Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception

Yuri Tsivian, Richard Taylor, Alan Bodger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317928362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines the development of cinematic form and culture in Russia, from its late nineteenth-century beginnings as a fairground attraction to the early post-Revolutionary years.

The author traces the changing perceptions of cinema and its social transition from a modernist invention to a national art form. He explores reactions to the earliest films from actors, novelists, poets, writers and journalists. His richly detailed study of the physical elements of cinematic performance includes the architecture and illumination of the cinema foyer, the speed of projection and film acoustics.

In contrast to standard film histories, this book focuses on reflected images: rather than discussing films and film-makers, it features the historical film-goer and early writings on film. The book presents a vivid and changing picture of cinema culture in Russia in the twilight of the tsarist era and the first decades of the twentieth century. The study expands the whole context of reception studies and opens up questions about reception relevant to other national cinemas.

Part I

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Chapter 1

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Early cinema architecture and the evolution of the social composition of cinema

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THE INNER SPACE OF CINEMA, 1904–8

As long as cinema remained an ambulant form of entertainment, no specific cinema architecture existed in Russia. Cinema shows were put on in rented premises, most frequently in seasonal theatres. Proprietors of mobile cinemas had hired circus marquees, market stalls, vacant storerooms, dockside warehouses, etc.¹ If any special premises did exist at that time, they were only small, light structures like fairground booths. Attempts were nevertheless made to adapt to specifically Russian conditions. Vast distances and bad roads made overland travel very difficult, and so, in 1906, a ‘floating electrical theatre’ that could house five hundred spectators was erected on a barge towed by a river steamer. It was called the Stenka Razin; its planned route was down the Volga river. It had coloured sails and its crew and ushers were supposed to be dressed as Razin's brigand gang. Since its projection machine was most probably equipped with oxygen lamps, it was extremely likely that it would eventually catch fire. Fortunately, it did so before the first spectator set foot on board.

The Stenka Razin was the last leviathan of the ambulant age. Already in 1903 property owners, who had previously been unwilling to provide premises for cinema, began to rent out conversions.² Gradually a kind of cinema hall with its own architectonics began to emerge. The interior of the early cinemas in the 1904–8 period differed greatly not only from that of buildings where public amusements had previously taken place but also from that of the cinemas that came later. This early type of auditorium did not last long; in 1908 it was pushed out from the centre of town to the fringes. Between 1904 and 1908 the cinema theatre, as a rule, consisted of a single room without a foyer or vestibule. If – as most frequently happened – the cinema was in a converted flat with the partition walls removed, the public came into the building by the main staircase and bought their tickets at a desk behind the door, just inside the auditorium. The following descriptions capture the atmosphere of those early auditoria. As early as 1919 the critic I. N. Ignatov was reminiscing with nostalgia:

In those days, when cinema was in its infancy, the electric theatres sought refuge in humble premises, where the spectators sometimes sat on wooden benches, where there were no decorations or any amenities for the public, but where you could enjoy so many lively and curious impressions.³

In his memoirs A. L. Pasternak also recalled those early days of cinema:

The door of the auditorium had been removed from its hinges, possibly as a safety precaution in case of fire, and replaced by a heavy plush curtain, which was tightly closed during the performance. It divided the darkened auditorium from the brightly lit landing. Two or three rows of plain bentwood chairs were arranged in rows in the room. The Pathé projector, with its trade mark of the ‘all-seeing and all-knowing’ cockerel, stood in front of the audience, not at the back as in all later cinemas, and brought to mind our magic lantern. It was mounted on a sort of primitive stand, rather like a trestle. On the wall in front of the projector hung a screen: if not a sheet, as we had at home for the magic lantern, then something equally crude, which suddenly began to undulate during the performance.⁴

The Russian actor Alexander Werner described his childhood memories of the early cinema in Odessa:

It was a small, permanently stuffy room crowded with chairs. Down at the front stood some weird apparatus, which we lads found terribly fascinating, but which was jealously guarded by a mysterious man whom we called either ‘the mechanic’ or ‘the technician’. He was both impresario, owner of the ‘theatre of illusions’ and ticket collector. He was the one who cranked the handle and the one who collected the money. On the wall hung a grubby bit of cloth, called the screen, and this was the focus of all our attention. The audience, which usually consisted of children and young people, were pretty unrestrained in their behaviour; they chewed seeds and munched apples, throwing the husks and cores on the floor, and sometimes at one another.⁵

Finally, a semi-autobiographical essay by the film journalist Vsevolod Chaikovsky gives us some idea of the average size of a Moscow cinema at about that time:

In September 1904 a cinema belonging to two sisters, Belinskaya and Genzel, opened on Tverskaya Street, at the corner of Bolshoi Gnezdnikovsky Lane. It was a small room, with only twenty-four seats and standing room at the back for another thirty. Those at the back used to chew seeds all the time and spit out the husks on the heads of the people in the seats. Old Belinskaya used to sit inside the room selling the tickets, while Genzel was the usherette, dealing vigorously with irrepressible small boys who were real pests and drove these two ladies to distraction.⁶

THE EARLY CINEMA AUDITORIUM AS AN OBJECT OF CULTURAL RECEPTION

The few descriptions cited above are enough to suggest that the atmosphere of the cinema auditorium was unique among the range of visual public entertainments existing at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not, therefore, just the films that came into the focus of film reception; the milieu also played a part. Memoirists, who give us scrupulous and lively descriptions of the interior of cinema auditoria, telling us how the performances took place and how the audience behaved, do not, as a rule, remember the films themselves. This is not simply because the films were always changing, while the space they were being shown in stayed the same. It is also because at that time people who went to the cinema looked around them more keenly than they do today. Early patrons were fascinated not by films alone but rather by films and the environment, which, taken together, contributed to the as yet undifferentiated, overall impression of ‘cinema’. Let us look now at two details that went to make up this impression: the illumination and the temperature of the auditorium.

In the early 1900s the source of light used in cinema projectors was not electricity but mainly ether-oxygen burners, or ‘saturators’. For the cinemagoer of those years the spluttering of the lamps, the flickering, yellowish, unsteady beam of the projector, the faint but exciting smell of the ether were essential attributes of the show.⁷ Another feature of ether-oxygen projectors (apart from the improved Lawson burners)⁸ was that they overheated very quickly, and when this happened the temperature in the auditorium rose significantly. One Moscow cinema was even named ‘The Hot Box’ [Goryachaya budka], and no doubt the large Volcano cinema on Taganskaya Square held more than merely exotic associations for Muscovites. The situation looked all the more unreal since the audience were not supposed to take off their coats, although etiquette – quickly dictated by pressure from the rear rows – required the removal of headgear. At the beginning of the century it was not done to remain in a public place with one's coat on: this was allowed only in church. In winter (the season of cinema) some people dropped into the cinema just to get warm. The newspaper satirist Lolo [Munshtein] published a eulogy in verse to cinema, which had the following lines: ‘We went to the pictures. My girlfriend whispered: “It's as lovely and warm as a Turkish bath!”’⁹ And a casual passer-by, strolling on the streets of Vasilevsky Island in St Petersburg, could easily recognise a cinema from a distance: ‘Chattering sparrows on telephone wires/Clouds of steam from the cinema doors … ¹⁰

However, the dominant feature, which immediately determined the nature of cinema reception in early twentieth-century culture, was the darkened auditorium. Although complete or partial darkness was familiar from magic lantern shows and some theatre performances, it was in cinema that it acquired the character of a dominant cultural symbol (in the Tadzhik language the first word for cinema was, in fact, the word for darkness, ‘torikiston’).¹¹ For a newcomer to cinema, the darkness of the auditorium, coupled with the silence of the characters on the screen and the black-and-white quality of the image, might stir an association with the depths of the ocean or a subterranean world. Several passages from Russian film literature could be cited to illustrate this point, but the best example can be found in an essay by Robert Musil: ‘Mute as a fish and pale as an underground creature the film swims in the pool of the barely visible’ [‘Stumm wie ein Fisch und bleich wie Unterirdisches schwimmt der Film im Teich des Nursichtbaren’].¹² This metaphor provides a graphic example of the way in which an ordinary trope of film reception may grow into a (very German) phenomenological statement.

Thus, the darkness of the auditorium, which was believed to enhance the reception of the film and to make it easier for the viewer to be drawn into the world of the image, itself became an object of reception. In a way, this was a repetition of an effect experienced some twenty years earlier by European theatre audiences under the impact of Wagner's music dramas. As Richard Sieburth writes:

Unlike the French theatres, which traditionally kept the houselights on during the entire performance (thus effectively maintaining the audience itself as part of the spectacle), Bayreuth plunged its public into a community of shared darkness. With all attention reverently directed at the illuminated stage, the entire aesthetic experience of drama thus took on the mystical quality of a religious event – the theatre as temple, the audience as anonymous officiants at a redemptive rite.¹³

In a similar manner, the sight of half-illuminated faces silently concentrated on the rectangle of light evoked images of occult circles, in particular the rituals of secret sects, which Andrei Bely's novel The Silver Dove had done so much to bring to the interest of the public. In 1910 Maximilian Voloshin wrote about cinema: ‘In a small room with bare walls, reminding one of the prayer rooms of the flagellants, an ancient, ecstatic, purifying rite is enacted.’¹⁴

When in 1902 the well-known newspaper reporter N. G. Shebuyev visited the all-night shelter for vagrants at the Khitrov market in Moscow, he was not slow to compare it with the cinema:

I held up a candle and illuminated the faces of my informants. It flickered over tramps and down-and-outs. Faces shone for a few moments in the light of the candle and then disappeared in the semi-gloom. It was living cinema.¹⁵

Shebuyev's comparison owes much to the stubborn reputation of cinema as the nadir, the underworld, the catacomb of culture. This motif was a variation on a theme that was central to film reception in Russia: cinema as a world beyond the grave. In the Introduction I have discussed the way in which early film reception contributed to Symbolist sensibility and how cinema became part of the mythology of St Petersburg. Later on these themes will be treated more fully in the passages describing certain features of Andrei Bely's script for a film based on his novel Petersburg.¹⁶ Here it should be noted that ‘beyond the grave’ did not refer exclusively to what was happening on the screen. Reception works by diffusion rather than distinction: it blurs all boundaries. At times the entire edifice of the film theatre, and not just the auditorium, would be described as the house of the dead.

Here is an example. By coincidence, 1907 – the year the revolution of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• General editors' preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Note on transliteration, translation and the Russian calendar
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index