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Brewster Novy Lef An Introduction
Brewster Novy Lef An Introduction
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FILMS FROM THE SOVIET UNION
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Foreword
The teaching of film as film is rare. More usually film is ' used'
in other subjects or alien curricula. Even where taught the teach-
ing is more ideology than an understanding of an artistic product.
Attention is to.' content', what is signified, what is depicted, rather
than to the manner of signification, to the modes of depiction.
Movies are in part responsible for the ideological readings given
them. Though film ' represents ' the world, is a mediation of it
through a structure of signs, it often appears as an unmediated
reflection or presentation. The technological apparatus of film-
making (more and more refined) presents an appearance on the
screen of an accurate reproduction of external reality. Film-making
has an in-built realism. It is no accident that aesthetics of realism
long since rejected for the other arts continue to dominate the
most technically advanced art, in criticism, teaching and produc-
tion, in part because of its technical ' superiority '.
Screen has chosen in this number to reproduce the debates
and ideas of Soviet artists and film-makers of the 1920's for these
debates are reflections upon and struggles with notions of
' realism' which Screen regards as crucial to any understanding
of the cinema in the past and at the moment.
Two sorts of reality concerned Soviet artists - the reality of the
artistic material (the sound, the letter, the word, the shot, the
celluloid) and social reality, either (or both) as something the
work of art depicted or as the context in which the art product
functioned and had a place. This area of debate and concern
was marked by confusion and struggle. The confusion is clear in
the texts - . the recurrence of terms such as * objectivity', ' facti-
city ', ' factography \ ' material' used in double often treble
senses. But the confusion was indicative of the struggles to pre-
serve the formalist pre-revolutionary concern with artistic elements
and the social and political necessities raised by the revolution.
A revolution in art and thinking about art had simultaneously
to be worked out with a revolution in society. The power of the
cinema to reproduce reality brought these two aspects together
in a very acute form revealing both a connection and a disparity
and problematic. The issue was in part expressed and battled out
over the question of the ' play' film and the ' unplayed' film,
Eisenstein and Vertov, the staged October and the revolution itself,
an actor-Lenin, the real Lenin.
What is clear in the debates is the complete awareness (no
matter what position is adopted) that the signs of the cinema are
signs, are mediations with their own particular structures and
specificities. And such structures had to be understood as con-
structs not as simple reproductions of external reality. It was the
beginnings of a science of cinema with an object of its own.
In Britain ' realism' dominates without question or reflection.
The documentary tradition of the most mystified kind persists in
film and television. Criticism orientates still towards content and
signified and impressionist ravings. Film education is obsessed
either with film ' themes ' or the cinema's ' talents '. Theory and
reflection are resisted at most levels — because these are threats.
The resistance most often gets expressed in deep anti-intellectual-
ism, accusations of dogma or in the retreat towards ' practicality ',
the nitty-gritty, what we really need. Sometimes, at the very worst,
the language is of creativity, the artist, art, intuition, the language
for example of Free Cinema, of Lindsay Anderson.
Films made in the Soviet Union in the 1920's were not ' a r t '
but part of a struggle in defining the specifics of the cinema. Films
were both experiments and counters in a debate; they were also
the practice of certain theories and the theorising of a practice.
Practice and theory went together, as indeed they must, reflecting
and modifying each other. There was not that divorce so evident
in film education (and education generally) in this country
between those who make things (the talented) and those who
criticise (the tasteful). Such existent polarities - the precise
practice in education - must be understood, exposed and destroyed
and room made for a more fruitful synthesis. This in part is a
matter of politics.
Screen most recently spoke of a ' politics of education' and a
' politics of film' without perhaps understanding fully the mean-
ing of these terms.
It is not adequate to theorise or to struggle, say, for a more
radical educational and film practice (as Soviet artists did) without
precise attention being paid to how film culture and film educa-
tion are organised and administered and to combat where neces-
sary at this political level organisation and administration. Ideas,
films do hava immense power, but those in power have even
more.
Politics and Production
Vivre sa vie was the last movie Godard made to find general
critical acceptance as an ' a r t ' movie before the real trouble
began over Les carabiniers. It contains (at least) the following ele-
ments, treated (expressed) explicitly:
- the relationships between men and women;
- the oppression of women;
- language and its use in society, silence and its use in society;
- questioning: the habit of asking questions, the practice of using
the asking of questions as a form of relationship between people;
- acceptance: what is seen as the joy of simply accepting existence
as it happens - ' tout est beau' - expressed in Nana's dance,
which is also a deliberate form of offering, and which is related
to her question to the philosopher, ' Why can't we just be silent? '
(cf above, language and silence); which is also related to certain
ideas of emotion, of warmth, and contact;
- appearance and reality;
- death as finality: something almost to be courted, at any rate
looked forward to in a spirit of acceptance;
- responsibility, expressed in this film tautologically in Nana's
io speech (scene 6): ' )e live la main - je suis responsable ' etc;
- prostitution;
- communication;
- documentation/documentary;
- the pursuit of consciousness, present in alternating forms through-
out the film, but expressed specifically in the scene "with the
philosopher Brice Parain, in which the principal ideas are that
there is a certain difference between thinking/talking on the one
hand and life (te v&cu) on the other, and that to think properly
you have to be at a certain distance from life — but this leads
to obvious difficulties, so there has to be a balance;
- and, in the same scene, the practice of arriving at the truth
through a process (or processes) of errors and lies;
- work - as oppression (the scene of Nana in the record shop) -
and as the only thing worth doing (Parain) because it is the only
process that leads you to the mot juste;
- struggle: in her talk with Parain Nana makes another plea for
a life that would be silent, happy, accepting and probably without
conflict, but the idea of struggle informs the whole film and is
present emblematically in the scene where she is being questioned
by the police after having been arrested for shoplifting and her
full name is revealed as Nana Kleinekampf (' little struggle');
- the relationship between life and art (the Oval portrait scene) -
covered by Susan Sontag in her essay on the film.3 (It goes without
saying that the preoccupations listed above frequently overlap with
one another, and recur in other movies.)
At the same time, the movie has a constant preoccupation with
form, as in its opening, where we see Karina's face from three
sides, with form expressed in terms of breaks and fragmentations,
replicated in the episodic structure by scenes and the abrupt hesi-
tations of music and speech on the soundtrack.
There have been widely different critical reactions to this kind
of multiplicity of elements and motifs. For instance: to accept
them uncritically (because they are fashionable?) - to deplore them
en bloc - to say, yes, very interesting, but he should have taken
one of them stuck to it; and explored it in depth the ' rationalist'
approach). In my view a more useful position might be to accept
the multiplicity of points of view and try to study how they con-
tradict, confirm or reflect off each other. In this film as in all
of Godard's the points of view are held together in a continuous
discourse which oscillates between coherence and incoherence.
But it's the primacy accorded the notion of discourse which dis-
tinguishes the mode from all others.
Vivre sa vie is an early film which prefigures the developments
of the later ones. An extract that might be useful to teachers in
this context, as it exemplifies the multi-directional aspirations of
the movie, is Extract Number 2 (scenes 7 & 8).4 It begins with
Nana, a shopgirl who would like to be an actress, writing a letter
of application to a madam for a place in her brothel. The camera n
begins by holding on the full text of the letter itself, as the girl
writes it (writing as work seen literariness, the context of employ-
ment). The text is interrupted only for a joke: in mid-shot we see
Nana rise to her feet and estimate her own height, almost in terms
of hands, like measuring a horse, in order to give accurate details, to
her employer. Raoul, her future pimp, arrives, and for the rest of the
scene dominates her with his offer of better-paid work. Set up
behind him as they sit facing one another, the camera tracks from
side to side while they talk, sometimes letting us see her at an
angle, then blocking her out completely behind his head and back.
We don't see much of his face, and what we do see is vulpine;
but at the same time there is a kind of sincere charm to his
flattery of her, to his assurances, to his almost naive insistence
that he wishes her well. The emotion of contact, shared on both
sides. After they have gone out together, there is a beautiful long-
shot of the Champs-EIysees that served as backdrop to the pre-
vious scene, and a narrating voice entones an elegiac phrase: ' C'est
a I'heure oit s'allument les lumieres de la villa que commence la
ronde sans espoir des filles de la rue'. After this Nana is being
shown her future beats, almost certainly by Raoul, but the
sequence is immediately changed into a montage about prostitu-
tion in general, in which the severely Bressonian quality' of the
shots is counterpointed by an aggressively informative narrated
soundtrack, with full documentation: statistics on health, police
surveillance, what happens when prostitutes get pregnant or drunk,
prices, and the fact that when on duty they have the right to
refuse no paying customer. This mutates into a further montage
of Nana in hotel rooms, and with her first customer. As he pre-
pares to pay her, there is a remarkably expressive (expressionist?)
big close-up of his hand, his trouserpocket and his fly in close
conjunction.
The final point to be made about Vivre sa Vie is that it stands
right outside its heroine. Her own consciousness flickers on and
off, Godard's never ceases, nor does the discourse.
4
Probably the richest period of Godard's work, and certainly the
easiest to do a kind of classical auteur study on, would be the
eight films made between 1964 and 1968 - beginning with Une
femme mari&e and going through to Weekend. For the purpose
of this essay we'll treat these films in the most condensed fashion
possible, partly because they're very well-known and much-
written-about movies, but also because there is a sense, in which
Godard has never been the author of his own work. The work has
been plucked out of the .atmosphere, out of what was going on, out
of the different modes of consciousness set out above. An enormous
number of different things are happening in these films: if we
12 try to single out the explicitly political elements, we see that they
are stated sharply, clearly but.in rather a self-contained way in
Pierrot le fou, and in Masculine, feminine they spread out to per-
meate the whole film. Leaud equates modern life with military
service: ' 24 hours a day authority — a life of taking orders'. In
the launderette sequence Robert tells him: \ . . you'll never find
an individual solution. There isn't any. You've got to throw your-
self into the struggle, and by being in it you end up learning.
You put up with too much. That's impossible. . . . It's a kind of
movement, you know; perpetual rebellion. I can't put up with all
you put up with. That's why I'm active in the union'. Leaud finds
work for a public opinion poll and then that ' the questions he
had to ask deformed public opinions'; that all questions are in-
formed by ideology.
The political emphasis explodes in extraordinary form in Made
in USA, where Godard denounces explicitly his own devotion to
American cinema but at the same time pays tribute to it in a
film which is a kind of orgy of shape, colour, form, music and
sound: abstract and concrete together, with a very highly
developed sense of playing. Emblems abound, and are shuffled
past and round each other: the bloody death's head in the doctor's
surgery, the paint shop where movie posters are, knocked up.
Playfulness: the main body of the film ends with a series of con-
fessions by the principal murderers. David Goodis kills Widmark,
Paula Nelson then kills Goodis. ' Oh Paula, you have robbed me
of my youth'. And yet this riot leads out into the simplest of
interview-type sequences, in which Paula ends by flatly rejecting
the bourgeois journalist Philippe Labro's contention that in the
modern world there's no difference between right and left.
Two or Three Things 1 Know about Her presents a highly-
coloured development of the documentary motif, and counter-
pointing this, the climax of the motif of individual-director con-
sciousness. At this time Godard was expressing a great interest in
television, and a desire to work in it, and his sense of the
medium's possibilities is very well illustrated in the Nouvel
Observateiir interview reprinted in Sight and Sound, Winter 1966-7.
At the same time there is the obsessive, doubting (in the best
sense) commentary read by the director himself: ' me, writer
and painter \ 3
La Chinoise (in the words of its script) marks .the ' first timid
steps ' towards a Marxist-Leninist ideology and towards the elabo-
ration of a science of images that might be both scientific and
revolutionary. In memory, two other things stand out in the film:
its strong formal sense, with controlled but blazing colour, and
the distinctly voluntarist character of the protagonists' conscious
engagement with political issues.6 Playfulness again: the people
reach out to try and grasp ideas, to try and grasp at practice.
Wiazemsky and Leaud are used much as Karina and Belmondo or
Leaud had been used in earlier films: as sacred individuals, not as 13
actors with a task of demonstrating certain things.
This brings us to Weekend, the culmination of the '64-'68
period and also the watershed film, the key to the past and future,
containing both on almost equal terms. The film is built around
the question of culture, which is what allowed Robin Wood to
claim Godard as a belated, tragically-despairing adherent to
Leavis and the Great Tradition (New Left Review 39). It remains,
however, that what is being discussed here is the necessary
destruction of a culture, and not last-minute attempts to salvage
it. To select five symbolic moments from the movie (the first of
which would seem to give Wood some ground for his position,
the remaining four radically contradicting it):
- a distinguished concert pianist takes a grand piano in a pantech-
nicon to a country farmyard, where he plays Mozart to a small,
bored and passive audience (musical action in defence of a culture),
while the camera moves twice through 360 degrees passing the
blank or neutral faces of the listeners. At the end of the perfor-
mance the pianist puts himself down, he wasn't worthy to play
this music - * you should have heard Schnabell';
- Jean Yanne, down-and-out by the roadside, begs a lift from a
well-fed, chauffeur-driven elderly lady. ' Would you rather', she
asks him before replying, ' be fucked by Johnson or Mao? ' Yanne
sizes her up and opts for Johnson. ' Dirty fascist' says the lady,
and drives on;
- a sizeable chunk of the film is given over to three garbage-
collectors, African and Arab, who are described as the Refuse-men
of the Third World, and who deliver a great deal of Third World
situation-speech straight into camera. Faces and words;
- near the end of the film, there is a massacre; horrible, says one
character; not as horrible as the bourgeoisie, says another;
- a printed caption indicates that Godard is striving for the
' Language of October '.
In Weekend the class struggle is seen as a violent, anarchistic,
apocalyptic clash rather than as a struggle between socialised
forces. The confusion is embodied in the style of the film, with
brightly-coloured references in all directions, and the formulation,
at one point, t h a t ' this is the end of the grammatical era, and the
beginning of the flamboyant, especially in the cinema'. If a single
emotion, a single formulation, crosses to the spectator, it is the
violent rejection of a certain form of society and a great uncer-
tainty about what to put in its place. There is even the familiar
suggestion, rendered concretely in the film in terms of similarities
and parallels in their rituals — eggs and fish between girls' thighs
- that the revolutionary society will be another formulation of
the murderously bourgeois one we knew already. Weekend kicks
the discipline of La chinoise out of the window; but both films
have to be seen as the complementary summation of a certain
14 period. Both were being made in the year before May.
(This highly selective account has omitted at least three other
important elements which peaked in the same period;
- the strain of individual romanticism, seen in Pierrot and in
Alphaville - ' I am as alive as my love and my despair';
the tendency to reduce human life to animal simplicity and absur-
dity, felt in Two or Three Things and in the sequence in Weekend
where we see a worm crawling through the mud and the reflection
on the soundtrack that ' we don't know ourselves at all';
- the militant feminism of Une Femme marine.)
The images of this extraordinary period were confused, and had
to be confused; it was the May revolution and its aftermath that
gave Godard the cue for an attempt at ordering them.
6
Of these experiments we are in a position to explore three.
British Sounds develops the practice first suggested in Gai savoir
of separating out image and sound. The film is constructed in six
simple episodes, each describing or accounting for different moments
in political life in Britain. Visually, the style is extremely simple:
elegant documentary reportage. The soundtrack is highly sophi-
sticated, and illustrative of an evergrowing concern for text. The
idea that there is a science of the image, and that it's important to
build it, is reiterated. The break with the Hollywood system intro-
duces a radical change in aesthetics. The aesthetic developing here
would seem to be one of pictures being criticised by words.
Pictures, images, can be very seductive; the more beautiful they
are, and the more lifelike, the more potentially deluding and
impregnated with the ideology of the status quo. The'cinema,
then, is confronted by a total dilemma: it would seem to repre-
sent ' things, facts, phenomena" but in fact it is not representing
them but giving an image of them, and this image is of necessity
not an innocent one. It is the role of the text to make this lack
of innocence clear; to qualify or criticise with ' correct' words
the sense impressions produced by the image. The text of British
Sounds spells these aims out explicitly: the system of representa-
tion is part of bourgeois ideology, the cinema should ' not record
realities, but simply areas of contradictions \ It is ' not a reflection
of reality, but the reality of that reflection '. This reality of reflec-
tion can be seen clearly as a development of the problematic
of consciousness in earlier Godard, and as bearing a clear relation-
ship with the ideas of Brecht about the theatre.
Two films made in 1969, 'Pravda and Struggles in Italy, take
the above proposals a stage further. Each is built around the
problems between film and ideology. Each develops the practice,
inaugurated in Gai savoir, of leaving the screen blank for short or
longer moments, to several ends: (a) to replace an image called
censored or appropriated by the bourgeoisie or international
capitalism; (b) to interrupt the flow of images and sense-impres-
sions in an attempt to force the spectator to listen to the text;
(c) to play a positive role in reorganising the images so that they
embody the growth of revolutionary knowledge and the struggle
for that growth. This is the process that Godard refers to in
several interviews and short articles as making film politically (as
18 opposed to making political films) and as ' the struggle for the edit-
ing *. Struggles in Italy is about an Italian girl. It begins with a
sequence of very simply ordered shots describing her life in
various spheres: in education (she is a student, and also a teacher
- in her own time she gives history lessons to a young worker), in
society (she is a consumer - she buys a blouse in a boutique), in
relation to her family, in relation to a man, and her ideas about
personal identity. The voice of the girl herself commentating:
' Earlier I said that I was a marxist and that I was a member of
the revolutionary movement. But in reality (...) I said (...) some-
thing else. I said: there is idealism and there is marxism. And I
did not say that marxism struggles against idealism. And this is
the important tiing, because when you say marxism you say
struggle. (. . .) I said I was a marxist, but in reality I remained
an idealist, because I did not oppose idealism, I did not struggle
against i t ' . The struggle then begins, and it is projected into the
visual fabric of the film itself by means of repeated re-iterations
of the shots that went to make up the opening sequence, cease-
lessly reorganised to fit a rigorously questioning commentary,
punctuated by black spaces. ' The relationship between images and
black spaces had been organised from this point, this centre
called society. This relationship has a name: ideology. Ideology:
relationship, necessarily imaginary, of yourself to your real condi-
tions of existence'. In this second part of the film, the black
spaces are a battlefield of ideas. ' Return to practice. Criticism of
past practice. Transformation. (. . .) Begin to transform yourself.
Produce knowledge'. Each area of the girl's life is gone over and
criticised, its contradictions laid bare. And in particular the con-
tradiction that for all her militant practice and for all her
militant talk, she remains in practice and in ideas largely
governed by bourgeois ideology (referred to as ' the determinant
region'.) Whence a renewal of the struggle: ' To discover with
Marx that life is a contradiction present in things and phenomena
themselves which is continually posed and continually resolved.
To discover with Marx that as soon as contradiction ceases, life
ceases as well, and death comes. To discover that contradiction is
universal and at the same time specific'. And this second section
of the film ends with a formulation that bears equally on the
life of a militant and on the cinematic process itself.' The problem
does not lie in the reflection itself, but in the struggle between
a reflection that denies the objective contradictions and a reflection
that expresses them'.
The third part of the film proposes changes. The black spaces
begin to be filled. The space relating to society is replaced ' by a
scene of a workshop, that is, by a scene of a production relation-
ship'. (In practice, this is not so much a 'scene' as an image,
a symbolic representation of a production relationship, but in both
British Sounds and Pravda there are genuine scenes of production
relationships.) The space relating to education is replaced by the 19
voice of the university apparatus ' speaking of ideas - in them-
selves. It does not say where they come from' while (in vision)
the girl herself passes on the same message to the young worker.
4
The blow had hit the mark. I was ensuring in my own practice
the daily uninterrupted reproduction of capitalist production re-
lationships '. The film ends on a note that would obviously repel
the bourgeois critic' if he were so unlucky as to stumble into .
a showing of it. How is the girl to change her life, to become
transformed? ' Aggravate the contradiction. To bring into my life
the struggle - the class struggle - the class struggle into my life.
Programme: to think of subjectivity in terms of class '. And then
on the kind of severely practical admission that doesn't - in con-
ventional aesthetic terms - find much favour either, but which
has come to characterise the endings of most of Godard's more
recent work: ' But it is a difficult road. And what I have said is
at most an indication of work and struggle '.
Pravda attempts to operate on two levels at once: to give an
account of the Czechoslovak situation; and to initiate (as in
Struggles in Italy) a programme of re-education of the intellectuals;
the word ' intellectuals * we take here to mean anyone capable of
responding to political ideas anywhere. The programme of re-
education adheres verbally fairly closely to extracts from the
Quotations of Chairman Mao, and to other material taken more
or less directly from Peking Information and from classic Leninist
texts. Two disembodied voices (named as Vladimir and Rosa, and
who are perhaps the descendants of LSaud and Berto in Gai
savoir) interrogate and inform one another ceaselessly on the ques-
tions of Czechoslovakia, modern revisionism, and re-education.
What is particularly interesting about the film is that these ele-
ments are combined with a renewed symbolic vigour (in intermit-
tent but strategically located shots) which is all the more striking
for being juxtaposed with a very dense and militantly polemical
text. For instance: Marxist-Leninist thought represented by a
blossoming rose; the same rose trampled in the mud for the in-
vasion of Czechoslovakia; red wine spilling from a lager glass
(the brand name of the lager is ' International') to denote revision-
ist butchery (much as petty-bourgeois butchery was indicated by
the flowing of rabbit and human blood in Weekend); a beautiful
high-angled shot of a circular tramway terminal, to indicate at
first appearance the enclosed situation in which the Czech work-
ing-class finds itself, and later the necessary circularity of all
intellectual work; a girl stands holding the rose on a stalk (im-
pression of fragility) while a peasant hay-wain crosses the back
of the frame. These sophisticated images are complemented by
the now familiar rough-and-ready ones (including many of produ-
tion scenes), the black spaces for reflection and ' editing' - think-
ing about the shot which came before and the one which is to
20 come after - the same emphasis on work and struggle, the same
urgent desire to ' establish new connections between images and
sounds'. There is also a visual insistence on the colour red, a
textual one on the idea t h a t ' red' can mean very different things.
In the last stages of the film, we have frequent shots of the
cameraman himself, filming with the Little Red Book attached to
the camera, while the voices of Vladimir and Rosa are already
admitting (another usual motif) that the film is a failure. ' You've
been wrong - too dogmatic. Images still have force. You've adopted
the style of posters and slogans. You thought you were taking one
step forward, in fact you were taking two steps back'. But mis-
takes have to be made in public, otherwise no work can get
done at all. Who cares about failure? Thinking is difficult. Ideas
come from social practices....
7
One problem that has to be confronted immediately is the
fact, as Gerard Leblanc put it in his article on Pravda in Cinethique,
that ' the Dziga Vertov group's films don't reach the masses, and
the few militants who see them reject them for their intellectual-
ism '. In other words, the Dziga Vertov group is not making agita-
tional films in the accepted sense; there's no question of the films
provoking (or even reflecting) revolutionary-type events in the ' real
world '; the politicisation of film undertaken here is strictly internal
to the film itself. The group itself stresses that the films are not
intended for large audiences, but for small groups conscious of
ideological questions. The films themselves make one acutely aware
that even within these small groups there must be further sub-
divisions, even smaller groups, split up along the lines of political
culture and cinema culture, and then again according to the vari-
ous forms of cross-mating possible between these two cultures.
Cindthiqua defines itself as ' a movement of cinephiles moving
towards politics '. Godard's status is essentially the same.
But the questions raised by this ' movement * can be of great
importance both to mass cinema and to cinema criticism. They
tie up, more than three (jecades later, with some of the proposi-
tions advanced by Walter Benjamin in his essays on 'The author
as producer' and ' The work of art in the age of mechanical re-
production '. In the first essay Benjamin called for the rejection
of the old question, How does a work stand in relation to the
relationships of production of a given period, and proposed sub-
stituting the question, How does the work stand in the relation-
ships of production? He then surveyed various apparently
' political' art movements of the 20's and 30's - ' activism' and
' the new objectivity' - and concluded from their failure that the
process of politicisation should intervene at the stage of produc-
tion of an art-work and not merely as part of the preliminary
ideological formation of its producers). The latter process can lead
only to works' of a political tendency', not to political works. 21
' However revolutionary this political tendency may appear, it
actually functions in a counter-revolutionary manner as long as
the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat ideologi-
cally and not as a producer '. The ' new objectivity ' for instance,
had the effect of making documentary fashionable; but documen-
tary presented poverty as something ' beautiful', to be contem-
plated, without promoting political consciousness of poverty.
' Misery became a commercial asset'.
For Benjamin, photography was meaningless unless it had
captions. It was the caption that in picture papers (and by exten-
sion, the cinema) could tear photography away from ' fashionable
cliches and give it a revolutionary use-value'.
The author as producer ends with a single demand to the writer:
that he should reflect, think about his position in the process of
production. Godard's maxim — that it is more important to make
films politically than to make political films - is an echo of these
propositions.
The proposition about photography and captions is more fully-
developed in 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction',
which polemically goes much further in establishing the revolution-
ary credentials of cinema than anything in Eisenstein. Benjamin
saw mechanical reproduction in all its forms - newspapers, photo-
graphy, cinema - as being the instrument that opened a breach in
the wall of the traditional values of the cultural heritage. These he
defined as Uniqueness and Permanence, the qualities of which tie
traditional, artisanal, individualistic art to essentially religious and
ritualistic modes. The moving-picture image, with its characteristics
of transitoriness and reproducibility has the effect of destroying
the aura of permanence around the object, of ' prying it from its
shell'. With the film, art leaves ' the realm of the beautiful sem-
blance ' and moves into a consciously mobilising stance. The
directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in
illustrated magazines soon became even more explicit and more
imperative in the film, where the meaning of each single picture
appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all the preceding ones '.
Godard carries this thought of Benjamin's a stage further with the
proposition (in and around British Sounds) that photography, in
its ' natural' state, was an ideological invention of the bourgeoisie
and must be dissolved and reconstituted along critical lines before
it can serve as a weapon for socialist purposes.
The theoretical consequences of this position have been admir-
ably worked through by J. P. Fargier in his Cine'thique article
Parenthesis or Indirect Route.6 Bourgeois cinema is not only a
vector for ideologies already in circulation; it also secretes its own
specific ideology: the impression of reality. The . impression of
reality spawns two processes in the spectator: recognition, and
then mystification. The task of political cinema, and of cinema
22 criticism, is to destroy those processes. ' Life is not on the screen,
and the most revolutionary film can only give what it has: images
and sounds *. It should by now be clear that these lines of develop-
ment must have their application to the whole of cinema, and not
simply to one sector arbitrarily labelled off as ' political'. All films
can be analysed on the basis of their production, of the choices
that go into the making of sounds and images during the process
of production of a film. ' The only way to rehabilitate art is to say
that aesthetic practice is the principal practice in the process of
production of a film '.
Notes
1. All cinema is political, but the particular form of this exploration
prevents us from looking in much detail either at political themes and
motifs within the traditional ' commercial' cinema or in the ' social'/
' socially-conscious' (social-fascist?) cinemas, Lumet, Ritt, et al). Or
at the Franju-Resnais-Marker filiature, or at the various cinemas of the
Third World which played an important role in the cultural fermenta-
tion of the late sixties. All of these areas, and not least the first, need
urgent re-examination. The most we can do here is refer to some of their
aspects at the points where they intersect with Godard and with the
critical pursuits contemporaneous with his later work.
2. Since The Little Soldier is a key movie, marking Godard's first plunge
into both politics and reflexiveness, it is only fair to say that despite the
prominence in it of Mao's pamphlet A single spark can start a prairie
fire and an acute awareness of the realities of the Algerian war, the
general tone of the movie is, in simple political terms, predominantly
reactionary. This arises quite naturally from the first category of con-
sciousness stated at the beginning of this section: at the time he made
The Little Soldier and in the period leading up to it Godard was nothing
much more (in terms of his general ideas) than a petty-bourgeois right-
wing anarchist with a good smattering of general culture. What redeems
the film is its consciousness of dialectic and of process.
3. Against interpretation, London, 1967 (pp 196-207).
4. Hunter Films.
5. If ultimately the film doesn't work very well, it's because Marina
Vlady doesn't really figure as any kind of a Brechtian actress, and also
because in the last third of the movie there is an insufferably long
word-game scene in a cafe.
6. Even at his most explicitly political, Godard is rejected by large
sections of the left; it was probably the voluntarism of La chinoise
that led Cinethique to refer to it as ' smeared all over with politics, but
but entirely invested with bourgeois ideology'.
7. Of which Thomas Elsaesser has given an excellent account in the
Brighton Film Review No 21.
8. Reprinted in Screen. Vol. 12, No. 2, pp 131-144.
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARTICLES
Cahiers du Cinema: Andre-S. Labarthe, ' La chance d'etre femme', No
125, November 1961.
Christian Metz, ' Le cinema moderae et la narrativite', No 185 Christ-
mas 1966.
' Les Etats Gdne'raux du cindma francais ', No 203, August 1968.
J. L. Comolli, Jean Narboni, ' Cinema/Ideologie/Critique', No 216
October 1969; and attack on Cinethique in No 217, November 1969.
Bernardo Bertolucci, 'Versus Godard'; Michael Delahaye, 'Jean-Luc 23
Godard and the childhood of art' - both in Cahiers du Cinema in
English, No 10, May 1967.
Cinethique: All issues of this periodical are relevant. We could single
out: In No 1 (January 1969), ' U n cincaste comme les autres' (inter-
view with Godard); 'Deux critiques comme les autres' (on Godard's
Un film comme les autres).
No 3 (Undated, 1969) Interview with Solanas; Interview with Pleynet
and Thibeaudeau 'of Tel Quel
No 5 (Sept-Oct, 1969) Statement by Godard on British sounds; J. B.
Fargier, ' La parenthese et le detour, essai de definition theorique du
rapport cin£ma-politique'; Gerard Leblanc, ' Godard - valeur d'usage
ou valeur d'cchange?'; J. B. Fages, ' Les figures du conditionnement'.
No 6 (Jan-Feb, 1970) Editorial attack on Cahiers No 216 (see above);
Interview with Christian Metz; J. P. Fargier, ' L e processus de pro-
duction de film'.
7-8 (Undated, 1970) J. P. Fargier, ' Vers le recit rouge'; M. Cegarra,
' Cinema et s^miologie'; Gerard Leblanc, ' Quelle avant-garde? (Note
sur une pratique actualle du cinema militant)' - in fact on Godard's
Pravda.
Cinema 70: Un ph£nom£ne nouveau: les groupes de realisation. Les
collectifs Dziga Vertov, Medvedkine, SLON, Dynadia et les C.R.P. se
definissent eux-memes', No 151, Dec 1970.
Sight and Sound: Interview with Godard, Winter 1966-67.
Brighton Film Review: Thomas Elsaesser, ' One plus One', No 21, June
1970.
New left Review: Controversy between Robin Wood and Lee Russell,
No 39, Sept-Oct 1966. Walter Benjamin, "The author as producer',
No 62, July-Aug 1970. Hans Magnus Enzensberger,' Constituents of a
theory of the media ', No 64, Nov-Dec 1970.
After-image: Articles by Peter Sainsbury on Godard and by Godard on
British Sounds and Pravda, No 1, Apr 1970. Graeme Farness, 'Which
avant-garde?', No 2, Autumn 1970.
Special numbers of other periodicals devoted to Godard:
New York Film Bulletin, No 46, 1964.
Film Culture, Summer 1964.
Image et Son, No 211, Dec 1967.
Cahiers du Cinema in English, No 12, Dec 1967.
BOOKS
Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard, Seghers, Paris, revised 1967.
Jean-Luc Godard au-dela du recit, edited by Michael Esteve, Les Lettres
Modernes, Paris, 1967 (Etudes Cinematographiques Nos 57-61).
Jean-Luc Godard: A critical anthology edited by Toby Mussman,
Dutton, New York, 1968.
The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, introduced by Ian Cameron, Movie/
Studio Vista, London, revised 1969.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Cape, London, 1970 (especially the
chapters ' What is Epic Theatre?' and "The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction').
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on the Theatre, Methuen, London, 1964.
Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1966.
For sheer entertainment, try Michel Vianey's En attendant Godard,
Grasset, Paris, 1966, a somewhat over-wrought account of the making
of Masculin-feminin.
Many transcriptions of films by Godard (particularly the less recent
24 ones) are now published in book form. Perhaps the mo
these publications is the script of Deux on trois choses
d'elle (L'Avani-Scene du Cinema, Paris, 1967), For a full
and other publications on Godard see the National Fi
Book .Library Bibliography No. 19.
Documents from Lef 25
Into Production!
Lef, Vol I pp 105, 108.
Rodchenko was an abstract artist. He has become a Constructivist
and production artist. Not just in name, but in practice.
There are artists whe have rapidly adopted the fashionable
jargon of Constructivism. Instead of' composition ' they say ' con-
struction '; instead of ' t o write' they say ' to shape'; instead of
' to create' - ' to construct'. But they are all doing the same
old thing: little pictures, landscapes, portraits. There are others
who do not paint pictures, and work in production, who also talk
about material, texture, construction, but once again out come the
very same age-old ornamental and applied types of art, little
cockerels and flowers, or circles and dashes.
And there are still others, who do not paint pictures, and do
not work in production — they ' creatively apprehend ' the ' eternal
laws' of colour and form. For them the real world of things does
not exist, they wash their hands of it. From the heights of their
mystical insights they contemptuously gaze upon anyone who
profanes the ' holy dogmas ' of art through work in production,
or any other sphere of material culture.
Rodchenko is no such artist. Rodchenko sees that the problem
of the artist is not the abstract apprehension of colour and form,
but the practical ability to resolve any task of shaping a concrete
object. Rodchenko knows that there aren't once-for-all set laws of
construction, but that every new task must be resolved afresh,
starting from the conditions set by the individual case.
Rodchenko knows that you won't do anything by sitting in your
own studio, that you must go into real work, carry your own orga-
nising talent where it is needed - into production. Many who have
glanced at Rodchenko's work will say: ' Where's the Constructiv-
ism in this? Where's he any different from applied art?' To them
I say, the applied artist'embellishes the object, Rodchenko shapes
jt. The applied artist looks at the object as a place for applying his
own ornamental composition, while Rodchenko sees in the object
38 the material that underlies the design. The applied artist has noth-
ing to do if he can't embellish an object - for Rodchenko a com-
plete lack of embellishment is a necessary condition for the proper
construction of the object.
I It is not aesthetic considerations, but the purpose of the object
I which defines the organisation of its colour and form.
At the moment things are hard for the Constructivist-production-
artist. Artists' turn their backs on him. Industrialists wave him
away in annoyance. The man in the street goggles and, frightened,
whispers: ' Futurist!' It needs tenacity and willpower not to lapse
into the peaceful bosom of canonised art, to avoid starting to
' create' like the ' fair copy' artists, or to concoct ornaments for
cups and handkerchiefs, or daub pictures for cosy dining-rooms
and bedrooms.
Rodchenko will not go astray. He can spit on the artists and
Philistines and as for the industrialists he will break through and
prove to them that only the productional-constructive approach
to the object gives the highest proficiency to production. Of course,
this will not happen quickly. It will come when the question of
' quality' moves to the forefront; but now, when everything is
concentrated on ' quantity ', what talk can there be of proficiency!
Rodchenko is patient. He will wait; meanwhile he is doing
what he can - he is revolutionising taste, clearing the ground for
the future non-aesthetic, but expedient, material culture. Rod-
chenko is right, It is evident to anyone with his eyes open that
there is no other road for art than into production.
Let the company of ' fair-copyists ' laugh as they foist their
daubings onto the philistine aesthetes.
Let the ' applied artists' delight in dumping their ' stylish
ornaments * on the factories and workshops.
Let the man in the street spit with disgust at the iron construc-
tive power of Rodchenko's construction.
There is a consumer who does not need pictures and ornaments,
and who is not afraid of iron and steel.
This consumer is the proletariat. With the victory of the pro-
letariat will come the victory of constructivism.
Osip Brik
Materialised Utopia
Lef, Vol I pp 61, 64
Towns of the future have existed in the past too: More, Fourier,
Morris etc. Yet Lavinsky's project has a quite special new signifi-
cance. Lavinsky has also created a town of the future. And this
was naturally only to be expected. Not from Lavinsky. From today's
revolutionary artists in general. For Lavinsky, of course, is only one
particular case.
The romance of the commune, and not the idyll of the cottage.
That is the first thing. Secondly: previously it was only discussed 39
(Wells and others), but Lavinsky has simply sketched it out. He
has drawn it in his own style, unusually depictive - but what of it!
There was just one purpose: to demonstrate, and not to discuss,
and the purpose has been achieved. Thirdly, and most important:
the artist wanted to construct.
One could name hundreds of professors, academics and so on
who did not even ' want'. Yet architecture turned into form, orna-
mentation, the aesthetic cult of beauty. But what of the engineers?
Of course they have been building, and still are. They build
straightforwardly, in modern fashion, on the basis of the latest
industrial techniques. But there's one odd thing: as long as they
occupy themselves with specific structures (bridges, cranes, plat-
forms) all goes well; but as soon as they take on a larger-scale
construction it's enough to make the old familiar face of the
aesthete peer out from beneath the mask of the engineer. Brought
up on the canons of bourgeois art the engineer is almost always
just as much of a fetishist as his blood-brother the architect. So.
engineering falls into the sweet embrace of aestheticism, and
thereby voluntarily condemns itself either to a narrowing of the
problems, or to social conservatism.
With all these facts in mind I maintain that Lavinksy's project,
1
using engineering in its future dynamics, engineering as a universal
method, engineering released from beneath the moulds of art and
subordinated only to the law of socio-technical expediency, this
project strikes at both the artist and the engineer. To the former
it says plainly: hands off the. business of life, you who have re- '
mained on Parnassus. The latter it summons to revolutionary bold-
ness and to a break with traditional aesthetising, towards the
organisation of life in all its extent.
This does not exhaust the significance of Lavinsky's experiment,
however. Lavinsky is a Constructivist. What is Constructivism?
When the former artist set about using his material (paint etc),
he regarded it only as a means of creating an impression. Such an
impression was attained in the various forms of depiction. The
artist ' reflected' the world, as people like to say. The furious
growth of individualism broke up depictive art. Abstract art
appeared. And at one and the same time, while some (the expres-
sionists for example) were highly delighted with such a novelty,
and, even though they did not crawl from the swamp of * impres-
sionistic ' creation, tailored it in the style of metaphysics — others
saw in the abstract form a new, unprecedented possibility. Not
the creation of forms of the supremely ' aesthetic', but the expe-
ditious construction of materials.
Not the ' end in itself', b u t ' value of content'. Replace the word
' content' by the word' purpose ', and you will understand what
it's all about. But how can one speak of a ' purpose ' in an abstract
construction? Between the construction and the object there is a
40 gulf: the same sort as between art and production. But the Con-
structivists are still artists. The last of the Mohicans of a form of
creation divorced from life represent themselves as the finish of the
' end in itself' nonsense, which eventually revolted against itself.
Herein lies their great historical significance. But therein also is the
tragedy of their situation. The crusaders of aestheticism are con-
demned to aestheticism until a bridge towards production can be
found. But how can this bridge be built in a country where produc-
tion itself is scarcely alive? Who will turn to the artist, who will
permit himself the luxury of a gigantic, unprecedented experiment
where it is necessary at present simply to * hold-out'? And the
proferred hand of the Constructivist will stay hanging in mid-air.
That is why I do not smile when I look at Lavinsky's sketches.
Pioneers always hold in their hands just a banner, and often a torn
one at that. Surely they do not cease to be pioneers for that?
Manilov busied himself with Utopias in his spare time: a little
bridge, and on the bridge etc, etc. His Utopias were born passively.
The economist Sismondi created Utopias of another sort - it was
the past that fascinated him. Fourier was also a Utopian, his Utopia
was a revolutionary one. Taking root in the bosom of the historical
process such a Utopia becomes a material force, which organises
mankind. And that is when we can say with a,capital letter:
Utopia. For who does not know that without Fourier and others
there would have been no Marx? It is to this particular category
of Utopias that Lavinsky's project belongs. If a * materialised'
Utopia is at present only alliteratively similar to a ' realised'
Utopia, then one conclusion must follow: help to realise the path
indicated. Or, finally: develop, continue further, reform, but do
not turn aside. May this individual attempt, this romantic leap
across the abyss turn into a collective, deliberate collaboration
organised on laboratory lines. Abroad (eg in Germany) we are
already aware of a series of experiments and projects for a future
city. These efforts are considerably nearer to present-day Western
resources than is Lavinsky's project to Russian resources. They are
' simpler *, more realisable, more production-like. But they have
a bad heredity: with an old architect for a father, and an expres-
sionist painting for a mother, you won't get far beyond aesthetic-
ism!
A city in the air. A city of glass and asbestos. A city on springs.
What is this - an eccentricity, a modish novelty, a trick? No -
simply maximum expediency.
In the air - to release the earth.
Made of glass - to fill it with light.
Asbestos - to lighten the structure.
On springs - to create equilibrium.
All right, but as to the circular plan, surely it's that cursed
old symmetry again? Yes, but not as form, but as an economic
principle.
It's marvellous, but what purpose is there in these strange 41
houses rotating? Who will dare say that this is not Futurism, the
Futuristic aesthetisation of life? In other words: surely this is that
same old aesthetidsm, but in a new guise? Such an objection may
apply not only to the houses: it bears down even more heavily
on the unusual appearance of the springs and the radio-station.
This is surely Futurism, dynamics, a fracture, a confusion of planes
and lines, antiquated displacements, all that old assortment of
Italian Futurist pictorial rubbish.
Not at all! Because:
1. The rotation of the buildings pursues the very same everyday
object as do Japanese houses made of paper. The difference is in
the technique.
2. The springs and the radio are built as they are, and not
otherwise, in the name of freedom and economy of space.
There is still one question, this time the last: are such systenu
technically possible? How will theoretical mechanics react to
them? I do not know. I am ready to assume the worst - that a
literal realisation of the plan in all its details is unthinkable either
with today's or with any other level of technique. ' My business
is to make suggestions . . . " as Mayakovsky declared to the angels.
Lavinsky declares the very same thing to the engineers, since what
has chiefly concerned Lavinsky is the social side of the matter -
the form 0/ the new life. Let the engineers now say (they are not
angels, fortunately) what is possible and what is not possible,
how they can amend, and where they can amplify. That would
not be useless work.
Boris Arvatov
Looking at the pictures that have come to us from the West and
from America, and bearing in mind the information we have about
the work and experiments abroad and at home, I arrive at this
conclusion: —
The death sentence passed by film-directors in 1919 on every
film without exception is effective to this very day.
The most thorough observa-
tion reveals not a single picture,
not a single experiment directed, LEGALISED
as they should be, towards the SHORT-
emancipation of the film-camera. SIGHTEDNESS
which remains wretchedly en-
slaved, subordinated to the
imperfect, undiscerning human eye.
We are not protesting at the undermining of literature and the
theatre by the cinema, and we fully sympathise with the use of the
cinema for all branches of science, but we define these functions
of the cinema as side-lines diverging from the main line.
2.
BACK NUMBERS
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References
1. A. A. Bogdanov: 'Critique of Proletarian Art', Proktarskaya
Kultwa, 1918 no 3, pp 12-21, German translation in Richard Lorenz
ed, Proletarische Kulturrevolution in Sowjetrussland, Munich 1969,
p 43.
2. Translated by Richard Sheldon, Ithaca and London 1970.
3. For the ' heroic phase' of Russian futurism see Vladimir Markov:
Russian Futurism, a History, London 1969.
4. See Edward J. Brown: The Proletarian Episode in Russian Litera-
ture 1928-32, New York 1953.
5. See Helga Gallas: Marxistische Literaturtheorie, Kontroversen irn
Bund proletarisch-revolutionarer Schriftsteller, Neuwied and Berlin
1971.
6. Manifeste, Schriften deutscher Kunstler des zwanzigsten Jahrhun-
derts, Bd.I, ed Diether Schmidt, Dresden 1965, p 358.
7. Erwin Piscator, Political Theatre 1920-1966, exhibition catalogue,
London 1971, p 10.
8. Tretyakov visited Berlin in 1931, met Brecht and many leading
members of the BPRS, and was attacked in Die Linkskurve by
Lukacs (see Gallas, op cit, pp 123-5). In the USSR, he was close to
Piscator after the latter settled there in 1931.
9. A feuilleton is a regular column in a newspaper which makes a
moral or political point about the day's news, usually by linking
two unrelated news items together in some unexpected way - the
conceit is as important as the overt point Feuilletons are found in
French papers and in papers modelled on French ones; in Russia
they had a particularly spectacular development. Robert Escarpit's
Au jour le jour column in Le Monde is a good example of a
feuilleton. For an analysis of the technique of the feuilleton, sec
Viktor Shklovsky: Gamburgsky Schet, Leningrad 1928.
10. See Victor Erlich: Russian Formalism, History-Doctrine, Paris and
the Hague, 3rd edition 1969, pp 176-7.
11. Eg: ' It is a commonplace that political tendencies inhabit every
work of art in every epoch, in that such tendencies are historical
forms of consciousness. But just as deeper rock strata only come to
light where they outcrop, so the deeper formation ' tendency' is
only visible to the eye in the outcrop points of the history of art.
. . . Technical revolutions are the outcrop points of the development
of art where tendency always comes to the surface, is in some
sense exposed. In every new technical revolution, the tendency
changes as if of itself from a very hidden element to a manifest one,'
Die Literarische Welt Jg3 (1927), No 11, p 7; cit. Helmut Lethen:
Neue Sachlichkcit 1924-32, Studien zur Literatur des ' Weissen
Sozialismus', Stuttgart 1970, p 130. For a general account of Benja-
min's aesthetic positions, ibid, pp 127-139.
12. For the Russian cinema and Left Front influence on it, see Jay
Leyda: Kino, London 1960, and Cahiers du Cinema, No 218-232,
esp. No 220-221, May-June 1970 and 226-7 (Jan-Feb 1971).
13. See Angelo Maria Ripellino: Majakovskij e il teatro russo d'avan-
guardia, Turin 1959, p 260n.
14. Vertov's reply to this criticism is discussed by A. Fevralski in an
article in Iskusstvo Kino, December 1965, published in French
translation in Colliers du Cinema No 229, May-June 1971, pp 27-33.
We are searching (Editorial, New Lef, No 11/12, 1927) 67
From the outset Lef has worked on the problem of the so'cial
function of things produced by workers in art. The task is — to
isolate from among the confusion of (often conscious) intentions,
the real social purpose of an object, that is, the effect it produces;
then to establish the methods and conditions which produce this
effect most fully, and most economically in terms of forces and
means.
In the five years of its existence, Lef's most notable results
have been in two fields - literature and the fine arts (IZO).
To the easel painting, which supposedly functions as ' a mirror
of reality' Lef opposes the photograph — a more accurate, rapid
and objective means of fixing fact.
To the easel painting — claimed to be a permanent source of
agit — Lef opposes the placard, which is topical, designed and
adapted for the street, the newspaper and the demonstration, and
which hits the emotions with the sureness of artillery fire.
In literature, to belles-lettres and the related claim to ' reflection '
Lef opposes reportage - ' factography' - which breaks with literary
art traditions and moves entirely into the field of publicism to
serve the newspaper and the journal. This is what is meant by
Lef prose which we are disseminating through various newspaper
articles and publishing in exemplary extracts in the journal New
Lef.
On the other hand, Lef continues to promote poetry which it
places within a definite agit function, assigns clear tasks in public-
ism and coordinates with other newspaper material.
These are the two fields from which the Lef formula of art is
developing. If fact is needed - old art is no use. Old art deforms
fact - to grasp fact use new methods.
If stimulus and agit are needed - assemble all the appropriate
material available, but bear in mind that agit divorced from a
concrete aim to which it is directed, agit transformed into agit in
general, a play on nerves, stimulation for its own sake, is agit
aesthetics and operates in society like drugs or dangerous drink.
While major poetic forms such as, for instance, the narrative
poem, may still be the subject of controversy within Lef from
the standpoint of their functional expediency, there is no contro-
versy over such forms as the feuilleton, the slogan and the prag-
matically orientated agit-poem.
The fixing of fact and agit represent two basic functions. In
considering these we must also consider the devices through
which these functions can be realised.
68 The art product operates (chiefly) as either intellectualisation
or emotionalisation. In fact these may well represent two func-
tional axes in relation to which the old concepts ' epic' and
' lyric' are now crystallising. We consider that with increased
precision of work in art, the former will gain ground at the ex-
pense of the latter. We are moving towards a time, when the
intellectual content of facts will give them agit effect far surpassing
that of any emotionalised pressuring.
It can be assumed that the schema appropriate to the fine arts
will apply equally to the cinema.
Film production is a field in which Lef has recently concen-
trated particular energy, establishing production practices, study-
ing film making and constructing a theory of cinema.
In this field theoretical research is in full swing. On questions
of cinema the unarmed (or indeed those armed by Lef-Eaters)
may see only anarchy of opinions in Lef theory and an apparent
absence of any structuring constants. This is not the case.
When Lef theorists analyse formal and material distinctions
between the ' play ' film and the ' unplayed ' film, Tretyakov pro-
ceeds from the film material, Shklovsky from the narrative structure
of the scenario, Zhemchuzhny from the shooting arrangements,
and so on, hence the apparent variations.
But when the question is the social function of these two
categories, then Lef's orientation emerges immediately and
clearly: on the one hand towards the cinema of fact - the news-
reel in the widest sense of the term - and on the other hand to the
pragmatically orientated, topical, publicistic agit-film.
At the same rime it must be stressed that Lef in no sense
equates the cinema of fact with cheap cinema, as does Comrade
Blyakhin (Izvestiva 25.12.27) in an article which expresses views
of the ' unplayed' film generally in accord with those of Lef.
The cinema of fact, if it is not to be discredited by amateurish-
ness, hackwork and dullness, demands at least an equal place with
the play film in estimates in terms of facilities and finance.
As far as the remaining mass of so-called ' entertainment' film
production is concerned, the agit function of which is dubious
since it lacks either actuality, or publicism, or pragmatic orienta-
tion, it is the business of Lef to sort out cinematic publicism from
among the cinematic belles-lettres.
The Lef analysis of the social function of film genres and the
related struggle for and against them is the main content of Lef
work now and in the future.
The Civil War was also a period of fierce struggle on the art front.
The revolutionary Futurists and Com-Futs were not just a detach-
ment of anti-traditionalists rushing in to conquer the tastes of the 69
period. They flung art into the thick of revolutionary activity.
They set the tone and held the hegemony in the field of aesthetic
forms. Their innovations and projects, while not always fully
realised, were always significant and grandiose. Tatlin's Tower,
Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe1, the Rosta Posters and the RSFSR
productions and in common ideas of the epoch as important and
inspiring as those that give rise to the worker's army and com-
munist Saturday labour. The greatest achievement of left art in
that period was the establishment of the principle of production
art, whereby the former entertainer/joker/dora/conjurer/
hanger-on of society's entertainment world switched categorically
to the ranks of the workers, exchanging an aesthetic fantasy for
the creation of things that were useful and needed by the prole-
tariat.
Lef was the form which the activities of revolutionary Futurism
took in the conditions of the New Economic Policy - an associa-
tion of workers in left art. Lef means Left front, and Left front
implies opposition to any other front. The novelty of the Lef
position as against the position of Com-Fut lay in the fact that
the principles established in the preceding period now had to be
realised in conditions of competitive production with other group
suppliers of aesthetic products. ' Who's side are you on? ' proved
to be an urgent question in the field of art too. The whole of
academy art ranged itself against Lef. Academy art was economi-
cally powerful for it had once again found its old, well-tried
consumer. It demanded a licence to trade and this was obligingly
granted in the shape of the formula about ' assuming the cultural
heritage'.
' Who's side are you on? ' - a frenetic rag fair had broken out
in the marketplace of aesthetic products where talent, charlatanry
and all kinds of fine imitations elbowed each other furiously. Their
guidelines were the box office takings and production costs, their
aims, to satisfy the tastes of the consumer. They lost no time in
disassociating themselves from ' Lefism ' even while appropriating
Lef formal devices for their own constructivist nicknacks. But Lef
proved to have staying power and vitality. Wherever artistic initia-
tive was needed. Lef emerged and acted, to each piece of expedi-
ency on the part of academism, Lef raised its own utilitarian-
based objection. But since Lef considered that an aggressive stance
was vital, it had at all costs to maintain a distance between
itself and its enemies: failing this it would have found itself thrust
into the general melee where it would have had its arms pinned
and been paralysed. As it was, the roach that crept up from the
right wing of art did in fact paralyse Lef to a significant extent
by taking over all its inventions, terminology, techniques, con-
structivist devices, parading itself in Lef colours to the point
where the inexperienced eye would have been hard put to dis-
70 tinguish where a wooden construction was a construction and
where a postcard with an inscription, where verse was a controlled
organisation of language, and where simply musty lyricism.
' Who's side are you on? ' was transformed into * anything
goes, with anyone, and anywhere', and embraces all-round.
Instead of a struggle there came the sermon which preached
inter-departmental agreement in the bosom of a single ' Soviet'
art. Ideological differences in art were annulled - everything was
reduced to a question of formal and technical differences. A band
of all-embracing associations arose, flying the ' red ' ' Revolution-
ary *, ' Soviet', banner.
New Lef had not come into existence by chance, and the bearers
of the innovatory initiative could not accept this ' peace and good-
will to all departments' as appropriate soil for the blossoming
of a Soviet art which would ' strike awe in the hearts of our
enemies in the remaining five sixths of the world ', as certain
admirable and responsible comrades like to put it.
Drawing the teeth of natural enemies in the art field can lead
to only one thing - they all end up toothless. The greatest sin
for a worker in the art field now is not lack of talent of inventive-
ness, but on the contrary, principles. Note that when a Lef artist
is asked to work in cinema he is told firmly, ' We're asking you
as a specialist, not as a Lefist'. Translated this means ' give us first
class subtitles for any old film we care to pass you but have the
goodness to keep your nose out of the opinions and intentions
of the cinema authorities who are floating on clouds of " satis-
faction " for the philistine and diverting film production from its
cultural role to the manufacture of aesthetic hashish'. A general
levelling always has a soothing effect on the bureaucratic heart.
Try to prove that when he wrote War and the Universe — a pro-
foundly revolutionary, international and anti-war work — the lum-
pen-intellectual Mayakovsky actually wrote something quite deca-
.dent. That's a difficult thing to prove isn't it? — As difficult as
perjury. What a difference it makes when poets are firmly divided
into groups neatly corresponding to the class categories of a basic
course in political studies: proletariat=VAPP, peasantry=Union
of Peasant Writers, bourgeoisie=Union of Writers. But for this
classification it would be clear to everyone that the nadsonian
lyrics of say someone like Vyatich with his absolute indifference
to mastering even the rudiments of verse writing — was essentially
an anti-cultural and aesthetically conservative phenomenon whose
effect must be the lowering of quality. But given the existence
of the Union, the system of indicators is stood on its head:
Vyatich equals peasant poet, therefore what he writes is character-
istic of and necessary to the countryside, therefore Gosizdat
publishes.
The first fact against which Lef must take a stand is this
replacement of intergroup wars of principles by a levelling of all
the conflicting tendencies within the protection of a corporative- 71
type union.
The battle for form has been reduced to a battle for the stylistic
sign. New inventions in the field of form are no longer weapons
for cultural advance, but merely a new ornament, a new embel-
lishing device, a new addition to the assortment of aesthetic
embroideries and rattles offered to the public. Those who assemble
these rattles of course bring them out wrapped in the padding of
statement about ' social command', ' social need ', • reflections of
revolutionary construction'. Who's going to strain his head and
his patience over questions of form when it is not by the sign of
quality that a product breaks into wide publication. In the field
of form, the stereotype reigns supreme, but even the stereotype is
mis-used. Remember Tugendkhold's ecstasies over the' godpainters '
who put an archangel's headdress adorned with a five-point star on
the Red Army man and painted his face so that the religio-mystical
effect to which icon painting forms are directed completely swal-
lowed up our own in no sense religious or mystical conception of
the Red Army man. The subjection of material to inappropriate
formal means can only lead to the distortion of the splendid
material offered by Soviet reality.
Soviet reality fixed by the lens of a Soviet camera (even in the
form of a painted photograph if the preservation of a col&ur im-
pression is called for) which finds a place in the pages of an
illustrated journal is as important and essential as daily bread.
But the same material hanging on the walls of an AkhRR (see
biographical notes and acronyms p 91) exhibition in the form of
an easel painting - which for all its sympathies in this direction the
AkhRR hasn't an idea where to put or how to use - is material fixed
by the outworn devices of a transplant art and therefore material
ruined.
' Red' icon painting devices lend themselves to this kind of
distortion of material (proud, fiery-eyed leaders, selfless marching
pioneers, peasant Ivans with their heraldic sickles): All of this is
a feature of the agit-poster, against which if I am not mistaken,
the AkhRR is waging a battle, but whose devices they seem to be
attempting to adapt to their own needs. I won't even discuss the
notorious instances of distortion which occur when a painter armed
with a camera goes for a stroll, shoots his material, and then
proceeds to smear the honest and accurate photograph with all
sorts of ' personally significant' but absolutely inaccurate daubs
of colour.
Our cinema is also a field where material is ruined, and precisely
in areas where room was given to the creators of cinematic stereo-
types and their activities. Thus unskilled hands have completely
ruined the splendid material presented by the Civil War and the
history of the Revolution. Battleship Potemkin* rehabilitated this
material at a moment when the term ' civil war film' had been
72 finally discredited in the film studios. Our Near East was ruined
in the same sort of way: the model structure for all kinds of
exoticism which is a feature of the imperialist's colonial novel
was adapted where a new, original, Soviet, operative approach to
the life of underdeveloped peoples should have been found.
It is a fact that once the concern with form lessened, what
remained was the line of least resistance, the reactivation of already,
worn-out formal models and the rejection of innovations in form.
The persistant cry of the ' saviours of a r t ' against so-called stunts
and conjuring tricks has led to a situation where they are now
credited with the defence of either the crudely talentless, or of
the good old stereotype.
The first mistake of these ' saviours ' was their endorsement of
the formula form/content, ' what'/' how ' (rather than Lef's pro-
posed ' material-purpose-form/thing') and in the activation of
each part separately. The second mistake, the forced pedalling of
the ' primacy of content' (i.e. of a completely indeterminate and
undifferentiated phenomenon) was in fact realised in a deteriora-
tion in form. The ' how ' flew up the chimney. Surely ' how ' has
its own noun - ' quality' [the Russian kak-kachestvo (how-* how-
ness ') permits this pun on the part of the writer] and the struggle
for how/quality is the struggle for form. The struggle for quality
in art has now been replaced by a struggle for the reinstatement
of the pre-war stereotype, what has happened is a flight back-
wards into the wilderness.
The fall of interest in the constructivist schema, in innovation
by mastercraftsmen, cannot be disputed. Where five years ago
people went to the productions of the ' October of the theatre '*
to see a director's work whatever the play, they now go to see
a play irrespective of how and by what theatre it is produced. What
is appropriate for our day is an orientation towards the material,
a focus on material in its most raw form — the memoir, the diary,
sketch, article, outline. But-the artist/cooks of the day turn up
their noses at such low, topical, journalistic forms and go on nail-
ing up living material in the stereotype coffins of tales and
romances.
The fall of interest in form is equally the tragedy of today's
poets since verse is precisely that verbal construct in which the
formal elements are underlined.
Material in raw forms - this is the vanguard of contemporary
art. But raw forms can only serve an informational purpose and
this is the tragedy of the situation - as soon as the question of
the use of material on levels other than that of pure information
arises, say in agit - pre-war formal devices immediately appear
on the scene and thanks to them the material is either deformed
as we have seen, or is immediately subjected to the aims of
aesthetic diversion from reality and its task of construction.
But the pre-war norm has its defenders:
Why should art be concerned with raising quality and seeking 73
new forms when the basic mass of consumers of aesthetic pro-
ducts swallow them in the pre-war models and even praise them.
Down with innovation; down with experiment; long live the
aesthetic inertia of the masses.
There is only one context in which the public can honestly be
fed the pre-war aesthetic norm: when what is intended is the
pre-war norm's corresponding social purpose — to draw the con-
sciousness and emotions of the consumer away from the essential
tasks of reality. And this is the point we have reached. The pre-
war norm in form has drawn after it the pre-war norm in ideology:
art as relaxation, art as pleasant stimulus, art as diversion . . . is
this not a variation on the old ' art as dream, day-dream, fan-
tasy '? The day dream has in fact been given full reign, such
sugary day dream that it's even nauseated comrade Bukharin, and
he's such a busy man!
The cry * down with agit-art' is already old hat, ' long live
reflection ' already has a hollow ring. The latest cry of the ' back
to the past * brigade is ' down with topicality! Volkenstein praises
Meyerhold's The Government Inspector5 for its retreat from topi-
cality and transforms his praise into a motto.
A full stop has been reached. The pre-war norm has. been
achieved. The altar of art has resurged out of the tedious abysses
of our ' depressing, grey, everyday reality' to provide citizens with
a legalised daily escape route into the kingdom of dream/
stereotypes. Topical raw material still survives, but never mind.
Volkenstein will deal with that too. The specialists will invent a
means of getting imaginative exoticism from Party history
material, or treat it in say, ancient Roman or Babylonian tones,
or even in the Sergievo-suburbs-iconpainting style0 and everyone
will feel that art is serving revolutionary construction (well of
course, look at the themes, incidents, characters) while in reality
art will be serving a philisrine escapism from the revolution.
These are the four dangers:
levelling
lowering of form
pre-war stereotypes
art as a drug
Lef is aware and will fight responsibly
for an aggressive, class-active aft
for innovation appropriate to the tasks of socialist construction
for art/lifebuilding, art/activisor, art/agit
74 Lef and Film
Notes of discussion (extracts) (New Lef No 11-12, 1927)
Tretyakov • •
Nowhere is Lef working more intensively than in the cinema.
Yet lately we have been criticised for not practising what we
preach: it's been said that Lef theory can sometimes be diametri-
cally opposed to the work it is doing in the production sphere.
This is the first question we need to confront.
We need to define our work in terms of what we reject, what we
consider arbitrary and what we believe needs to be argued in
words and action. Lef does have a general line, but the weight of
work at the level of production has meant that it has been only
partially articulated - it needs to be made explicit.
The second question concerns the basic problem of contemporary
cinema - the ' play' film/' unplayed' film controversy. This
requires a theoretical analysis to clarify distinctisns and opposi-
tions. Perhaps the actual ' play' film/' unplayed ' film opposition
is itself an unfortunate formulation of the problem.
There have been attempts to establish the degree of ' play'
involved at the various stages of film production. The element of
' play' is the random personal factor which may be introduced
by the director, the scenario writer, or the actor, and it is this
element which determines the degree of ' play' in a given film
sequence. . . .
It has never been my view that Lef should be concerned with the
documentary exclusively - this would be rather one-sided. I have
always felt that there is every justification for the fact that the
Lef cover bears two names: Eisenstein and Vertov. These two men
are working with precisely the same apparatus, but with two
different methods. With Eisenstein the agitational aspect predo-
minates and the film material is subordinated to this function,
j With Vertov it is the informational aspect which predominates
I with the stress on the material itself.
But can Vertov's work be called pure documentary? Pure docu-
mentary is the editing of facts simply in terms of their actuality
and social significance. When a fact becomes a brick in a construc-
tion of a different kind — the pure documentary concept disappears;
everything depends on the montage.
Whether or not a film is a ' play' film or an ' unplayed' film
to my mind is-a question of the degree of deformation of the
material out of which the film is composed: the random personal
factor in any given film. ' Interpretation ' is from the start a one-
sided exploitation of the material. I would for instance call the 75
film The Great Road7 a ' play ' film, but a film ' played ' by a single
character, Esfir Ilishna Shub. The personal factor in her case is
artistic, her selection of material purely aesthetic, directed towards
achieving a certain emotional charge in the auditorium through
the arrangement of montage attractions. But Shub is here dealing
with material of a certain cultural level which has been minimally
deformed.
The reaction of a viewer who said with feeling after watching
Shub's Fall of the Romanov Dynasty3: ' It's a pity there are those
gaps, they should have been scripted in', was not such a stupid
one. This man valued not the authenticity of the material, but the
effect the film had on him on the strength of which he asked for
the blanks to be filled in by inauthentic material. . . . I think that
in order to distinguish between the ' play' film and the ' unplayed '
film (the terminology is arbitrary) one must have in mind the
scale of deformation in the elements from which the film is com-
posed. By deformation I mean the arbitrary distortion and dis-
placement of' raw ' elements.
Such deformation operates first of all on the level of the material
(from the moment the question ' What is to be filmed? ' is asked
and a selection made of the material required from the total mass
of material available). Secondly, the deformation of material'occurs
with the selection of camera position, the arrangement of lighting,
and thirdly, at the stage of montage, through the director.
Measured against such a deformation scale, the material falls
into three categories: in flagrante, scripted, and ' played '. The first
category covers material caught red-handed, Vertov's 'life slap-
up '. Here deformation is minimal, but it nevertheless has its own
scale since it is possible, for instance, to film a subject without
his being aware of being filmed. . . . I have for example discussed
with Shub the possibility of walling cameras up in the street to film
passersby. . . . This would produce shots of the typical in which
the personal element in choice of camera position had been
eliminated.
When a cameraman films, he inevitably introduces something
individual into his work. This'is not problematic if he proceeds
from certain premises: natural lighting, calculated sharpness in
focus, a preliminary working out of relationships between groups,
etc. But we should take a stand against randomness in the
cameraman's selection of camera position. Why should a camera-
man dance around his subject? The usual explanation is that in
this way the subject is shown from all sides. But there is surely a
distinction between the position necessary for the fullest represen-
tation of the object, and an arbitrary aesthetic ' contemplation'
of the object from all sides.
The material ' in flagrante-' of the first category is therefore
the most objective. The next degree along the deformation scale
76 represents the slightly more impure ' in flagrante ' material which
results when the presence of a camera affects the behaviour of the
subject being filmed. He sees the handle turning and his movements
become artificial, he begins to give a distorted version of himself,
to present himself as an icon rather than as you want to see him.
The third degree along- the scale in this category is .the filming
of life ' in flagrante ', but using artificial lighting; for instance the
filming of a peasant family in natural conditions, in a dark hut,
when the natural lighting is changed by the positioning of lights
in various corners of the room.
The second category, which I have labelled ' scripted ' material,
I will illustrate with the following example. I film a woodcutter at
work; I bring him to a tree selected by me, and ask him to chop
it down while I film. His work is being done to order, but I have
i set in motion his professional habits and therefore the deforma-
I tion involved is minimal. This is in fact a description of the way
work with the actor-model operates; he is selected as material
which corresponds in its concrete qualities, habits and reflex
actions to the image required on the screen. This is how Eisen-
stein works - he chooses people with the appropriate faces, habits
and movements. There is of course an undoubted orientation
towards play in this structure but to a far lesser degree than with
the professional actor. The ' free ' personal element introduced by
the actor is here replaced by the authentic action of a correctly
selected reflex....
The task of the director of the ' unplayed' film is to get as
close as possible to the ' raw', to material * slap-up'. For us in
Lef it is important to delimit the practical possibilities in relation
to the dictates of social command and thus to establish the limit
towards which our concrete daily work must be directed. This is
why, in setting up our maximum-programme we demand: give us
' Kino-eye ' and ' life slap-up *, etc.
But insofar as there is a need for emotional stimulus, we work
with the montage of attractions method, insofar as our hands must
be free to affect the viewer, we will also need to concern ourself
with material of another kind: we may perhaps also need to
defend scripted material, that is, to work with the methods of
Eisenstein.
And now for a word or two about depersonalised material.
The documentary needs clear indication that the image on the
screen represents a particular man at a particular moment in a
particular place, doing something specific. The loss of this
' specificity' of the image generalises the object and the viewer
observes it as a depersonalised and ' type ' representation.
Example: barge haulers towing a barge, the usual colour com-
binations are: barge haulers, ropes and barge, grey. The camera-
man, waits for a ray of light, then shoots an effective shot but
does not however convey that this represents barge haulers taken
at a moment of visually effective lighting. The viewer therefore 77
receives an impression of bargehaulers which is exceptional, not
typical.
Finally, the film direction. There is on the one hand the director-
cameraman who looks for the typical shot and natural lighting,
without forcing the material. And then there is the ' play ' director
who sees himself as the sole master and interpreter of the
material. He usually justifies his random free personal interpreta-
tion of material on the basis of intuitions: the director who is at
once a specialist and a publicist is rare. Most often the director
will tell you: ' That's how it seemed to me, that's what I felt *.
He has a visual taste approach to the evaluation of a film which
is personal to him.
And so it seems to me that the apparently sharp demarcation
line between the ' play' film and the ' unplayed * film is in fact
extremely relative.
The question of ' play' film as against ' unplayed' film is the
question of respect for fact as against fiction, for contemporaneity
as against the past.
Shklavsky
The point is that there are some extremely useless clever people
about and some extremely useful mistakes. Talking to the docu-
mentary film-makers, I find it is relatively easy to break them
down, but the mistakes they are making are extremely useful in
terms of both art and cinema: they are the mistakes that lead
to innovation.
The distinction between ' play ' and ' unplayed ' film is an ele-
mentary one of course, but there is nothing to be gained from
hammering something we haven't understood: the material itself
is always intelligent, if we haven't been able to analyse certain
distinctions within it, the fault is with our analysis and not with
the material.
It's been suggested here that Kuleshov and Eisenstein are the
* play' film, while Shub and Vertov are the ' unplayed '. But they
all sat in the same company, Shub learnt her montage on the
' play' film, while the play film director studied montage on the
documentary.
It's a very old problem: Goethe once said - ' You sit right
opposite a tree, draw it as carefully as you can, and what becomes
of that tree on paper? '
It's the same with a camera. Certain problems are not easy to
solve by the laws of physics: whether to have a fixed camera
position, or whether the cameraman should move round a ' play '
actor or the actor around the ' unplayed * cameraman. The prob-
lem is raised from the very beginning, by the way a shot is set up,
which already involves an element of ' play'. . . .
78 The best moments in Shub's film are the sequences which show
Dybenko - he has no idea how to face a camera and wavers
between smiles and putting on a heroic face. And this piece of
' play' with the cameraman constitutes a moment of genius in
this excellent film.
I've watched VIP's being filmed and they could be .signed up
in the artist's union right away. The camera no sooner starts to
roll than they're there in the frame, they've taken up their posi-
tions and launched into conversation with each other.
Obviously the ' play'/' unplayed' division itself is at fault
because it generates a general law.
What Shub is doing and Vertov is getting ready to do has many
analogies in literature. For instance, Tolstoy: he is almost entirely
an ' unplayed ' writer since he takes three or four pages of histori-
cal material and it's enough for him to change a word to transform
it into literature. . . . And Brik recently showed me a parody on
Dostoevsky where he writes: * you still haven't had my last final
chapter of Crime and Punishment so take some court case and
substitute Raskolnikov for the name of the accused - 1 haven't had
time to write i t ' .
The play side of art shouldn't be exaggerated. The phenomenon
of * play ' is inherent in art, but art itself periodically reorientates
itself towards the material.
And in this respect the erring documentary film makers were
correct and are correct now in that they rightly bring forward
the material. The consequence is that the material takes priority.
For today.
For this reason I consider that for all the complexity and contro-
versial nature of the ' play'/' unplayed ' question, the problem
is not one of who is doing the seeing or revealing, or how he sees
or reveals, but how to assess the degree of usefulness and depth
achieved.
Lef is faced with a task that is more extensive than the problem
of the * play' film as against the ' unplayed ' film, and that is the
question of the priority of the material.
Curiously enough Rabis has just recently distributed us with
a draft of its writer's agreement which contains, among other
things, one very odd item. This item lays down how many hours
are required for the writing of a scenario. The agreement reckons
on 75 hours and an hourly rate of pay.
Karl Marx wrote that everything could be translated into hours
except writing: Marx's work was written a long time ago and
was of course based on the material. But this is far from the
mind of Rabis.
Let's take the formula for the composition of a work: some
people have the very strange idea that the starting point is a
narrative structure which is then filled out by material. The Lef
idea is that a man begins by studying the material, only then does
the question of how that material is to be formulated arise. 79
There are moreover both narrative and non-narrative representa-
tions of reality; non-narrative cinema is nevertheless thematic. . . .
What practical suggestions do I have? Firstly - instead of the
division into film documentary and ' play ' film, a division between
narrative and non-narrative cinema.
A certain Bragin suggested that a film was needed on the subject
of corn, and then himself proceeded to squeeze in a love theme.
There's been a lot of talk about rye lately and how it's being
exported to London now. Well corn and love make a fine pair and
should be packed off to London too - there's no sense in them.
Saltykov-Schedrin once made the point that you could only
introduce family events into the framework of a family novel. Our
main tragedy today is that we have a soviet empire style afflicted
with restorationist themes. When a form has been misapplied but
persists for a number of decades.it is universalised. And so the
inevitable love theme is being pushed into everything. . . .
Our misfortune and error is not just that we don't know how to
distinguish between the " play' film and the ' unplayed ' film but
that within the organisation of cinema we don't always know how
to defend the material and begin our work on material which
has no merit from an artistic point of view. . . .
Shub
The whole problem can be reduced to the question of what it
is we should be filming today. When this has been resolved, the
terminology — ' play' or ' unplayed ' — will be unimportant. The
essential fact is that we are Lef.
Lef believes that only the filming of the documentary is rele-
vant for our times, in order to preserve our epoch for future
generations, just that. This means that we want to film today's
times, today's people, today's events. Whether Rykov or Lenin
' play' badly or well in front of the camera, and whether or not
this represents a moment of play are questions which do not
disturb us. The important thing is that the camera is filming both
Lenin and Dybenko, even if th'ey don't know how to present them-
selves to the camera, since this feature is most characteristic of
them.
Why does Dybenko come across to us in such a non-abstract
way on the screen? Precisely because this is Dybenko himself, and
not someone portraying Dybenko. The fact that an element of
' play' is involved doesn't trouble us. . . . Everything is a question
of technique and when we have good lighting equipment, and the
technical apparatus for mounting a shot properly, the element of
play will begin to disappear.
What we need to fight for now is not the documentary - this is
being stressed all around us in the newspapers and by people every-
So where. We don't have to argue for the documentary anymore,
our work is a better argument than any article. What is important
now is the fight for the conditions which make work of quality
possible. We have gathered the material, and the skills we will
master with time.
Where does the idea come from that we are not interested in
making emotionally effective films? The point is that our concern
is with the material and with questions of the kind of material
we want to work with.
Have we denied the importance of the element of skill? Not
at all. We believe that a high degree of skill can produce a film
composed of ' unplayed ' material which will surpass any art film.
But everything depends on the technical possibilities available and
on the method, and this is what we should be discussing.
Arvatov
Neiv Lef No 11/12 of 1927 contained a report of an interesting
debate on what constitutes Lef cinema, i.e. left cinema, i.e. obvi-
ously, production cinema, understanding under this term the socio-
technical utilisation of art.
The conclusions reached were not unanimous, but there was
enough of a consensus for the following to emerge: Lef theory
considers cinema of the right to be characterised by ' play',
narrative-structure {fabula) and deformation of the object, while a
film of the left is ' unplayed', non-narrative and does not deform
the object.
Firstly, a few words on the misunderstanding of the concept of
narrative structure.
The term is used to describe the succession of events which
makes up the theme (syuzhct) of an art product. Bourgeois art
tradition has taught us to consider that narrative structure belongs
to the realm of imagination (the tale, the story, etc) but any fact
out of reality developed in time obviously has a narrative stucture -
it would be doctrinaire for instance to deny the existence of a nar-
rative structure in the film Petroleum, and this is not something
to be regretted. On the contrary, the narrative structure is possibly
one of the main factors in aesthetic expression — to reject it would
be to deprive revolutionary art of one of the powerful advantages
of art in general.
The ' unplayed ' film Si
This problem is tightly bound up with the problem of' deforma-
tion ' and the problem of so-called agit-art. The view was
expressed at the Lef debate - and no particular objections were .
raised - that Lef theory defends two types of artistic activity:
agit-art (agit-verse, the living paper, the placard, etc) and srt-
organiser of reality (industrial art, the feuilleton, the demonstra-
tion, etc), and consequently, the agit-film and the documentary; it
was suggested that while the agit-film was to a large extent
obliged to resort to ' play' and to the deformation of the subject,
the less there was of these two elements, the closer the film
approached the category of Lef and production art. However, the
absence of ' play', of ' acting', and so on, in a film cannot
guarantee its correspondence to the tasks of the proletarian art
movement as they are formulated in production art theory. If this
were not so, then the best proletarian film makers would be the
authors of the so-called abstract German expressionist films and
the French PathS-journal. The term ' unplayed ' describes a negative
characteristic and is therefore inadequate.
The Eleventh
Dziga Vertov's film The Eleventh is an important frontline event
in the struggle for the ' unplayed' film: its pluses and minuses
are of equal significance and interest.
The film consists of a montage of' unplayed ' film material shot
in the Ukraine. Purely in terrqs of camerawork, Kaufman's filming
is brilliant, but on the level of montage the film lacks unity. Why?
Primarily because Vertov has ignored the need for an exact
clearly-constructed thematic scenario. Vertov's thoughtless rejec-
tion of the necessity for a scenario in the ' unplayed' film is a
serious mistake. A scenario is even more important for the ' un-
played ' film than for the ' play' film where the term is under-
stood not simply as a narrative-structured exposition of events,
but rather as the motivation of the film material. The need for
such motivation is even greater in the ' unplayed' film than in
the ' play ' film. To imagine that documentary shots joined without
any inner thematic link can produce a film is worse than thought-
less.
84 Vertov tries to make the film titles do the work of a scenario
but this attempt to use written language as a means of providing
the cinematic image with a semantic structure can lead nowhere.
A semantic structure cannot be imposed on the film from outside,
it exists within the frame and no written additions can compensate
for its absence. The reverse is also true, when a determined seman-
tic structure is contained within the frame, it should not be
exchanged for'written titles.
Vertov has chosen particular film shots from a complete film
sequence and joined them to other frames from a different
sequence, linking the material under a general title which he
intends will merge the different systems of meaning to produce a
new system. What happens in fact is that these two sections are'
drawn back into their basic film parts and the title hovers over
them without uniting them in any sense.
The Eleventh contains a long sequence on work in coal mines
which has its own semantic structure, and another sequence show-
ing work in a metallurgical plant which also has its own, distinct,
semantic structure.
Vertov has joined a few metres from each sequence, intercutting
the title ' Forward to Socialism'. The audience, watching the coal
mining shots registers the system of meaning of .this complete
sequence, sees the metallurgical shots and registers this sequence,
and no association with the new theme ' Forward to Socialism ' is
provoked. For this to be achieved new film material is essential....
This fact needs to be firmly established - the further develop-
ment of the ' unplayed' film is being impeded at the moment by
its workers' indifference to the scenario and the need for a pre-
liminary thematic structuring of the overall plan. This is why
the ' unplayed' film at present has a tendency to dissolve into
separate film parts inadequately held together by heroic inscrip-
tions.
It is curious that Shub's Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, put
together out of old film strips, makes a far more total impression,
thanks to careful structuring on the levels of themes and montage.
The absence of a th'ematic plan must inevitably affect the
cameraman. For all the brilliance of Kaufman's filming, his shots
never go beyond the visual illustration, they are filmed purely for
their visual interest and could almost be included in any film.
The reportage/publicism element is completely lacking and what
emerges is essentially beautiful ' natural' shots, ' unplayed'
images for a ' play' film.
This is because Kaufman did not know what theme he was film-
ing for, from what semantic position those shots were to be taken.
He filmed things as they seemed most interesting to him as a
cameraman; his taste and skill are undeniable, but his material
is filmed from an aesthetic, not a documentary, position.
October . 85
Sergei Eisenstein has slipped into a difficult and absurd situa-
tion. He has suddenly found himself proclaimed a world-class
director, a genius, he has been heaped with political and artistic
decorations, all of which has effectively bound his creative initia-
tive hand and foot.
In normal circumstances he could have carried on his artistic
experiments and researches into new methods of film-making
calmly and without any strain: his films would then have been
of great methodological and aesthetic interest. But piece-meal
experiments are too. trivial a concern for a world-class director:
by virtue of his status he is obliged to resolve world-scale problems
and produce world-class films. It comes as no surprise therefore
that Eisenstein has announced his intention to film Marx's Capital
- no lesser theme would do.
As a result there have been painful and hopeless efforts to jump
higher than his own height of which a graphic example is his
latest^film, October.
It would, of course, be difficult for any young director not to.
take advantage of all those material and organisational opportu-
nities that flow from the title of genius, and Eisenstein has not
withstood the temptations.
He has decided that he is his own genius-head, he has made
a decisive break with his comrades in production, moved out of
production discipline and begun to work in a way that leans
heavily and directly on his world renown.
Eisenstein was asked to make a jubilee film for the tenth anni-
versary of October, a task which from the Lef point of view could
only be fulfilled through a documentary montage of existing film
material. This is in fact what Shub has done in her films. The
Great Road, and The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Our position
was that the October Revolution was such a major historical fact
that any ' play' with this fact was unacceptable. We argued that
the slightest deviation from historical truth in the representation
of the events of October could not fail to disturb anyone with the
slightest cultural sensitivity.
We felt therefore that the task that Eisenstein had been set - to
give not the film-truth (kinopravda), of the October events, but a
film-epic, a film-fantasy - was doomed in advance. But Eisenstein,
who in some areas has moved towards the Lef position, did not
share the Lef viewpoint in this instance — he believed that it was
possible to find a method of representing October, not as docu-
mentary montage, but through an artistic ' play * film. Eisenstein
of course rejected the idea of straightforward historical recon-
struction from the start. The failure of Moscow in October™ — a film
based purely on the reconstruction of events - showed him to be
right in this regard. What he needed was an artistic method for the
86 representation of October events.
From the Lef standpoint such a method does not exist and
indeed cannot exist. If Eisenstein had not been loaded down by the
weighty title of genius, he could have experimented freely and
his experiments might have brilliantly demonstrated the impos-
sibility of the task set him. Now however, alongside pure experi-
ment, he was obliged to create a complete jubilee film, and there-
fore to combine experiments with form and trite conventions in a
way that sits curiously in one and the same work. The result is an
unremarkable film.
While rejecting straightforward reconstruction, Eisenstein was
obliged one way or another to deal •with Lenin, the central figure
of the October Revolution, in his jubilee film. To do so he resorted
to the most absurd and cheapest of devices: he found a man who
resembled Lenin to play the role of Lenin. The result was an
absurd falsification which could only carry conviction for someone
devoid of any respect or feeling for historical truth.
Eisenstein's film work on the heroic parts of his film analogous
to the operations of our cliche" painters, like Brodsky or Pchelin,
and these sequences have neither cultural nor artistic interest.
Only in episodes fairly distantly related to the development of
the October Revolution is his work as a director apparent and it is
to these episodes that any discussion of the film has to be
limited.
The Women's Battalion. This theme is given much greater pro-
minence in the film October than the women's battalion had in
the actual historical events. The explanation for this is that
women in military uniform represent rich material for theatrical
exploitation.
However, in structuring this theme Eisenstein has committed
a crude political mistake. Carried away by his satirical portrayal
of the woman soldier, he creates, instead of a satire on the women
who defended the Provisional Government, a general satire on
women who take up arms for any cause at all.
The theme of women involving themselves in affairs that don't
concern them draws further strength in Eisenstein's work from
juxtapositions in a metaphorical relation of the women soldier
and images like Rodin's The Kiss and a mother and child.
The error is committed because Eisenstein exaggerates the
satirical treatment of the women without constucting a parallel
satire on the power which they were defending and therefore no
sense of the political absurdity of this defence is conveyed.
People and things. Eisenstein's search for cinematic metaphors
gives rise to a whole series of episodes which intercut the lines of
objects and people (Kerensky and the peacock, Kerensky and the
statue of Napoleon, the Mensheviks and the high society dinner
plate) and in all these constructions, Eisenstein commits the same
error.
The objects are not given any preliminary non-metaphorical 87
significance. It is never made apparent that these objects were
all to be found in the Winter Palace, that the plate, for instance,
was left in the Smolny by the Institute originally housed there.
There is therefore no context for their sudden and inexplicable
emergence in a metaphorical relation.
While the verbal metaphor allows us to say ' as cowardly as
a hare ' because the hare in question is not a real hare, but a sum
of signs, in film we cannot follow a picture of a cowardly man by
a picture of a hare and consider that we have thereby constructed
a metaphor, because in a film, the given hare is a real hare and
not just a sum of signs. In film therefore a metaphor cannot be
constructed on the basis of objects which do not have their own
real destiny in terms of the film in which they appear. Such a
metaphor would not be cinematic, but literary. This is clear in
the sequence which shows a chandelier shuddering under the
impact of October gunfire. Since we have not seen this chandelier
before and have no sense of its pre-revolutionary history, we cannot
be moved by its trembling and the whole image simply calls up
incongruous questions....
The unthought out linkage of objects and people leads Eisen-
stein to build relations between them which have no metaphorical
significance at all but are based purely on the principle of visual
paradox; thus we have tiny people alongside huge marble feet, and
the overlap from earlier metaphorical structures leads the viewer
to look for metaphorical significance where none proves to exist.
The opening of the bridge. As a film director Eisenstein could
obviously not resist filming the raising of the bridges in Petrograd,
but this in itself was not enough. He extended the episode with
piquant details, women's hair slipping over the opening, a horse
dangling over the Neva. It goes without saying these guignol
details have no relation to any of the film's themes - the given
sequences are offered in isolation, like some spicy side dish, and
are quite out of place.
Falsification of history. Every departure from historical fact is
permissible only where it has been developed to the level of gro-
tesque and the extent of its correspondence to any reality is no
longer relevant....
When departure from historical fact does not approach the
grotesque, but remains somewhere halfway, then the result is the
most commonplace historical lie. There are many such instances
in October.
1. The murder of a bolshevik by women in the July Days:
There was a similar incident which involved the murder of a
bolshevik selling Pravda by junkers. In an attempt to heighten the
incident, Eisenstein brings in women and parasols - the result is
unconvincing and in the spirit of trite stories about the Paris
Commune. The parasols prove to have no symbolic value, they
88 function as a shabby prop and distort the reality of the event.
2. The sailors' smashing of the wine cellars: Everyone knows
that one of the darker episodes of October was the battle over
the wine cellars immediately after the overthrow and that the
sailors not only did not smash the wine cellars, but looted them-
selves and refused to shoot at those who came after the wine.
If Eisenstein had found some symbolic expression for this affair,
say, demonstrating some kind of eventual resolution between pro-
letarian consciousness and the incident, the sequence might have
had some justification. But when a real sailor energetically smashes
real bottles, what results is not a symbol, not a poster, but a lie.
Eisenstein's view as it has been expressed in his most recent articles
and lectures is that the artist-director should not be the slave of
his material, that artistic vision or, to use Eisenstein's terminology,
the ' slogan * must be the basis of cinematography. The ' slogan '
determines not only the selection of material, but its form. The Lef
position is that the basis of cinematic art is the material. To
Eisenstein this seems too narrow, too prone to nail the flight of
artistic imagination to the realm of the real.
Eisenstein does not see cinema as a means of representing
reality, he lays claim to philosophical cinema-tracts. We would
suggest that this is a mistake, that this direction .can lead no
further than ideographic symbolism. And October is the best proof
of this.
From our point of view, Eisenstein's main contribution lies in
his smashing the canons of the ' p l a y ' film, and carrying to the
absurd the principle of creative transformation of material. This
work was done in literature by the symbolists in their time, by the
abstract artists in painting, and is historically necessary.
Our only regret is that Eisenstein, in the capacity of a world-
class director, feels obliged to construct 80 per cent of his work
on the basis of worn out conventions which consequently con-
siderably lower the value of the experimental work he is trying
to carry on in his films.
Eisenstein's October.
Reasons for failure, V. Shklovsky.
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein's talk of the need for a special
department in cinema is unnecessary - his film is understandable
in a general, not in a special way, and it doesn't call for panic.
Sergei Mikhailovich has raised the question of the reasons for
failure, but first we must define what constitutes failure. We all
know, many things were received as failures when they first
appeared and only later re-assessed as innovations in form.
Sergei Mikhailovich.has doubts about his own film in this respect 89
and I too feel there are elements of straightforward failure in the
film.
In terms of artistic devices, the film divides into two parts, Lef
and academy sections; and while the former is interestingly made,
the latter is not.
The academy section of Eisenstein's film is distinguished mainly
by its scale and the vast numbers of light units employed. Just by
the way, isn't it time an end was put to the filming of %vet things?
The October Revolution did not take place in a1 constant downpour
and was it worth drenching the Dvortsovaya Square and the
Alexandrovsky Column? Thanks to the shower and the thousands
of lights, the images look as if they've been smeared with machine
oil, but there are some remarkable achievements in these
sequences.
One of the branches of cinema is at the moment treading a line
somewhere between vulgarity and innovation.
The essential task at the moment is to create the unambiguous
cinematic image and reveal the language of film, in other words,
to achieve precision in the action of cinematic expression on viewer,
to create the language of the film shot and the syntax of montage.
Eisenstein has achieved this in his film. He sets up lines of
objects and, for instance, moves from god to god coming in the
end to the phallic negroid god and from this through the notion
of ' statue ' to Napoleon and Kerensky, with a consequent reduc-
tion. In this instance the objects resemble each other through only
one of their aspects, their divinity, and are distinct from one
another through their reverberations on the level of meaning. These
reverberations create the sense of differentia essential to an art
product. Through the creation of this transitional series, Eisenstein
is able to lead the viewer where he wants him. The sequence is
linked to the well-known ascent of the (Winter Palace) staircase by
Kerensky. The ascent itself is represented realistically, while at
the same time the film titles list Kerensky's ranks and titles..
The overstatement of the staircase and the basic simplicity
of the ascent, carried out at, the same regular pace, and the very
disparity between the notions ' ascent' and ' staircase * together
constitute a clearly comprehensible formal device. It represents an
important innovation, but one which may contain within it certain
flaws, that is, it may be imperfectly understood by the author
himself.
A degenerated version of this innovation would take the form
of an elementary cinematic metaphor with too close a correspon-
dence between its parts; for instance a flowing stream and a moving
stream of people, or the heart of some person as a forgetmenot.
It is important in this_ context to bear in mind that the so-called
image functions through its non-coincident components - its
aureoles.
go In any case, Eisenstein has forged a long way ahead in this
direction. But a new formal means when it is created is always
received as comic, by virtue of its novelty. That was how the
cubists were received, and the impressionists, that's how Tolstoy
reacted to the decadentes, Aristophanes to Euripides.
A new form is therefore most suited to material where the
comic sense is appropriate. This is how Eisenstein has used his
innovation. His new formal device, which will no doubt become
general cinematic usage, is only employed by him in the structur-
ing of negative features, to show Kerensky, the Winter Palace, the
advance of Kornilov, etc.
To extend the device to the pathetic parts of the film would be
a mistake, the new device is not yet appropriate to the treatment
of heroism.
The film's failures can be explained by the fact that there is
a dislocation between the level of innovation and the material -
and therefore the official part of the film is forced rather than
creative, instead of being well-constructed it is merely grandiose.
The thematic points of the film, its knots of meaning, do not
coincide with the most powerful moments of the film.
. . . but art needs advances rather than victories. Just as the
1905 revolution cannot be evaluated simply as a failure, so we
can only talk of Eisenstein's failures from a specific standpoint.
Translations by Diana Matias
Notes
1. Mystery Bouffe was a verse play written by Mayakovsky in the
summer of 1918. It received its first performance, directed by Meyer-
hold and with Mayakovsky himself playing three parts, on Novem-
ber 7 1918 at the Petrograd Conservatoire, and an expanded and
topicalised version was staged, again by Mcyerhold, on May Day
1921 at the RSFSR Theatre No. 1 in Moscow. Its subject was a
celebration of the workers' victory over various enemies and
waverers.
2. War and the Universe is a long poem by Mayakovsky written in
1916, but only published in full after the Revolution. The earlier of
its five sections celebrate war as a the sole hygiene of the world
in Marinettian fashion, but the later ones express a millenarian
revolutionary pacifism.
3. Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets ' Potemkin') directed by Eisen-
stein, photography by Tisse, sub-titles by Aseev, 1926.
4. Meyerhold became a Communist after being captured by Whites
while convalescing from a bout of TB in Yalta, and then rescued
by the Red Army. Summoned to Moscow by Lunacharsky, he was
made head of TEO, but to Lunacharsky's surprise proclaimed
' October in the Theatre', demanding the nationalisation of the elite
Academic Moscow theatres, and setting up his own revolutionary
theatre, the RSFSR Theatre No 1. When NEP was introduced in
1921, these projects had to be abandoned, and Meyerhold resigned
as head of TEO.
5. Meyerhold's production of his own adaptation of Gogol's Govern-
ment Inspector at the Meyerhold Theatre in December 1926 was
regarded by the left as a retreat from the bio-mechanics of his 91
dramaturgy from 1921-5 to a traditional naturalism.
6. Sergiev (now Zagorsk) is a town 44 miles North of Moscow built
around the Monastery of Trinity-Sergius, home of Andrei Rublev
(c 1360-c 1430), the famous icon painter. Its suburbs became a
centre for folk crafts, including painting on wood and it is to this
that Tretyakov is presumably referring.
7. The Great Road (Veliky Put), directed and edited by Esfir Shub,
1927. A compilation film telling the story of the ten years that had
passed since the October Revolution.
8. Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Padeniye dinasti Romanovikh),
directed and edited by Esfir Shub, 1927. A compilation film telling
the story of the last years of the Russian empire.
9. The Thief of Baghdad, directed by Raoul Walsh, 1924, starring
Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
10. One Sixth of the World (Shestaya chast mira), directed by Dziga
Vertov, photography by Mikhail Kaufman, 1926. A film made for
Gostorg, the State trade agency, to illustrate the resources of the
USSR.
11. The Eleventh (Odinnadtsati), directed by Dziga Vertov, photo-
graphy by Mikhail Kaufman, edited by Elizaveta Svilova, 1928.
Film celebrating the eleventh year of Soviet Power and the achieve-
ments of the first year of the first Five Year Plan in the Ukraine.
12. October (Oktyabr), directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori
Alexandrov, photography by Edvard Tisse, 1928.
13. Moscow in October (Moskva v Oktyabre), directed by Boris Barnet,
1927. The film tells the story of the Bolshevik seizure of. power in
Moscow in 1917.
FOCUS ON FILM
THE MAGAZINE OF FILM RESEARCH
Our eighth issue will be published in December.
Contents will include tlie following:
ROBERT DONAT —an appreciation and filmography
OSWALD MORRIS — on photographing Fiddler on the Roof,
working with Huston, Lumet, etc. plus filmography
FRITZ RASP — a villain to remember, with many rare photo-
graphs, filmography, and LOUISE BROOK'S recollections of
working with him and Pabst
MONICA V r r n — an appreciation and filmography
Past issues with valuable material on Ford, Hathaway, Bondarchuk, Lon Chaney, Douglas
Fairbanks, The American B Film, James Mason, etc., still available.
The film shot - is not a still photograph. The shot is.a sign,
a letter (character) for montage. The change in normal point of
view ought to be used by the director with an awareness of the
work of the shot as a sign. A proud person may be shot from a
low angle - the foreshortening will stress, will help to highlight
the essential emphasis on pride. A lowly, dispirited person may be
shot from a high angle — the dispiritedness will be emphasised
by the point of view of the camera. For example — the work of
Pudovkin in Mother.
A poet places one word after another, in a definite rhythm, as
one brick after another. Cemented by him, the work-images pro-
duce a complex conception as a result.
So it is that shots, like conventionalised meanings, like
characters in the Chinese alphabet, produce images and concepts.
The montage of shots is the construction of whole phrases. Con-
tent is derived from shots. It is better still if the scenarist produces
the content by determining the character of the material of the
shot. The director expresses the conception of the scenarist by a
montage of shot-signs.
122 Two Mayakovsky Scenarios
Mayakovsky was fascinated by the cinema all his life.- His sister
describes how, when he was a teen-ager, ' the cinema attracted
him most of all; in one evening he was capable of sitting through
three different programmes one after another. Because he was short
of money, he would sometimes sneak in without paying and often
get into trouble for this. But he would sacrifice everything for the
cinema '. He wrote his first script in 1913, soon after he had come
in contact with the Futurists for the first time. It was about a
Futurist poet (Mayakovsky had a constant tendency to write
himself into films as the hero) and never got made. The same year
he appeared in an independent Futurist film with a number of other
poets and painters and also wrote his first film criticism, which
concentrated on attacking the theatre and theatre-based movies.
Mayakovsky's next wave of interest and activity in the cinema
came immediately after the Revolution. In 1918 Mayakovsky wrote
and starred in three movies for a private film company, Neptune.
The first, an adaptation of Jack London's . novel Martin
Eden, shifted from California to Moscow with the hero changed
into a Futurist poet. The second was another adaptation, of an
Italian story about a delinquent who falls in love with a school-
teacher and gets killed in a gang fight defending her honour. The
producers insisted on a religious ending which Mayakovsky
managed to get cut out later when the industry was nationalised.
The third project, Shackled by Film, was the most ambitious; it is
the first version of Heart of the Screen, which is printed here, but
less critical of the movie industry and more traditionally romantic
in its conception of the love between the hero (an artist rather
than a sign painter) and the star, played by Lily Brik.
Mayakovsky was dissatisfied with all the Neptune films. They
were written and made in two weeks each and the director,
Turkin, was out of sympathy with Futurism in general and Maya-
kovsky in particular. He showed no interest in the experiments
which Mayakovsky wanted to introduce - ' Having familiarised
myself with the technical side of film-making, I wrote a script on
a par with our innovatory literary work. The production by
Neptune made a shameful mess of it'.
Mayakovsky retreated from the cinema again after this experi-
ence, though he did write a polemical article. Cinema and Cinema,
in 1922, attacking the capitalist cinema for which he had worked
and hailing a new revolutionary cinema, which would spell the end
of the old commercial spectacle, destroy aesthetics and root out
emotions and plots to replace them with ideas and with reality.
He worked briefly with Lunacharsky on plans to reorganise the
nationalised film industry, but did no actual film work. Then in 123
1927 he was invited to write a number of scripts for VUFKU, the
Ukrainian state film company. He wrote nine, of which only two
were produced, both after re-writing by others. Heart of the Screen
(not made) was one of this series and also How Are You?, which
Mayakovsky himself thought the most important. He himself
described its reception at Sovkino, where he read the scenario:
The assembly listened gloomily. Comrade Yefremov rushed away
(ill?) at the beginning of the second part.
Afterwards, discussion. 1 can only report the essence of this from
my own notes; unfortunately no stenographic record was made of
this proud occasion, inspiring the entertainment industry to new
heights.
Comrade Trainin: I know of two types of scenario; one deals with
the cosmos in general, the other - with man in the cosmos. The
scenario we've heard conforms to neither type. To speak of it at
once is difficult, but it seems clear that it passes the ideological
test.
Comrade Shvedchikov: Art is a reflection of reality. This scenario
does not reflect reality. We don't need it. Orientate yourself to
The Tailor From Torzhok. This is an experiment and we have to be
self-supporting.
Comrade Yefremov (who came back as Trainin began his speech):
Never in all my life have 1 heard such nonsense.
The Comrade Secretary looked around the circle of executives and
then took the floor: The scenario will not be understood by the
massesl
Comrade Kuleshov (while the discussion goes on): How can you
talk with such people? See what I mean? After their speeches my
head will ache for two weeks!
The scenario is not accepted by Sovkino.
After this experience (How Are You? had been through three
drafts and was to have been directed by Kuleshov) Mayakovsky
gave up writing for the cinema, though he intervened polemically
in debate, denouncing Sovkino for underestimating the masses and
considering them fit for nothing better than costume epics. He
consistently supported experimental and newsreel directors, such
as Esther Shub. In 1928, during his visit to Paris, he wrote Lily
Brik that ' of the arts, 1 can stand to look at only movies - there
1 go every day'. One of his last projects. Moscow is Burning is a
kind of tribute to the cinema, which contains not only simultaneous
three-screen projection, but episodes modelled directly on the
cinema - Shub, Eisenstein and American chase and slapstick movies.
Cinema struck Mayakovsky as the most modern and contemporary
art and he approached it as a modernist. It influenced his own work
enormously: plays like The Bath-house and The Bedbug were both
based on rejected scripts, his poems were influenced stylistically
124 by his scenarios. It is a tragedy he never had the chance to
influence the movies, by getting his scripts made as he wanted,
even or at all. Today, when directors and critics are turning
back more and more to Russian cinema of the twenties, we can
learn from Mayakovsky as we can from Eisenstein or Dziga
Vertov: like them he was not just a revolutionary movie-maker
but also a theorist interested in the nature of film.
Prologue:
1. A street. An ordinary man walking - Mayakovsky. Panorama.
2. Panorama from the other direction. Continuation of Mayakovsky's
movement against the same background - the same houses.
3. People
4. Automobiles
5. Trams
6. Buses
the background for Mayakovsky walking.
7. A second man, almost identical with the first, walking.
8. He walks almost identically, waving his arms like a windmill.
9. A hand.
10. Repeat of shots one through six.
11. "I
12. I •The first ordinary man walking - the second walking.
13. (Intercut montage, preparing their meeting.)
14. J
15. Mayakovsky stops, looks intently, begins to wave and walks on.
16. The second Mayakovsky catches sight of him, pauses, looks
intently, continues walking too.
17. The first Mayakovsky extends his hand.
18. The second Mayakovsky extends his hand.
19. Hand hits hand, water splashes in all directions from between
the palms.
20. The two stand, motionless, with hands clasped, like a provincial
photograph. They stand for a very long time (photographically).
Movement in the background continues exaggeratedly.
21. The first changes the immobile expression on his face to a smile
using only his lips.
22. The second changes his immobile expression to a smile using
only his lips.
23. The first tears his hand away.
24. The second tears his hand away.
25. The first tips his hat.
26. The second tips his hat.
27. The collar of the first flips up with joy.
28. The moustaches of the second flip up.
29. Both wear expressions of maximum pleasure. From one mouth
the letter ' H ' jumps out. Immediately from the second's mouth form
the words: ' How are you? ' 125
(Title) 'How are you?'
30. They've come nose to nose, peering at one another tensely,
awaiting an answer.
31. Both at once step back to the sides of the frame. Each extends
a hand pointing into the depth of the frame.
32. Between the ends of their extended arms appear:
Part One:
(Title) All people, except the rich and the dead, meet the morning
like this:
33. Black screen. A chalk drawing grows visible: a grandma drinks
coffee, the coffee pot turns into a kitten. The kitten plays with a ball
of string; strings extend from the ball - zigzags pointing with arrows
to the forehead of the sleeping Mayakovsky (he gradually appears in
outline).
34. A bed. Mayakovsky is in the bed. Beyond the bed, the back-
ground turns into the sea.
35. The sea. The ball of the sun rises from beyond the horizon.
36. Clouds cover the sun. One ray pierces the clouds.
37. Across the black screen, the ray, narrow at the window and
growing wider towards the bed, gradually gets stronger.
38. In the ray of light part of a man lying in bed can clearly be seen.
39. In the ray of light - pedestrians stamping and walking orr.
40. Footsteps.
41. The bed shakes from the footsteps.
42. Mayakovsky turns on his other side in bed.
43-50. In the ray of light are seen solitary automobiles and trucks,
delivering food.
51. The bed shakes harder. Mayakovsky turns on his other side.
52-55. In the ray of light the full commotion of the city with trams,
cars, trucks, pedestrians.
56. Mayakovsky tosses back and forth in bed.
57-61. One after another, automobile horns, tram bells, steamship
sirens and factory whistles sound.
62. The room has grown light. Mayakovsky opens his eyes a little,
raises his watch to one eye. The watch shows a quarter to eight.
63. The minute and second hands are almost squeezed up against the
upper and lower lids. The hands spread apart, opening the eye. (In
all the watch's actions, the watch should appear as realistic as
possible, and only at the moment when the hands work, the watch
face fades slightly.)
64. Mayakovsky leaps up, opens the door a little and roars through
the crack.
65. The crack. Mayakovsky's room. From his mouth leap the letters:
(Title) ' Newspaper!'
66. The letters of the word spread through the room and the hall,
bounce into the kitchen, and one by one settle on the head of the
cook who is preparing the samovar and disappear into her head.
67. Mayakovsky plugs in an electric tea pot.
68-69. The cook tears herself from her place and trudges down the
stairs.
126 70. Mayakovsky enters his room, wiping his hands and face as he
goes.
71. The cook stops before a newspaper kiosk.
(Title) The universe on paper.
72. The newsvendor gives the cook several newspapers.
73. The cook loads her basket of food, crowned by the newspapers,
on her right shoulder and walks off.
74. Two komsomols stop at the news stand. They take a paper.
Their eyes quickly scan the page looking for the short lines of verses.
They shrug.
(Title) ' Again no verses. What a dull newspaper."
75-80. The cook strides along. The newspapers on her shoulder
grow: they weigh down on the cook. The houses in the cook's
background gradually shrink. The cook becomes really tiny. The
houses appear even smaller. On the cook's shoulder - a huge globe
of the world. She walks, hardly able to move her feet under the
weight.
81. The street in perspective. The tram rails pointed at the camera.
In the distance, the sphere of the earth appears rolling towards the
camera - the globe quickly grows.
82. The entrance to Mayakovsky's house. The door opens by itself.
The globe rolls up to the door. It shrinks until it is small enough to
fit through the door.
83. Inside the door, it rolls up the stairs by itself. ,
84. The door of an apartment with the nameplate: ' Brik. Mayakov-
sky '. From the door the cook appears with her groceries and news-
papers.
85-86. Through the crack in the door, a hand gives Mayakovsky, who
is busy washing his razor, a newspaper. He takes it and sits down at
his desk.
87. Mayakovsky turns his head, looks.
88. A detail of his desk.
89. A radio tower.
90. Mayakovsky unfolds the newspaper.
91. Out of the page of the newspaper - a train rushes at the camera.
92-93. Details of a steam engine in motion.
94. Mayakovsky dodges away from the newspaper a little. He goes
to the window and opens it.
95. A plane flying.
96-97. Details of a plane in motion.
98. Mayakovsky at the desk. He spreads the newspaper out com-
pletely.
99. Mayakovsky's eyes.
100. A detail of the newspaper: editorial - 'Our export, bread.'
101. A line drawing of a man climbs out of the frame of the editorial,
straightens his pince nez, and, standing on a line of type as at a
rostrum, jumps out of the newspaper.
102. He grabs Mayakovsky's hand; he shakes with the effort of trying
to persuade. Quotations and statistics pour out of his mouth.
103. Statistics fly into the ear of the listening Mayakovsky and raise
a whirlwind over his head
104-106. Mayakovsky begins to shrink away, to yawn and hem and
haw: ' I know, I know." Finally he places a calm and good-natured 127
hand on the shoulder of the editor and chases him back into the
newspaper page.
107. Mayakovsky turns the page. He reads on.
108. Mayakovsky's eyes open wide; he falls back in his chair and
looks around the room.
109. The things on the desk start to shake.
110. The lamp shatters.
111. The calendar falls into a pile of separate sheets. On the desk,
bits and pieces of newspaper letters form the phrase: ' Earthquake
in Leninakan'. Mayakovsky fixes his eyes on the lines of the news-
paper; his hands and shoulders tremble. He listens.
112. He turns around.
113. The teapot boiling.
114. Mayakovsky takes the teapot, puts it on the desk amidst the
fragments of letters. The teapot whistles and shakes, rising as though
in imitation of an erupting volcano. Mayakovsky looks at the boiling
water, smiles, gathers the fragments and'rolls them up in a sheet of
newspaper. The newspaper straightens out and becomes a normal
newspaper again.
115. Mayakovsky reads further.
116. 'The growth of bureauc . . .' A little head with a pen behind
its ear pokes out of the ' u'. Catching hold of the newspaper border
with his mits, he crawls out, grows and brandishes pens and pencils.
117. Mayakovsky retreats before him, then attacks, grabs h'im by
the throat, chokes him and with difficulty chases him back into the
newspaper.
118-119. Mayakovsky pours the tea; after blowing on it, he takes a
swallow and looks at the paper: ' Accidents'. Accidents.
120. He sits down, breathing heavily. He straightens his crumpled tie.
He reads.
121. 'Attempted suicide . . . Yesterday at 6 o'clock a young woman,
22 years old, with a shot from a revolver . . . condition hopele . . .'
122. The newspaper floats up and stands at an angle like a huge
partition.
123. From the dark corner of the newspaper, the figure of a young
woman emerges; in despair, she raises her hand with a revolver in
it. The revolver to her temple, she touches the trigger.
124. Tearing through the sheet of newspaper, like a dog in the circus
when it leaps through a paper-covered hoop, Mayakovsky bursts into
the room formed by the newspaper.
125. He tries to grab and pull away the hand with the revolver, but
it is too late - the girl falls to the floor.
126. Mayakovsky steps back. Horror on his face.
127. Mayakovsky in his room. He crumples the newspaper, carelessly
pushes his tea aside and falls back in his chair.
128. Slowly Mayakovsky's face becomes calm. He turns his eyes to
the newspaper again.
129. ' Announcements.'
(Title) 'To dress yourself, you can't ask for more than the " Moscow-
stitch " clothing store.'
130. In the corner hangs a miserable scrap of human clothing.
128 Wadding hangs out of the lining. The collar is threadbare. Mayakovsky
picks up the coat with two fingers and spreads out the holes so
he can see them.
131. 'Announcement.' 'To dress yourself, you can't ask for more
. . .' The street. Along the street, independently, without people
inside, march smoothly pressed, brand new coats and three piece
suits: pants, jackets and vests, and, instead of a.head, each one has
a tag with a steep price.
132. The prices flit by.
133. Pensively Mayakovsky moves his lips, adding and computing.
134. The flitting prices stop, draw even with one another and form
one huge sum.
• 135. The sum turns into a wad of ruble notes.
136. The wad of notes rustles before his eyes.
137. Mayakovsky stands up and stares pensively.
138. Before him a book of verses swings into view all by itself, to
the side .of the frame opposite the notes. The book settles and new
books pile on top of it.
139. Between the verses and the notes appear two pens which turn
into a white equal sign.
140. Mayakovsky grabs the equal sign-posts.
(Title) ' Not to work is impossible.'
End of first part.
Part Two:
1. Mayakovsky is sitting by the window, sharpening a pencil with
a razor blade.
2. He takes aim and brandishes the sharpened pencil in the direction
of the window.
(Title) ' Let there be verses!'
3. A piggy-looking family sits drinking tea.
4. Close-up of the closely shaven father.
(Title) ' I don't need verses!'
5. Komsomol boys and a girl in moonlight. The Komsomol girl moves
away from the others, dreamily demanding :
(Title) ' Let there be verses!'
6 Papa's collar is coming off, and in addition his beard and the pelt
on the paw with which he grips his tea glass are growing out.
(Title) ' I don't need verses!'
7. The Komsomols at a news stand.
(Title) ' Let there be verses!'
8. Transformed into an orangutan before our eyes, the father:
(Title) ' 1 don't need your verses!'
9. A poster. Battle of the poets: Aseev, Kirsanov, Mayakovsky,
Pasternak.
10. Workers' university hall, audience rising to its feet, applauding.
11. Mayakovsky stands up and looks around.
12. Decisively, Mayakovsky rolls up his sleeves.
13. Mayakovsky wets his pencil.
14. Mayakovsky aims at a piece of paper with his pencil.
(Title) ' Factory without smoke and stacks.'
15. He rubs his forehead. Movement with his hand, like turning a dial.
16. Letters start flying out of his head and soaring around the room.
17. Mayakovsky jumps about, catching the letters on his pencil. 129
18. Mayakovsky spills the letters off the pencil, like pretzels off a
pole, and with difficulty fastens them to the paper.
19. The flying letters form into hackneyed phrases and fly apart again.
20. For a moment phrases such as these hang in the air: ' How fine,
how fresh were the roses/ ' The ladybird knows not,' etc.
21. Mayakovsky tears letter from letter, grabs and selects the ones
he needs.
22. He plants them on the paper again.
23. Mayakovsky admires what he's written.
24. In fat letters on the sheet of paper: ' Left, Left, Left!'
25. Mayakovsky at the window with a sharpened pencil, decisive
and smiling.
26. He gathers the pencil shavings in a piece of paper and throws
them out the window. He adjusts the ventilator in the window.
27. He gets a piece of paper from the desk and smooths it out
lovingly.
28. The ventilator whirls.
29. The ventilation pipe sucks out the over-worked rhymes: dove-
love-above, steeple-people, flight-night, etc.
30. Mayakovsky completes his poem, signs it and gets up, satisfied.
(Title) Enthusiasm 'swept him off his feet,' as they say.
31. Glowing with hope, Mayakovsky rolls what he has written into
a cylinder, ties it with a ribbon and
32. goes down the stairs, not touching the steps with his feet.
33-35. He goes along the street making huge leaps, his legs crossed
and motionless. He is two heads higher than the other people on the
street. Passers-by turn around. The tails of his coat, carried by the
wind, render him a demonic figure.
36. Mayakovsky in an editor's waiting room. Next to him sits a whole
series of identical visitors with the exact same rolled piece of paper
and the same ribbon.
37. Mayakovsky is called in.
38. Mayakovsky enters the editor's office. Entering, he grows until he
occupies the entire door frame.
39. Mayakovsky and the editor shake hands. Mayakovsky shrinks to
the editor's size. The editor is a newspaper bureaucrat. He asks
Mayakovsky to read.
40-42. From being the same size, the editor grows smaller and smaller
- becoming quite tiny. Mayakovsky approaches him with his manu-
script, growing to huge proportions, four times larger than the editor.
A tiny chess pawn sits on the editor's chair.
43. The poet reads with an auditorium as background.
44. Having listened, the editor returns to normal size. He swallows
the manuscript, makes an angry face and walks toward the poet.
Mayakovsky grows small. The editor grows huge, four times the size
of the poet. The poet sits like a tiny pawn on a minute chair.
45. The editor criticises with the orangutan family as background.
46. The poet picks up a paper with the word ' Account' written
on it.
47. The poet courageously approaches the editor, again growing in
size, but not to such an extent as before.
48. Behind the poet - walk the Komsomols.
130 49. The editor grows to immense size. The little poet stands on his
chair; the editor shoves a signed piece of paper into his hands.
50. Behind the editor, the rejoicing orangutans.
51. The editor writes: 'Ten rubles advance.'
52. Mayakovsky leaves through the door, tiny, hardly noticeable over
the door step.
53. The poet stands in line with the others at the cashier.
54. Over the cashier's window is a sign: ' The cashier will return
sometime.' -
55. The poet begins to yawn.
56. He dozes.
57. The grille of the cashier's window becomes the railings of a
southern terrace wound with flowers.
58. The ventilator turns into a bird.
59. Asleep. Mayakovsky knocks over the ink pot. Ink pours over
the papers.
60-61. Papers from the cashier's desk and the building merge and
become the real Black Sea.
62. Palm trees wave in the breeze.
63. The end of a palm leaf caresses and tickles Mayakovsky's nose.
64. Mayakovsky wakes up. The end of the cleaning lady's broom
is under his nose.
65. Mayakovsky walks along the street. He looks around.
66. The shop window ' Moscowstitch '.
67. Mayakovsky takes his watch out of his vest pocket, looks at the
watch, holding it next to his stomach. 5.30. The hands are together.
He puts the watch back in his pocket.
68. The watch hands seem to pierce into the stomach. The hanging
stomach contracts.
69. Mayakovsky stops at the window of a bakery, takes out some
change and weighs it in his hand.
70-72. Mayakovsky enters the store and asks about the price. He
buys a little package. Bread and sausage.
End of second part.
Part Three:
(Title) Dry Bread.
1. In his room, Mayakovsky sits at his desk. He eats without appetite
or pleasure, staring at the newspaper. He takes a piece of bread in
his hand, and shoves it in his mouth. He can't chew it. He looks at
the piece with dissatisfaction, frowns and throws it on the floor in
disgust.
(Title) ' How much work for a piece of bread!'
2. The slightly chewed piece of bread falls to the floor.
3. The editorial man climbs out of the newspaper, grabs the seated
Mayakovsky by the arm and points to the floor with his free hand.
(Title) ' So much work for a piece of bread!'
4. The hunk of bread lying on the floor.
5. The hunk jumps up and leaps into his hand.
6. From his mouth the bitten off piece rejoins the hunk of bread.
7. His hand puts the bread on the desk; the piece merges with the
loaf.
8. Mayakovsky puts on his coat and moves backwards to the door.
9. Backwards, he goes down the stairs. 131
10. He goes along the street.
11. He enters the store.
12. He gives the loaf back.
13. He walks backwards to the cashier.
14. He receives his money back from the cashier.
15. He leaves the store.
16 The loaf climbs onto the shelf.
17. From the shelf, the loaf gets onto a pile of loaves."
18. The loaves go into the oven.
19. The loaves come out as dough.
20. The dough turns into flour.
21. The flour pours into a sack.
22. People carry the sack to the door, to a truck.
23. The sack is loaded on the truck.
24. The paper wrapping on the bread smoothes out.
25. The bread wrapping grows into a ream of paper.
26. The reams of paper are packed into a crate.
27. Crates pile up with other crates.
28. The crates pile onto a car.
29. The car drives backwards to a paper factory.
30. The truck with sacks of flour returns to a flour storehouse.
31. The flour is received at the storehouse.
32. The flour travels backwards to the flour mill.
33. The mill makes grain from the flour.
34. Peasants take away the grain in sacks.
35. The peasant carry the grain to the threshing-floor.
36. The grain collects itself into ears.
37. The ears tie together into sheaves.
38. The sheaves are carried to the field.
39. From under the sheaves, the rye straightens up.
40. Along a path through the rye, the young woman from the acci-
dents column strolls arm in arm with Mayakovsky.
41. The rye starts to grow smaller.
42. The rye turns into shoots.
43. Ploughed earth.
44. The furrows grow shorter.
45 The peasant is tired.
46. People run out to him from the village.
47-49. The village attacked, in flames.
50-52. Partisans beat off the attack.
53. A city, full of demonstrating crowds.
54-56. On all the posters and flags: ' Bread and Peace.'
(Diaphragm).
57. (Diaphragm reopens). Mayakovsky in his room with a cup of tea
and a piece of bread.
58. The sketched editorial man shakes his hand and climbs into the
newspaper.
59. Mayakovsky looks at the discarded piece.
60. Mayakovsky carefully picks up the piece.
61. Mayakovsky dusts the piece off.
62. Mayakovsky places the tough piece of bread in a fantastically
ornate vase He cleans off the vase with his jacket and spreads out
132 his own handkerchief as a napkin for the bread. He steps back and
admires.
End of third part.
Part Four:
(Title) Natural Love.
(Title) A rock.
1. Several ordinary peaceful rocks.
(Title) A swamp. . '
2. An ordinary peaceful swamp.
(Title) Chance.
3. A hand picks up a rock. .
4. It throws the rock into the water.
5. Regular circles in the swamp.
(Title) People.
6-8 In a room someone knocks over a candle. The candle sets fire
to a curtain. Beyond the curtain the room is occupied.
9-11. The other room. People congratulate a bride and groom dressed
in wedding attire.
(Title) Chance.
12. The house burns.
13-15. Firemen drive off to the fire.
16-17. People run out of the house.
18-20. People surround the house and walk in crowds around it.
21-24. In various apartments people put on their .holiday clothes,
reading their invitations to the wedding.
25-28. People leave their homes.
29-32. The wedding pair get into a carriage.
33-35. People in a carriage and in cars — follow the wedding. Pedes-
trians chase after the carriage.
36. The bride's home.
37. People constantly come and stare in the windows.
38. The guests drive up.
39. The city from above.
40-41. Circle of people around the burning house.
42-43. A circle around the house with the wedding.
(Title) A young woman from the wedding circle.
44. The circle around the wedding: in the middle of the crowd - a
young woman, anxious and lonely.
(Title) A man from the fire circle.
45. Among those staring at the fire - Mayakovsky, curious and
lonely.
(Title) The circles touch.
46-47. A circle (close-up): part of the circle with the young woman
and part of the circle with Mayakovsky.
48-49. The circles fit one on the other.
50. The young woman looks around at Mayakovsky. From the fire
circle Mayakovsky looks around the young woman from the wedding
circle. A fine figure of a girl.
51. The young woman leaves her circle.
52. MayakovskyJeaves his circle.
53. Mayakovsky hurries after the young woman. He looks at the
young woman. In his eyes she becomes the one from the accidents
column. 133
54. He catches up with her.
(Title) ' But I'm not even going to talk to you.'
55. The young woman moves away, turns her face away from him
a few times and shakes her head in disagreement.
56. Finally she joins in conversation.
(Title) ' But I'm not even going to walk with you, only two steps.'
57. He takes a step alongside her.
58. Then he takes her arm and they walk along together.
59-61. Along the way Mayakovsky picks a flower which has somehow
sprouted through the pavement.
62. Mayakovsky stands before the gates to his house.
(Title) ' But you won't even drop in on me, only for a minute.'
63-69. All round it is winter, except in front of the very house where
there is a little garden in bloom and trees with birds; the facade of
the house is completely overgrown with roses. Sitting on a bench,
wearing only his shirtsleeves, the yard-keeper wipes off his pouring
sweat.
(Title) On wings of love.
70-72. Airplane wings grow on the young woman and Mayakovsky.
73-74. The young woman and Mayakovsky flutter up the stairs.
75-80. Each object in the dirty room bursts into bloom; lilies appear
in the inkwell; before our eyes the simple pattern on the curtains turns
into a rosebud pattern. The plain lamp becomes a chandelier.
81. Mayakovsky pours water from a pitcher.
(Title) ' But we won't even have anything to drink - only one glass.'
82. The young woman says:
(Title) 'What strong water you have!'
83-84. He takes her glass and slowly starts towards her.
(Title) ' But we won't even kiss.'
85. Their lips come together.
86-89. The facade of the house: the flowers fall off the wall, there
is snow on the street. The yard-keeper in his shirt sleeves puts on
a fur coat.
90-93. The room has returned to the norm of its usual dirty look.
94-96. They leave the house. He is wearing galoshes, she - worn
down heels. They carry folded wings under their arms. They slip.
They yawn.
97. After walking a few feet, Mayakovsky takes out his watch.
98-101. 22 minutes after nine. The arrows point in different directions.
Mayakovsky shows the young woman the pointing arrows and says
goodbye. They walk off in opposite directions.
End of fourth part.
Part Five:
(Title) Both Day and Night.
1-11. The intense workings of the central water works. Masses of
water pouring out of filters. The veins of the water works. The
watermains.
(Title) The destroyers of water.
12. A water tap, astounding in its frailness.
13. The kitchen. Mayakovsky filters water into the samovar.
(Title) The authorities on the spot.
134 14-16. The kitchen. A militiaman blissfully enjoying himself with the
cook. He takes off his uniform.
17-18. Mayakovsky fans the flame in the samovar with a shoe.
(Title) Both day and night.
19-27. The immense building of a telephone station. The constant
work of the operators. The tangle of telephone wires.
(Title) The wreckers of the telephone.
28. The frowsy mother of the family on the' telephone. Behind the
mother, in a line, the papa, a grown-up daughter, three little boys and
two dogs. The telephone conversation:
(Title) ' We're coming to visit you on the occasion of the eve of the
anniversary of the birth of ftobespierre.'
29. Mayakovsky on the telephone makes an amiable face, and says:
(Title) ' Come on over! I'll put on the samovar.'
30. Mayakovsky throws down the receiver and mutters angrily:
(Title) ' Get out of here - and we'll drink some tea . . . "
31-33. The family on the street.
34-35. Mayakovsky fans the samovar with a shoe - the fire won't
catch. He takes the shoe from the samovar and puts it on his foot,
takes the militiaman's boot and starts to fan with it.
36. The telephone.
37. A call from the organiser of a workers' university.
38. A crowd, thronging into the auditorium.
39. Mayakovsky on the telephone:
(Title) ' I'll come, if I can get rid of them.'
40. The doorbell rings.
41-42. The family and a dog crowd in.
43-45. Mayakovsky seats the guests wearing a hypertrophied smile.
46-47. Mayakovsky serves them tea.
48-50. The seated guests amiably start in with amiable questions:
(Title) The father: ' They say the price index for chitterlings is
fluctuating, again?'
The daughter: 'Tell me, have you ever experienced ideal love?'
51. The son starts in with the dog:
(Title) ' My dog is dithiplined: she pitheth not when she wanth,
but when I wanth.'
52. The mother, in ecstasy:
(Title) ' My Toto, don't you think, is a delight, so mature for his age?'
53-55. Mayakovsky answers each politely, but as soon as the person
addressing him turns away, he grimaces hopelessly.
56. A packed-full auditorium.
57. Three organisers from the workers' university at the telephone.
58. Mayakovsky at the telephone.
(Title) ' I have a meeting here.'
59. The guests have finished their tea.
60. Mayakovsky gets up, joyfully rubbing his hands together.
61-63. The guests thank him. But then they all sit down in a row on
the couch, saying:
(Title) ' It's so pleasant to sit a while here at your house - it relaxes
the very soul.'
64. The auditorium in an uproar.
65. A crush at the telephone.
66. Mayakovsky waves aside the ringing telephone.
67. Mayakovsky runs out of the room. 135
68. Mayakovsky sobs in the kitchen, leaning against the kitchen table.
69. Mayakovsky raises his head.
70. On a nail hangs the uniform of the militiaman who is spending
the night with the cook.
71. The guests relaxing blissfully on the couch.
72. A militiaman enters. He hands them a paper.
(Title) ' Sign for it.' -
73. The confused guests take the paper and read i t :
(Title) ' Notification from the Apartment Building Committee. Seismo-
graphic division. In view of the possibility of a repetition in Moscow
of the Tokyo earthquake, it is proposed that the aforesaid night be
spent outside the house - on the street.'
' Sign for it!'
74-76. The militiaman pokes at the paper. On the run, putting their
hats on backwards, shoving one arm in their coats and scrawling
their signatures with the other, the family vanishes, dragging their
dog by its tail.
77. In his confusion, the husband says to the wife:
(Title) ' We really ought to say goodbye to our host . . .'
78. The wife irritatedly drags him by his jacket:
(Title) ' Tomorrow, we'll say goodbye!'
79. Mayakovsky looks around, tears off his moustache and uniform
and laughs.
80. In gratitude, he shoves three rubles in the pants pocket.
81. Mayakovsky dashes down the stairs and into a taxi.
82. Mayakovsky's ride.
83. Mayakovsky on the stage.
84. Someone in the audience talking.
85. Someone in the audience napping.
86. Mayakovsky on the attack.
87. People in the audience all ears.
88. Mayakovsky finishes reading. Notes handed up from the hall.
89. Applause.
90. Mayakovsky, tired, goes down the stairs.
91. Mayakovsky's ride home.
92. Mayakovsky fumbles into his room.
93. Mayakovsky sits down on the bed, unlaces his shoes.
94. Mayakovsky in bed with a book.
95. The room grows blurred.
96. Someday things will be like this:
97. Mayakovsky dictates into a microphone.
98. An audience full of people listening to loudspeakers.
99. Notes bounce along little conveyor belts and wires. It grows dark.
100. It grows dark
101. Blackness.
102. The family out in a field, drowsing under an umbrella.
103. Stars.
104. Mayakovsky sleeps.
105. Dream.
106. The sun rises from beyond the sea.
The End.
136 HEART OF THE SCREEN (Revision of the scenario Shackled by Film)
A Factual-Fantasy in Four Parts with a Prologue and an Epilogue.
Cast of Characters:
1. Movie star 5. Douglas Fairbanks.
2. Painter. 6. Charles Chaplin.-
3. Manicurist. 7. Rudolf Valentino.
4. A Man in a bowler. - A director and many others.
Prologue:
1. (Title) Before the twentieth century, time left us only dead
witnesses.
2. A spider, weaving a v/eb; beyond the web -
3. (Title) Paintings . . .
4. A Grande in a gilded frame. A sword and roses in his hands.
5. (Title) Statues . . .
6. Beneath the painting a marble Venus bends modestly.
7. (Title) Books . . .
On either side of the statues are enormous books: the Bible - the
Song of Songs.
8. (Title) And then a man came out of his laboratory bubbling with
joy.
9. Loaded down with film equipment, an American-looking fellow
(Edison) comes out of the door and strides gaily down the street.
10. He took a fancy to setting ruins spinning. (Title).
11. The American type turns the handle of the camera - the cobweb
tears apart, the Grande climbs out of the painting and hands Venus
the flowers. Venus comes alive and embraces him. Horn blowers
crawl out of the books and glorify love.
12. A portly, prosperous-looking gentleman wearing a bowler steps
up to the man turning the handle, looks on ecstatically and slaps him
on the back.
13. (Title) You have a good thing here, sir.
14. The American type takes off his hat, stops turning the handle
and the picture fades away.
15. (Title) How much?
16. The American type holds up all ten fingers many times, takes
off his shoes and counts his toes too.
17. (Title) All right!
18. The man in the bowler writes out a cheque, gives the cheque
to the American and carries off the camera.
Part One:
1. (Title) Impossible not to turn and stare.
2. An enormously beautiful woman walks along the street. People
who had been walking along carelessly, even bumping into one
another, suddenly become very polite, turn and look, step aside to
make way, stare undecidedly for a second, walk on and then turn
to look again.
3. (Title) A man, not resembling a hero.
4. A puny looking house painter walks along, dragging his bucket 137
of paint in one hand and balancing himself on the other side with
his brushes.
5. Passers-by wrap their coats tightly around them as they get near
the dirty bucket. As they pass it, they pick the imagined dust off
their sleeves.
6. The phlegmatic painter almost runs into the Beauty, tries to get
past, bumps into her,'looks startled, and then, in his embarrassment,
spreads his arms wide making way for her.
7. Frowning with disgust, the Beauty goes on.
8. The painter tries to go on, looks back, finally puts down his
bucket, leans his brushes against the wall. He hurries after the
Beauty, losing her in the crowd. He stands on tip-toe and shades
his eyes with his hand.
9. (Title) A man under a foreign flag.
10. In a car with a foreign flag flying, the Franchise-holder floats by
(the man in the bowler hat from the prologue).
11. The Beauty walking along.
12. The Franchise-holder turns his head, opens his eyes wider and
wider and almost twists his head off.
13. The car stops in front of a trolley car.
14. The Beauty jumps onto the step of the overcrowded trolley.
15. The trolley starts to roll.
16. The painter, who has caught up, tries to jump on too.
17. A policeman grabs the painter by the seat of his pants.
18. The painter tries to pull himself away. The policeman is im-
movable. He demands a fine, taking out his ticket pad.
19. The laughing face of the Franchise-holder who looks back as he
sails on by.
20. The trolley riding away with the Beauty.
21. The Franchise-holder tries to drive alongside the trolley.
22. Scratching his head, the painter pays the policeman a rouble.
23. The painter grins and shakes his fist.
24. (Title) I will earn back that rouble!
25. The Beauty jumps off the trolley. She runs across the street and,
looking back, disappears into an entranceway.
26. The Franchise-holder gets out of his car, looks the building over,
writes down the street and the house number.
27. He gestures to the doorman, with gestures describes the Beauty,
and then writes down the name the doorman (who is delighted to
receive a three-rouble note) gives him.
28. The painter picks up his bucket and brushes.
29. The painter walks along, walking right into passers-by, showered
with curses by the people he splashes with paint.
30. (Title) The Beauty comes in handy.
31. The painter walks up to a Beauty Parlour with a half-finished
sign on the glass window.
32. The painter arranges his scaffolding.
33. The painter climbs onto the scaffolding, dripping paint on the
manicurist who is entering the store.
34. In the store the manicurist complains about the painter to the
hairdressers and the boss, making threatening gestures at the window.
35. On the other side of the glass, the painter sketches the outline
138 of the Beauty.
36. The hairdressers move closer and stare in amazement.
37. A crowd starts to gather around the painter.
38. (Title) The star-maker.
39. The Franchise-holder rings the rusted bell on the peeling door.
40. The door opens a crack on a chain.
41. The Franchise-holder hands in his visiting card.
42. The card:
Jones,
Director of the Great Hollywood
Association of Film Studios
43. Papa, mama and the Beauty examine the card in amazement.
44. The impatient Franchise-holder.
45. All together the family rushes to open the door to the Franchise-
holder.
46. The Franchise-holder places his bowler on the table and displays
movie posters and stills showing the most elaborate costumes.
47. The Beauty, her.mouth open.
48. (Title) And here live the parents of the stars.
49. He displays architectural drawings of palaces before the ecstatic
parents.
50. A brief bargaining session. (Title).
51. The teary-eyed but greedy parents count ten-rouble notes.
52. The Beauty signs a paper marked ' Contract'.
53. (Title) The enamoured painter's work went quickly.
54. The painter completes the Beauty's head, whipping up an unlikely
hairdo for the portrait.
55. All the passers-by stop, look and applaud. Some of them pull at
the painter's shirt and write down his address.
56. Turning away ecstatically every few minutes to look at the painter
through the window, the manicurist jabs the man whose nails she
is doing.
57. (Title) Finished.
58. The painter takes down his scaffolding and, looking one last time
at the portiait, wanders home.
59. Part of his audience stays to gape, the other part runs after the
painter.
60. A reporter, interviewing the painter.
61. Photographer run ahead of them taking pictures
62. At the beauty parlour, the hairdressers, the boss and the mani-
curist crowd together, grabbing the newspaper away from one
another.
63. The evening news: An amazing new artist-sign painter.
64. The manicurist gazes lovingly at the portrait
65. (Title) All spruced up.
66. The painter, unrecognisable, shaved and combed, awkwardly
fastens a bow-tie under his chin.
67. The orders roll in — and the customers too. (Title)
68. Women, men and children puff as they climb up the crooked
staircase.
69. In the waiting room, models primp before many mirrors.
70. The painter seats a model - a most genteel little man with a
book in his hand.
71. The painter steps back and starts to work with canvas and paints. 139
72. The model gradually begins to grow transparent and instead of
a heart, he has vodka bottles and a whoremaster inside.
73. The painter puts down his brush.
74. (Title) Come back tomorrow.
75. A respectable matron makes a dignified entrance, and folding
her little hands nobly, she assumes a prayerful pose.
76. In despair, the painter takes up his brush.
77. The woman grows transparent and instead of a heart, she has a
bawdy young man with mustachios a la ' Gillette'.
78. (Title) Come back tomorrow!
79. The manicurist leans in the door.
80. The painter greets her cheerfully. He seats her solicitously, steps
back, palate in hand, looking at her.
81. The manicurist too grows transparent and instead of a heart, she
has the painter himself standing with the manicurist under the sign
Registrar of Marriages.
82. The painter throws down his brush in disgust, practically chases
the manicurist out and slams the door.
83. The painter sits down pensively.
84. A large cut out of a heart arises.
85 A tiny train passes through the heart, the Beauty's silhouette
flashes by in one of the windows.
End of Part One
Part Two:
1. (Title) Business is bad.
2. The entrance to a movie theatre - a large, tattered poster.
3. ' The Cockroaches from Torzhok'
An international feature.
4. The few people who come near the entrance, read the poster and
turn away.
5. Two faces yawning with relish.
6. The doorman, drowsing in his luxurious uniform, suddenly jerks
awake and grabs a potential viewer by his coat tail. He fights the
doorman off and takes to his heels, leaving the coat tails behind.
7. A soaked, ragged cat slips dejectedly in through the movie theatre
doors.
8. An entranceway.
Rental Bureau.
9. Dejected boys in short jackets stand outside the door of the
' Director'.
10. (Title) No hot features.
11. The director with his aids and vice-directors. The director paces,
gesticulating agitatedly. He goes up to the poster for ' The Cock-
roaches from Torzhok', tears it down, crumples it and throws it on
the floor.
12. From under the shreds of the poster can be seen:
Scientific film
' Angina in Crocodiles'
13. The director looks at it and spits angrily.
14. A melancholy conference of head scratchers.
140 15. Sheets of paper:
Credit Debit
1,235,756 23
17
Total — 100000000000
16. With pencils in their paws, the conferees doodle dogs and cats
under the accounts.
17. (Title) The longed-for guest.
18. The Franchise-holder's car rolls up to the. entrance of the
' Rental Bureau'.
19. The Franchise-holder jumps out, and presses the bell. Under one
arm he carries a roll of posters and under the other a round container
of film.
21. The Franchise-holder enters the bureau as though he owned the
place.
22. Employees, couriers and boys make way for the Franchise-holder.
Their mood changing instantaneously from gloom to joy, the secre-
taries all turn towards him.
23. The dejected gathering of conferees.
24. In the doorway, the Franchise-holder stonily tips his bowler and
then claps it on again.
25. A dozen joyously welcoming hands.
26. The director and an aid rush to meet him.
27. Not moving from the doorway, the Franchise-holder takes a
poster by two corners and lets it unroll.
28. The poster:
'The Heart of the Screen!'
A universal film starring all the stars
and constellations!
The Beauty is all dressed up and covered with jewels. She is sur-
rounded by all the most famous movie personalities. In her hands she
holds a huge heart.
29. The director steps back, enraptured.
30. Solid applause from the board.
31. The Franchise-holder opens the container of film.
32. The conferees hold the end of the film up to the light.
33. Individual frames of the Beauty in the most elegant costumes
and captivating poses. '
34. The entire bureau, from the boys to the cleaning ladies, crowds
around the poster, looking ecstatically at the huge poster.
35. The director sends everyone out of the board room and remains
alone with the Franchise-holder.
36. (Title) Now we'll have a profit!
37. The director servilely shakes the hand of the imperturbable
Franchise-holder.
38. (Title) A good product must be advertised.
39. The Franchise-holder drums with his fingers on the container of
film.
40. The director grabs the phone, blows into it and growls a number.
41. The phlegmatic painter answers the phone.
42. The director makes a begging face.
43. The painter shakes his head no. 141
44. The director insistently:
A hundred! Two hundred! Three hundredl
45. The painter thinks for a minute and then reluctantly agrees. He
throws down the receiver and goes to get his hat.
46. The director, delighted, rubs his hands together.
(Title) He agreed, now it's in the bag.
47. The Franchise-holder leaves, colliding with the artist in the
doorway.
48. Indifferent to everything, looking at no one, the artist goes to a
chair, escorted by the director who is all compliments and solicitude.
49. (Title) We need a little poster for this movie.
50. The director turns the artist's shoulders towards the foreign
poster.-
51. The artist turns his indifferent eyes.
52. The painter's eyes open wider and wider.
53. The painter leaps up and runs to the posters.
54. The. amazed director throws up his hands.
55. The painter clutches his heart and, almost stumbling, steps back
from the poster.
56. The amazed director skips after the painter.
57. The painter throws himself on the floor, rolls up the poster,
carefully presses.it to him and runs to the door.
58. The director, totally amazed, grabs the painter by his jacket and
puts a hand to the painter's forehead to see if he has a fever.
59. The painter tears himself away and pushes the director back
with all five fingers of one hand:
60. (Title) All right, all right, everything will be the way you want.
61. The painter disappears through the door.
62. The director is frozen in bewilderment.
63. The painter runs down the street, knocking into passers-by,
clutching the poster protectively to his heart.
64. The painter stops in front of the beauty parlour sign, unrolls the
poster and compares the faces.
65. The hairdressers look out at the window and the manicurist
shoves her way to the door.
66. (Title) It's her! It's her!
67. Hurriedly rolling up the poster, the painter dashes on.
68. Shoving on her hat as she goes, the manicurist hurries after the
fleeing painter.
69. The painter flies up the stairs.
70. The manicurist stumbles after him.
71. Hardly breathing, the painter runs into his workshop, dropping
the unrolled posters.
72. The manicurist runs in and stops in front of the poster woman.
She recognises her. Angrily she goes up to the painter.
73. The painter simply takes the manicurist by the shoulders and
puts her out the door.
74. The manicurist pounds on the locked door with her fist.
75. She hurts her fist and blows on it.
76. (Title) You striped sleepwalker!
77. She wags her finger threateningly at the door and, turning
abruptly, runs down the stairs.
142 78. The painter looks like some sort of lunatic. Feverishly he pins
up a piece of paper.
79. On the sheet of paper the outlines of the beauty parlour. Beauty
begins to appear.
80. (Title) The campaign has begun.
81. Posterhangers paste up the poster for 'Heart of the Screen*.
82. People instantly gather at the posters.
83. Boys hand out fliers.
84. A citizen carefully hides one of the fliers in his pocket.
85. Newsies hawk newspapers with articles about ' Heart of the
Screen'.
86. Stumbling into others, a man reads the notices and looks at the
portrait.
87. A whole string of sandwichmen wear the poster for ' Heart of
the Screen'.
88. Lines of boys and adult movie fiends run after the sandwich men.
89. The portrait rides by on an elephant, on a camel.
90. The disdainful face of the sign painter.
91. The painter stands on a ladder holding a brush.
92. The painter whips up the hairdo on the beauty parlour Beauty
to make it look like the latest shot from the film.
93. The painter adds a necklace.
94. (Title) A siege, in the quarter of an hour the advance sale of
tickets will beginl '
95. The movie theatre doorman is besieged by a crowd, shoving and
pushing for tickets.
End of Second Part
Part Three:
1. (Title) An insane day.
2. A crush at the entrance to the movie theatre which is decorated
. with the posters for ' Heart of the Screen'. The squeals of the
crushed. Canes and umbrellas wave above the. crowd.
3. (Title) One patron arrived almost at dawn.
4. In the empty theatre, impatiently looking at his watch, one man
sits alone among all the seats - the painter.
5. The women who sell tickets look at him with amazement and
reproach.
6. A mass in front of the doors.
7. The lobby doors. The crowd bursts in.
8. The crowd fills up all the seats.
9. Those who do not find seats crowd in the aisles.
10. The painter's face, impatiently straining forward.
11. The black screen. 'Heart of the Screen' lights up.
12. A gallery of concentrating faces.
13. Close-up of the painter, his eyes glued on the screen.
14. The screen - and on the screen, the Beauty. Holding a huge heart
in her hands, the Beauty runs, hiding from the film people - Fairbanks,
Valentino, Chaplin leaning on his cane, and others - who pursue her.
15. The rapt faces of the audience.
16. The action on the screen unfolds. The Beauty leaps from cliff to
cliff. It seems that she is safe at last, but then the man in the bowler
appears. Like a lasso, he tosses a ring of film. The Beauty is caught.
They pull at the Beauty. 143
17 The tense faces of the audience.
18. The painter jumps out of his seat. The woman sitting in front of
him, whose hat he hits, turns around annoyed.
19. The painter waves her off, crawling almost onto the screen.
20. The amazed faces of the audience looking at the painter.
21. (Title) The End.
22. The entire hall applauds.
23. The painter (standing on tiptoe) tries to raise himself above
everybody else and applauds frantically.
24. Applauding as they go, the people leave the theatre.
25. Gradually, the painter is left alone, applauding and eyed by the
existing audience.
26. The painter, applauding alone in the empty theatre, stands before
the black screen which has finished its work.
27. The users come up to the painter. They try to get his attention
and ask him to leave. Uneasy, the painter fights them off.
28. Suddenly the screen lights up and the Beauty appears on it. The
Beauty starts to climb down from the screen.
29. Exchanging scared glances, the ushers clutch their heads and
run away.
30. Alone, struck dumb, the painter stands with his arms spread
expectantly.
31. The Beauty climbs down from the screen and, smiling, approaches
the painter.
32. The painter, his eyes wide open, takes the Beauty's arm and
walks through an empty passage in the chairs.
33. The doormen fearfully open the door before the unlikely couple.
34. The painter jumps out first. He looks around. The Beauty is gone.
35. The painter looks in amazement: like a vision, the film-Beauty
passes through the closed door.
36. Spreading her arms, smiling, the Beauty sniffs the fresh street air.
37. (Title) I haven't seen all this in a long time. Living life makes my
head spin.
38. Coming to his senses, the painter rushes to join the Beauty.
39. The Beauty frowns, dissatisfied.
40. The Beauty takes a step backwards. Slowly she moves back-
wards to the door and disappears through the locked mass of the
door.
41. The painter throws himself at the door, but is stopped by its bolts
and locks.
42. The painter pounds on the door. He pounds some more. He hurts
his fists. Looking wildly around, he steps back, turns and runs away.
43. The painter, watched by the passers-by, runs along the street,
loses his hat, but goes without picking it up.
44. Rushing past the waiting manicurist, without looking at her, he
bursts into the entrance of his own house.
45. The distraught manicurist tries to catch his eye as he runs by.
46. The painter bursts into his work shop, throws himself on the
bed and lies there motionless.
47. The manicurist pokes her nose in at the door, the manicurist
enters the room, looks in horror at the half-dead painter and runs to
the telephone.
144 48- The doctor picks up the receiver, listens, recognising the name,
he jumps up, packs his medicine bag and runs out, putting on a coat
as he goes.
49. In vain the manicurist tries to bring the painter to his senses.
50. The doctor knocks at the door.
51. The manicurist, upset, runs to open the door.
52. The doctor comes in, goes to the sick man's bed, gives him a
phial to sniff, feels his pulse, and gives him a thermometer.
53. The doctor, taking his pulse, shakes his head with dissatisfaction.
54. 104.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
55. The painter tosses weakly.
56. The doctor writes out a prescription.
57. The manicurist grabs the prescription, slips the doctor some
money, and then shows him out as she runs off to fill the prescription.
58. The manicurist runs into a drugstore. She is given little boxes,
phials and jars.
59. The painter lies motionless in bed.
60. The manicurist runs back carrying the medicinal assortment
wrapped in a piece of this paper.
61. The paper tears and the medicines scatter on the sidewalk.
63. The manicurist looks around, not knowing what to do.
64. The manicurist tears off a fence the first piece of paper which
comes to hand - it is a poster f o r ' Heart of the Screen '. She wraps
the medicine in the poster and runs on.
65. The manicurist at the painter's bedside feverishinly unwraps the
medicines. She drops the poster. She arranges the jars on a little
table.
66. Opening his eyes, the painter's glance becomes glued to the piece
of paper.
67. The painter jumps up, and shows the manicurist out.
68. Alone, the painter smooths out the crumpled poster, hangs it
at the head of the bed, and, tired from the strain, lies down exhausted.
69. The fixed eyes of the painter.
70. A woman gradually separates herself from the poster hanging at
the head of the bed, moves out of the frame and almost sits on the
bed.
71. The joyful surprise of the painter who jerks to a sitting position,
leaning on one hand.
72. The Beauty puts her hand on the painter's head and leans towards
him.
73. (Title) Hello.
74. The manicurist's eye, fastened to a crack in the door.
75. The manicurist rubs her eyes and looks again, rubs them again
and, her face contorted, runs headlong away from the door.
76. (Title) Strange happenings on the streets of the city.
77. Sandwich men walk along accompanied by gapers.
78. Suddenly the picture of the Beauty disappears from all of the
sandwich posters.
79. The sandwich men continue to walk.
80. Rubbing theireyes, the gapers stop the sandwich men and point
to the empty frames.
81. Dropping their emty frames, the sandwich men run off in terror.
82. A portly citizen is reading a poster for ' Heart of the Screen'
with obvious pleasure. 145
83. Suddenly, the woman disappears from the poster.
85. The Beauty's painting on the beauty parlour window. Slowly it
disappears, fading away to nothing.
86. The customers runout of the beauty parlour, rubbing their eyes
at this strange phenomenon.
87. The door to the ' Director's ' office.
88. The director is sitting, absorbed, smiling over his profit figures.
89. The public, sitting in a movie theatre, looks impatiently at the
clock.
90. Stamping feet.
91. The projectionist dashes about his booth looking for the vanished
film.
92. The projectionist on the telephone.
83. The director answers the telephone.
94. The director listens, unable to understand. He questions the
projectionist, then clutches his head, grabs the receiver again and
dials agitatedly.
95. A telephone receiver in the hand of a security agent.
96. TTie director growls:
(Title) For the love of god and the devil, take immediate
measures, our most profitable film has been stolen.
97. The security agent slams down the receiver, pushes a bell and
in run the other agents. Excitedly they discuss what has happened
and what measures to take.
98. (Title) Meanwhile, the people who have bought tickets wreck
the movie theatre.
99. The people sitting in the theatre look at the clock. Then they
knock the clock over and raise their fists.
100. Stamping feet breaking through the floor.
101. The projectionist in front of the screen, trying to calm the
audience.
102. (Title) Citizens! Citizens!
The citizens break away from their places, destroying the seats.
The citizens burst out onto the street, sweeping up the doorman and
breaking down the doors.
End of Part Three
Part Four:
1. (Title) A day of extraordinary adventures.
2. (Title) A crowded meeting in an empty theatre.
3. The outside of the movie theatre, the doors locked.
4. The empty seats of the theatre with scattered scraps of posters
and other traces of the melfie of the day before.
5. The screen. An'empty black spot in the place where the heart and
the Beauty had been. Her pursuers are frozen in the suddenly arrested
frame. Gradually, the pursuers start to move and one after another
the two-dimensional figures climb down from the screen into the
theatre. A whole crowd of famous and unsung movie heroes gathers:
Fairbanks, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, spies, tough guys, etc.
6. The heroes converse excitedly. Fairbanks calms the others. He
seats them in a semi-circle, climbs on a chair and haltingly begins to
speak.
146 7. (Title) Citizens of the movies, our heart, a chic and beautiful dame,
has been stolen. Will rich old men and lovesick secretaries buy tickets
now?
8. The distressed heroes agree with their speaker.
9. (Title) We must organise a search immediately.
10. The 'heroes' welcome the proposal decisively, rattling their
movie weapons threateningly: Chaplin his cane, Lloyd "his glasses,
the spies their Brownings, the cowboys ready their lassoes.
11. (Title) Jealousy.
12. Angry and nervous, the manicurist runs into the beauty parlour.
The beauty parlour is empty. The assistant hairdressers are reading
the newspapers.
13. The manicurist sits at her table, absentmindedly rearranging the
implements of her trade.
14. The newspaper readers become animated. They all focus on
some notice. One of them tears the newspaper away, and, pointing
to the notice, runs up to the manicurist. ,
15. The manicurist skims over the notice.
16. (Title) A major theft. Yesterday the film 'Heart of the Screen'
was stolen from the ' Dawn' movie theatre. The losses are immense.
The public . . . to whoever finds....
17. The manicurist drops the paper and makes a fist at it.
18. (Title) He would even steal because of her.
19. All excited, the manicurist scurries around the beauty parlour.
20. The manicurist grabs the telephone book and searches quickly
through it, running a finger down the columns of numbers. She finds
it - and runs into the telephone booth.
22. The telephone rings in the office of the director of the movie
trust. He is consulting gloomily with the Franchise-holder and the
security agent.
23. The director's face becomes radiant, he yells excitedly to the
instantly attentive visitors, slams down the receiver and all three get
ready to leave, watching the door expectantly.
24. Laughing wickedly, the manicurist hurries along the street, her
hat on cockeyed.
25. (Title) The inconvenience of romance with a two-dimensional
person.
26. Rising up in his bed, the painter tries to embrace the Beauty but,
when he succeeds, he find only a crumpled poster in his arms.
27. The painter rubs his eyes - the Beauty is already standing in
another part of the room.
28. The painter, assuming that his excessive haste and crudeness
has insulted the Beauty, tactfully and guiltily climbs out of bed.
29. With trembling hands, the painter straightens his tie and arranges
his hair.
30. Grabbing a chair as he walks weakly and unsteadily across the
room, bending politely, the painter puts the chair down and invites
the Beauty to sit.
31. The Beauty slides to the chair and sinks onto it.
32. The painter takes another chair for himself, moves closer so he
can sit next to her - and sees on the chair only the container from
the film. Again the painter rubs his eyes.
33. The Beauty is standing in another part of the room. She points
to the table covered with a white cloth. 147
34. Puzzled, the painter looks from the table to the Beauty.
35. The painter guesses. He grabs a corner of the tablecloth and pulls
it over to the wall, steping on the dishes which fall off the table.
36. The painter pins the tablecloth to the wall like a screen, and the
beauty, delighted, takes her usual place against the white back-
ground. The Beauty indicates a place in front of her for the painter.
37. The painter sets his gramophone in front of the screen in place
of the orchestra and takes his seat as a one-man audience. He stares
at the screen, hardly able to stay on his chair.
38. The Beauty begins her well-learned role against the tablecloth
screen.
39. (Title) The chase.
40. The door of the movie trust.
41. The door bangs forecfully open. Led by the manicurist, the
director, the Franchise-holder and the agent run out.
42. The excited and preoccupied group piles into a car.
43. The automobile whizzes through the streets of the city.
44. The speeding automobile in the foreground, in perspective at the
end of the street, the movie theatre can be seen looming larger and
larger.
45. The locked doors of the movie theatre.
46. Through the locked doors a pair of eyeglasses becomes visible;
The rest of Harold Lloyd climbs through the doors. He waves a hand
to the others.
47. Buster Keaton becomes visible, dragging a toy car behind him.
48. Fairbanks climbs out, leading a horse by the reins.
49. A group of spies jumps out, loading their revolvers as they go.
50. The ' tough guys' climb out stealthily, carrying knives.
51. A crowd of cowboys becomes visible, dramatically adjusting
their wide-brim hats, straightening out their lassoes and saddling their
horses.
52. Trie automobile of the pursuers speeds past the theatre.
53. Leaning out of the car, the Franchise-holder signals to the heroes.
54. The heroes, running, riding and galloping, dash after the auto-
mobile.
55. An unusual hubbub in the quiet streets. In front rides the
Franchise-holder's car; behind him Keaton's toy car; behind Keaton
gallops Fairbanks; behind Fairbanks come the cowboys waving their
lassoes; behind the cowboys the spies and the toughs charge along,
every second looking around suspiciously. Chaplin, walking on stilts
with his cane in his teeth, brings up the rear of the chase.
56. The chase stops at the entrance to the painter's house.
57. The pursuers run up the stairs.
58. The pursuers eavesdrop at the painter's door.
59. The painter, exhausted, rests his head on his hand and watches
the Beauty raise the heart above the tablecloth screen.
60. Crowding in the hallway, the pursuers use beams to break down
the door.
61. At the tremendous crash, the painter looks around.
62. The hoard, led by the manicurist, bursts into the room.
63. (Title) There they are.
64. The manicurist points first to the painter and then to the Beauty.
148 65. The painter crawls off into an unnoticed corner of the room.
66. Paying no attention to the painter, the Franchise-holder
approaches the Beauty, holding the contract up before him like a
shield.
67. (Title) Return to the movies, you are ruining us.
68. The Beauty retreats (growing smaller on the screen) and shakes
her head no.
69. The Franchise-holder falls on his knees and begs shaking his
wallet.
70. (Title) Come back, we will pay you twice as much as Gloria
Swanson.
71. The Beauty retreats further, though her move is less decisive,
but still shaking her head.
72. (Title) What are you standing and looking at her for?
73. The manicurist jumps out of the crowd, at a loss at what to do
at first, she then grabs a knife from one of the toughs and plunges
it into the Beauty.
74. The Beauty turns into a poster and the knife only tears the poster
paper and lodges firmly in the wall. The Beauty stands next to it
and laughs.
75. The manicurist faints.
76. The Franchise-holder kicks her aside.
77. (Title) Take the idiot away.
78. The Franchise-holder comes right up to the Beau.ty and, with a
threatening gesture, takes a piece of film from his pocket.
79. (Title) You don't want to come back of your own free will,
then we will take you by force of all the habits of our society, by
the iron force of the unwritten law of our taste for dollars.
80. The Franchise-holder wraps the film around her, and the Beauty
melts into the celluloid. Finishing with the Beauty, the Franchise-
holder wraps film around all the remaining movie heroes. The mani-
curist runs out in terror.
81. In the room remain the Franchise-holder who winds the film into
the container which was lying on the table, the director, who rubs his
hands joyfully, and the painter. He looks wildly around from the
corner in which he is lying.
82. Having packed up the film, the director goes out first, followed
by the Franchise-holder. The end of the film is sticking out of his
pocket. When he slams the door, the end is caught.
83. The director and the Franchise-holder run down the stairs -
behind them unwinds the snagged film.
84. The director and the Franchise-holder ride in the car - behind
the speeding car the film continues to unwind.
85. Alone, the painter wipes the sweat from his brow. He looks at
himself, at the pinned up tablecloth, at the bed. He tries to force
himself to remember what happened, but cannot.
86. He reaches for his pipe and matches which he dropped in all
the confusion.
87. Slowly, with great relish, the painter lights his pipe. The painter
tosses away the burning match.
88. The burning match flies through the air.
89. The match lands on the snagged end of the film.
90. The film ignites.
91*. The frightened look of the painter. 149
92. The flame burns along the film which curls down the stairs.
93. Like a fuse, the flash runs across the city.
94. The flame darts under the door of the movie trust office.
95. The flame flies up the stairs to the director's door.
96. The satisfied Franchise-holder and the director examine the
film against the light.
97. The flame runs around the room.
98. The flame climbs to the hands of the dumbfounded Franchise-
holder and the director.
99. The flame explodes the film container.
100. The director and the Franchise-holder dash around the room,
in vain trying to extinguish the growing fire.
101. The panic of people and things in the burning office.
End of Part Four
Epilogue:
1. (Title) As usual, the best-looking young women and men go to the
doors of the film trust to hire themselves out to the movies.
2. Hurrying, primping as they go, straightening their ties, evening
out the crease in their trousers, they go to apply for jobs in the
movies.
3. At the locked doors of the film trust - policemen and whispering
men in bowlers.
4. The crowd arrives. People get irritated and point out the news-
paper announcement to the policemen and the men in bowlers.
5. (Title) Pretty girls from the ages of 16 to 24 are required for the
completion of contracts for filming in Am . . . passage . . . wardrobe.
6. From the crowd of bowlers, the saddest and most solid man steps
out, and, standing on tiptoe on the top step, speaks, calming the
crowd with his hand.
7. (Title) The film trust has burned down. Movies from our world,
for various reasons, cannot find tranquility and a proper place in your
serious republic. Therefore . . . discontinued....
8. After stamping around for a while, the crowd disperses. The
charred door, empty, guarded by policemen. .
9. The last to leave are a cameraman and a 17 year old actress,
almost a younger double of the Beauty from ' Heart of the Screen'.
10. At first they walk along sadly; then they grow more animated
and chat gaily.
11. The cameraman stops and,'taking the girl by the arm, points to
the scene before them.
12. On the huge scaffolding of a huge construction a carpenter is
working, lightheartedly and gaily hammering some board into place
high above the whole city.
13. The cameraman swings his camera off his shoulder and quickly
adjusts the focus.
14. (Title) Why shouldn't the movies go in for real life? That trick
beats Fairbanks!
15. The cameraman turns the handle of his camera. The girl watches
him ecstatically.
16. The cameraman finishes his work. The girl comes close to him.
17. (Title) And why have I only kissed on the screen up to now?
18. They embrace and kiss. Translations by Elizabeth Henderson
Screen Education Notes
New quarterly publication of the Society for Educa-
tion in Film and Television, which supplements the
critical and theoretical work of SCREEN
SEFT
63 Old Compton Street
London W1
152 Maririetti and Mayakovsky: futurism, fascism, communism
Stanley Mitchell
TO MEMBERS OF S.E.F.T.
Peter Wollen
symposium 1
published 1971 by the screen education group (S.W.
Lanes) in association with the editorial board, Edge
Hill College of Education, Ormskirk, Lanes
articles include:
. ^ • ' : ~ ^ '
Write your name £& address here, cut & post this coupon or write a separate Istter
films »
address S
SKCI filming •
town county S
sm
AATILLERY MANSIONS, 75 VICTORIA STREET, LCNDOX SWi |
i68 BOOK REVIEWS
Sergei Eisenstein, Leon Moussinac, Cinema d'Aujourd'hui
Editions Seghers (in English)
REFERENCES
1. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Marie Seton, Bodley Head, London, 1952.
2. With Eisenstein in Hollywood, Ivor Montagu, Seven Seas, Berlin,
1968.
3. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Peter Wollen, Cinema One,
London, 1969.
4. Wollen, op cit p 56.
5. Film Makers on Film Making. Ed. Harry Geduld, Pelican 1970,
(P 112).
6. Geduld, op cit p 110.
7. Screen Vol 12, No 1 p 11.
8. Illuminations, Walter Benjamin (Cape, London, 1970). The essay
' The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction'.
172 Letters
November 2, 1971
Dear Sir,
The recent issue of Screen, Mr Hillier's splenetic article on the
North East Educational Film Project is simply another attempt to
discredit the management of the British Film Institute. The fact
that Mr Hillier was an employee of the British Film Institute when
the article was written and published naturally appears strange to
someone used to the more primitive morality of the North where
loyalty to one's employers is still regarded as normal. Then, of
course, we lack the cultural and moral infallibility of the metro-
politan avant garde.
Mr Hillier began by saying that the North East Educational Film
Project was important because, among other things, ' it involves
large sums of public money'. The annual cost of the Project is in
the region of £6,000 which, I understand, was the amount until
recently of the annual grant by the British Film Institute to your
own magazine. During the first year of our operation over 43,000
students and pupils attended nearly 200 separate" performances
from well over 100 schools and colleges in an area covering nearly
500 square miles. What have you given for the public money
you spend?
Obviously, a scheme of this magnitude could not be motivated
without considerable growing pains. I believe in many respects that
this has been the most ambitious scheme in the use of film for
educational purposes that has been started in this country in
recent years. With a limited budget it has not been possible to
erect a complicated administrative structure. We employ a part-
time Project Assistant and a part-time Theatre Officer whose com-
bined salaries would probably total less than half the salary of a
single member of the Education Department of the British Film
Institute. Whatever success the Project has achieved has been due
to the work of this small staff together with the help of local
teachers, education officers and well-wishers. From the" side of the
British Film Institute the work and encouragement of Martyn
Howells, John Huntley and Stanley Reed has' been invaluable.
Before receiving the grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation
which gave the Project financial security for one year at least,
local trade unions and firms responded to an appeal for contri-
butions. This current year every single local authority approached
agreed to give the contribution which the Honorary Treasurer asked
of them. Directors of Education in the North East, which generally
suffers an unemployment figure of twice the national average,
have learned by hard experience to judge the priorities in any
situation and compare relative costs. When Mr Hillier suggests
that our Local Education Authorities should invest in a ' multipli- 173
cation of good viewing facilities in schools ', he can have no con-
ception of the relative costs involved. For any single school to
attempt to mount only a few of the courses which we have orga-
nised would be timetaking for staff and would, in any case, repre-
sent the duplication of facilities and the underuse of capital equip-
ment which many Local Education Authorities are striving to
prevent with rising educational costs which can make even the
adequate provision of text books something of a headache.
As a member of the British Film Institute, Mr Hillier was allowed
free access to the scheme although, to my knowledge, he has
attended only a very few of our programmes and I suspect that he
has talked to very few teachers in the area. Most of the criticisms
appear to be based on priori reasoning founded on ex cathedra
judgements. Nevertheless it is remarkable how much false infor-
mation he has been able to squeeze into the short article. A brief
selection:— '
1. 'The Project began some two years ago when a local head-
master with an interest in films took the initiative in approach-
ing the Tyneside Film Theatre '.
I believe I am the headmaster referred to. Mr Hillier is wrong
in both time and initiative. The first pilot scheme "was com-
menced as far back as 1968 and the iniative came from two
British Film Institute employees — Mr Reg Campbell, Manager
of the Tyneside Film Theatre, and Mrs Harris, Secretary of
the Film Theatre.
2. ' At least one auditorium, sometimes two, is in use every
afternoon'.
The last time the smaller auditorium was used by the Project.
at the Tyneside Film Theatre was in November 1970 - just
over two months after the Project commenced. This alone
demonstrates the fallibility of Mr Hillier's detailed study and
critique; he is just one year out of date.
3. ' The CSE Course in Film Study is devoted to the study of
film as film, as an art form in itself. Significantly perhaps, these
are by far the least popular of all programmes offered by the
Project'.
This course has never in fact been the least popular in terms
of numbers. Naturally, one school had to initiate this study
as it involved special registration of the course with the North
Regional Examinations Board. Numbers, however, have been
rising steadily and during this current term there have never
been less than 200 pupils present for any programme in this
course.
4'. ' Most of the original Subject Panels designated to organise
programmes seenTto have lapsed '.
Where Mr Hillier obtained this information is remarkable
because it bears no relation to the truth.
Tnis
174 current term the Art Panel, the PE Panel, the Science
Panel, the Careers Panel and the History Panel have already
met. Contact has been maintained with the Secretary of two
others. Next term, for example, the Science Panel will mount
a series on the problem of conservation. The Art Panel and the |
Careers Panel will be organising courses. We are continuing n
to programme suggestions made by the English Panel. i
This hardly seems to justify the word ' lapsed'.
I realise, however, that the artistic conscience cannot be bounded
by the mundane world of fact. To join issue, therefore, with Mr
Hillier on the theoretical level, let me admit straight away that
we plead guilty to having tried to carry out both our two original
objects, one of which was to * organise courses based upon the use
of film for pupils and students in the North East'.
Mr Hillier obviously disagrees with this object. Yet it was
known to all our subscribers — we even mentioned the kind of
courses which we intended to organise. These are the very courses
which Mr Hillier despises. Is it ' positively harmful * for pupils to
see films of a set book which they are studying for examination
purposes? Is it wrong to allow pupils to see a screen version
of a Shakespearean play which they may never be able to see
performed on the live stage unless they can afford to travel nearly
300 miles to London? Is it wrong for *A' Level candidates in
French and German to see films based on works of classical litera-
ture in the language which they are studying? It may be the only
opportunity that these pupils have of listening to natives speaking
their own language!
It is strange that not a single educationalist has made this
criticism to us.
Again, Mr Hillier objects to ' literary academics ' introducing
programmes. -Are we now wrong to allow pupils to listen to
experts in their own field? These people are professional educators
who have kindly given their services free of charge. Mr Hillier
' has the feeling that they tend to look like prestige occasions'.
Why? Because we try to get the best? Obviously the quality of
films which we use will vary. Very often there is only one version
available to us of a particular film. We are criticised for screen-
ing films ' regardless of age or quality'. I would not regard the
age of a film as reflecting upon its usefulness provided that the
print is in a reasonable condition. When Mr Hillier suggests that
there is evidence that ' Teachers use set book films as a way
out of the problem of getting pupils to read the books ' we would
be most happy to examine his evidence. He admits that he is
thinking ' Not only of Tyneside' which implies that this also
happens on Tyneside. I defy him to produce a shred of evidence
for such a piece of impertinent libel on members of the teaching
profession. If this were the case in any school examination results
would very quickly demonstrate the inadequacy of the work of
such teacher. 175
To be accused of ' a rather unbendingly Reithian principle'
might equally be regarded as a compliment. Lord Reith made the
BBC in his day one of the greatest educational forces in the land
and my generation owe him a great debt of gratitude. \ believe
it is still valid to expose pupils to great art and if the cinema can
help us in this task it fulfils a most valuable role. Therefore, when
Mr Hillier asserts that this is ' exposing them to great art (rather
than to the cinema)' he is creating an illusory antithesis.
Our music programmes have been introduced by a music
organiser of one of the Local Education Authorities. He did not
share Mr. Hillier's ' very serious doubts about the way in which
music is taught' in the schools which sent senior pupils to our
programmes. Similarly, Mr Hillier's doubts about our religious
programmes have not been shared by the professional clergy.
It is true that on some occasions the film content in a pro-
gramme is small. Nevertheless, in these cases our Project is making
a contribution to educational efficiency by preventing the unneces-
sary duplication of efforts in Careers teaching. It is certainly not
true to say that often where the film content is fairly small that
the films can be obtained by any school' cheaply or at no expense '.
Some of the films screened in the PE series were brought by the
speaker himself, who was often a national authority in his sport.
The question of evaluation is naturally difficult. It has never
been our intention of interfering with the work of the schools or
trying to evaluate the work of teachers in the classrooms. This
interference would be rightly resented by any school. We aim to
provide a service to the schools and colleges and if this service has
been used and continues to be used we think we can claim some
success even though we realise there is still room for improvement
in the service which we provide. Negotiations have already opened
with two Local Education Authorities to organise an in-service
course for teachers on the classroom follow-up of visits to the
cinema.
Since the beginning of .the Project we have attempted to canvas
the views of teachers and this is one of the most important tasks
of our Theatre Officer. Local Inspectors have helped us by making
their own enquiries for their education authorities do not give
grants without checking to see that the money is well spent.
The range of our courses has been so great that each has
presented its own particular problems in evaluation. The mechanics
of the Project are important as the mechanics of every educational
object. We have initiated on Tyneside the study of the film as an
art in the schools which even Mr. Hillier acknowledges. This,
however, is not our only object, nor indeed our main object. We
. are exploring the use of the film in many aspects of the educa-
tional process in the sense that it can be an educational tool like
• the blackboard and the overhead projector. Of course it is ' dis-
176 pensable' - so is the blackboard. Teachers are well aware of the
difference between the necessary and the desirable. As they become
aware of the extent of our Project and realise that it will become
a permanent institution they will be able to plan ahead for the
full use of the facilities which we offer. This is why we .have been
so concerned to send programmes out to schools in good time -
one of the mechanics which Mr Hillier so despises.
When he categorically states as a result of his profound study
that our Project will fail, bringing with it a reflection on the
British Film Institute for its support, we begin to see the real
truth behind the article. This Project owes nothing to the Educa-
tion Department of the British Film Institute. We have never
attempted to subordinate our aims to their esoteric dogmas. The
film industry was never established by these latter-day school men
in their ivory tower at Dean Street. We have tried to examine
the practical advantages of the use of film in a wide range of
educational activities without asking for huge sums of public
money. We have had to convince educational administrators in
Whitehall and in the Local Educational Authorities about the value
of our work and, above all, the teachers in the schools. This is
something which the Education Department, of the British Film
Institute should have been.doing years ago. They failed and Mr
Hillier must take his share of the blame for that failure.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Gray
Hon. Secretary
North East Educational Film Project
To the Editor:
Given the length, haste, and condition of my manuscript (' The
American Film Institute') it is not surprising that a few errors
escaped final editing; perhaps I can correct them here. "
P 64, first paragraph, last line of the Implementation section, a
line has disappeared; the last portion of the final sentence should
read: '. . . authority to make decisions necessary at those levels
has often been withheld by top management; specific responsi-
bility for decisions is consequently difficult to assign'.
P 65, paragraph 4,1 3: ' Foundation grant of $150,000 over these
years ' should read . . . over three years . . . ' .
P 80, paragraph 4, thoughtlessly overlooks the work of Ann
Schlosser, Center librarian, whose considerable skill in film
research and scholarship has always been generously shared with
Fellows and film students in general.
P 83, paragraph 8, last line, should read '. . . as MPAA at about
this time withdrew its financial support of the AFI'. I'm sure
MPAA continues in its general support of AFI despite the dis-
continuation of its funding participation.
. P 86, first paragraph of the Outcry section, Prescott Wright's
letter is dated February 1, not January 1. 177
P 92, final paragraph, line 5: ' behind this stupid administrator's
. . . originally read, ' behind this studio administrator's . . .' Not
that I don't think it's stupid, but rather, that I was trying for a
specific association with Hollywood production mentality's
thought and practice.
In closing, it should be mentioned that despite the considerable
challenges to AFI in the recent press, the Institute has not felt
the need to justify or explain itself, nor has it issued the complete
financial accounting it had promised for the month of July. George
Stevens, Jr, as I understand it, has removed himself from the
Beverly Hills Center, where to my surprise he had been Dean of
the Center for Advanced Film Studies, and has been succeeded in
that office by Frantisek Daniel. It also seems that no new faculty
has been added to replace faculty lost throughout the 1970-71
academic year, although some Fellows at the Center have been
given the suggestion that AFI's Center is in the process of becom-
ing an accredited institution of higher learning.
Best regards,
Richard Thompson
Vent
Shakespeare
and the Film
ROGER MANVELL
Dr Manvell discusses some
fifty sound films from many
countries and shows how
Shakespeare has to be modi-
fied to achieve screen effec-
tiveness. 48pp plates. £3.00