go from parody to real material (...). This poorly executed show is very interesting because it marks the transition from Wiseman to the semantic montage of real material.” Eisenstein himself would hold a similar view: for him, the play already contained all the elements of his cinematic tendencies. the turbines, the factory ultimately “negated the last remnants of theatrical trickery and habits, and all the elements seemed to operate independently. Amid the plastic values of the real factory, theatrical props looked ridiculous. The ‘spectacle’ element was incompatible with the acrid smell of gas. The miserable stage was lost among the authentic settings of working life. In short: it was a failure. But through it, we found our way to the cinema.”