The Men with the Movie Camera

The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s

Philip Cavendish

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782380788
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film History & Criticism

Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships. He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts.

CHAPTER ONE
The Theory and Practice of Camera Operation within the Soviet Avant-Garde of the 1920s

Tisse is not a camera operator, he is a god.¹

Introduction

THE ODESSA MIST sequence in Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), an early-morning prelude to the images of the murdered sailor, Vakulenchuk, as he lies peacefully in a makeshift tent along the quayside, has been universally acclaimed for its atmosphere and poetic lyricism. The scenes of the harbour – ghostly ships lying at anchor, slow-moving yachts, a motley crew of motionless birds, and glinting water, all photographed contre-jour – are notable for their eerie sense of calm (Fig. 1). Eizenshtein had originally envisaged a ‘port in mourning’ scene that would be photographed out of focus, as if ‘through tears’.² The impressionistic potential of the landscape that presented itself spontaneously to him and Tisse as they rowed around the harbour, however, quickly intruded. In his later reminiscence of the event, Eizenshtein evoked the uncanny mood of the scene: the mist ‘clinging to the lens of the camera like wet cotton wool’; the quiet ‘grumbling’ of the apparatus, as if to say that ‘such things are not supposed to be filmed’; and the ironic laughter coming from another figure in the vicinity (if he is to be believed, the pre-revolutionary camera operator Aleksandr Levitskii), an expression of scepticism that the scenes in question could be adequately registered given the relatively poor lighting conditions.³ Such weather would normally bring filming to a halt. Instead, as Eizenshtein records, this ‘found object’ became the initial chords of what would later become a ‘symphony’ to the memory of the murdered sailor and the mutiny with which he would later become associated.⁴

The ecstatic response on the part of the screenplay writer, Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko, on seeing the rushes of these sequences, cited as the epigraph to this chapter, is doubtless hyperbolic. Inadvertently, however, it draws attention to a radical break in assumptions about the role of the camera operator in the post-revolutionary era: for the first time, instead of merely a ‘hand that turns the handle’, he is now saluted as the genius behind, and author of, the visual image.⁵ This represents a fundamental, albeit perhaps unconscious, shift in the perceived relationship between director and camera operator, one which, in the case of Eizenshtein and Tisse, achieved a rare synchronicity. It went beyond recognition of Tisse’s practical importance to Eizenshtein: his unflappability under pressure, his devilish speed and lightning-quick temperament, his painstaking approach to his work and the fact that, as the senior and more experienced of the two, he had personally vouchsafed Eizenshtein’s transition from experimental theatre to avant-garde film director when they first started working alongside each other.⁶ In the words of Eizenshtein, Tisse possessed that ‘subtlest appreciation of the barely perceptible nuance, that “slight adjustment” [chut'-chut'] in the material which marks … the creation of true art’.⁷ The two men combined their respective roles with a rare understanding – as Eizenshtein noted: ‘It is unlikely that anyone anywhere has ever encountered the kind of synchronicity of vision, feeling and emotional experience that binds Tisse and me.’⁸ The film historian Jay Leyda, who had the privilege as a student of observing them working together on Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow, 1935–37), has described their partnership as ‘one of the miracles of film history’.⁹

Miracle or not, this partnership was not an isolated event in the development of the Soviet avant-garde. The first decade after the October Revolution witnessed a series of creative alliances that blazed a trail of experimentation through the realms of cinema. Golovnia’s camerawork for Pudovkin, Moskvin’s life-long association with Kozintsev and Trauberg, and Demuts'kyi’s prematurely interrupted but artistically fruitful collaborations with Dovzhenko were typical of this new type of partnership. If the formation of these relationships was initially fortuitous, they developed with the passage of time into profound creative alignments, as well as close personal friendships, the disruption of which provoked crises in the individuals concerned. Their significance in the context of avant-garde cinema cannot be underestimated. These camera operators were pioneers of Soviet cinematography, consummate technicians during an age that worshipped the machine, and at the same time artists who exploited their scientific expertise in the service of what they regarded as a new and revolutionary art. If it can be said that their formal influence waned in the early 1930s after the arrival of sound and the end of ‘poetic cinema’, their informal influence nevertheless persisted through their pedagogical functions and published writings. Successive generations of students were educated and trained by them at the camera operators’ faculty of the GTK (later GIK, and then VGIK). It is little appreciated that, with the exception of Demuts'kyi, who died in 1954, these men continued to wield considerable influence into the 1960s, either teaching at VGIK (Golovnia and Tisse), or actively involved in film production (Moskvin). Despite the relative conservatism of their later years, it is doubtful that the Soviet ‘new wave’ of the 1960s would have taken place without them. More than the directors with whom they were associated, only two of whom were alive as the Khrushchev ‘Thaw’ began to gain momentum, they were actually the living link between revolutionary past and experimental present.

This chapter seeks to outline the changing status and perceptions of the camera operator during the post-revolutionary silent era. It will analyse the reasons why he was accorded a greater degree of significance as far as the filmmaking process generally was concerned, and why indeed he became something of an iconic figure. Not only were his creative impulses encouraged and respected, but the principle of the durable partnership with an individual director within a specific unit became a bedrock of Soviet filmmaking practice to the extent that, from the 1930s onwards, although ideological pressures and the politics of personnel could and very often did intervene, deviations from this norm were considered the exception rather than the rule. It should be emphasized that, while this was a peculiarly Soviet phenomenon, it was not without echo in the filmmaking practices of Europe and North America. The move towards unionization, prompted by the desire to protect camera operators from studio exploitation, gradually merged into the concept of professionalization, which in turn developed into concerted pressure for artistic recognition. The inauguration of the American Society of Cinematographers (A.S.C.) and the German Cameramen’s Club in 1918 and 1919 respectively was accompanied by the publication of journals which not only discussed technical matters relevant to the development of cinematography, but also lobbied hard for a system of production in which the professional skills and creative initiatives of these societies’ members were respected.¹⁰ Despite this trend, however, it is undeniably the case that few film industries outside the Soviet Union produced partnerships as enduring as those of the Soviet avant-garde. The importance attributed to the art of the camera operator within Soviet film culture during the 1920s and beyond is reflected in both the quality and the quantity of the writing dedicated to it in the film newspapers and magazines of the period. Furthermore, general recognition of the creative importance of the camera operator gave rise to a complex dynamic between directors and camera operators in the Soviet Union which in some cases had far-reaching ramifications. According to Andrei Tarkovskii and Gleb Panfilov, two auteur directors who came to prominence in the early 1960s, this relationship was something akin to a ‘marriage’, one that was ‘intimate, very complicated, capricious, vulnerable and tender’.¹¹

This first chapter considers the broader issues that were common to the avant-garde units rather than the specific dynamics of individual partnerships. It seeks to chart the emergence of a new generation of camera operators out of the cauldron of revolution, and to analyse the ideological, psychological and cultural forces that shaped their ways of thinking. It will also examine the technological resources at their disposal, which influenced what they were able to represent on screen. In some senses, these men were fortunate to begin their careers at a time when theoretical debates around the essence of cinema were increasingly emphasizing its power as a visual medium of expression; indeed, because of his ‘ownership’ of the camera, the role of the camera operator within the production process became an important theoretical issue in its own right.

This chapter seeks to chart the evolution of this debate, but goes beyond abstract formulations to consider the actual practices of avant-garde cinematographers during the silent period and the degree of creative autonomy they enjoyed within even the avowedly collective dynamic of their units. In fact, it goes further and challenges the very notion of the auteur in relation to Soviet avant-garde cinema. It will be argued that the camera operator should be recognized as ‘co-director’, and thus co-author, of the many experimental classics of the post-revolutionary silent period. Furthermore, it will suggest that the history of film style is incomplete without due consideration of the aesthetic inclinations and cultural backgrounds of individual cameramen, or what some have described as their trademark ‘signature’ (in Russian, pocherk). Those who have written about Soviet cinematography from a professional point of view maintain that it is both possible and important to distinguish these signatures. The following assertion by Maiia Merkel', a camera operator trained at VGIK who in the 1950s moved into film criticism, might be regarded as typical:

Each operator has seen and expressed the world in his own different way. It is impossible to confuse the screen work of Moskvin and Volchek, Ekel'chyk and Magidson, Tisse or Gordanov. The appearance of each and every one of their works was a celebration which was invariably followed by controversy.¹²

In turn, this has given rise to the idea of certain ‘schools’ or tendencies within Soviet cinematography which transcend the particular limitations of dramatic subject or genre and relate to the influences of certain camera operators on their apprentices, pupils or students. In certain respects, therefore, this monograph claims to offer the beginnings of a revisionist view of the development of Soviet cinema in general. It discusses film primarily as a photographic phenomenon, one in which the traces of multiple cultural influences are tangible, and treats the filmic utterance as a delicate negotiation between a series of diverse and sometimes competing pressures, the most important and compelling of which lies in the relationship between the director and camera operator. The fact that this r...