Natasha's Dance

even setting up his own school of rhythmic gymnastics in Petersburg, he drew many converts from the Russian theatre, including Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The essence of Volkonsky’s teaching was the conception of the human body as a dynamo whose rhythmic movements can be trained subconsciously to express the emotions required by a work of art.+ Volkonsky conceived of the human body as a machine which obeys ‘the general laws of mechanics’, but which is ‘oiled and set in motion by feeling’.53 After 1917, this idea was taken up in Soviet film and theatre circles, where similar theories of ‘biomechanics’ were championed by the great avant-garde director Meyerhold. In 1919 Volkonsky set up a Rhythmic Institute in Moscow. Until he was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921, he also taught his theories at the First State School of Cinema, where Kuleshov was one of the directors to be influenced by them. In Kuleshov’s own workshop, established in Moscow in 1920, actors were trained in a lexicon of movements and gestures based on the rhythmic principles of Volkonsky.54

    Many of the most important Soviet directors of the avant-garde graduated from the Kuleshov workshop, among them Pudovkin, Barnet and Eisenstein. Born in Riga in 1898, Sergei Eisenstein was the son of a famous style moderne architect of Russian- German-Jewish

    * Diaghilev was dismissed when Volkonsky left the Imperial Theatre. Diaghilev’s dismissal meant he was ruled out for any future job in the Imperial Theatre, so in a sense it could be said that Volkonsky had a hand in the foundation of the Ballets Russes.

    + The theory was not dissimilar to Gordon Craig’s conception of the actor as a ‘supermarionette’, with the one important distinction that the movements of Craig’s actor were choreographed by the director, whereas Volkonsky’s actor was supposed in internalize these rhythmic impulses to the point where they became entirely uncon-scious. See further M. Yampolsky,’Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, in R. Taylor and I.Christie, Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, 1991), pp. 32-3.

    ancestry. In 1915 he went to Petrograd to study to become a civil engineer. It was there in 1917 that, as a 19-year-old student, he became caught up in the revolutionary crowds which were to become the subject of his history films. In the first week of July Eisenstein took part in the Bolshevik demonstrations against the Provisional Government, and he found himself in the middle of the crowd when police snipers hidden on the roofs above the Nevsky Prospekt opened fire on the demonstrators. People scattered everywhere. ‘I saw people quite unfit, even poorly built for running, in headlong flight’, he recalled.

    Watches on chains were jolted out of waistcoat pockets. Cigarette cases flew out of side pockets. And canes. Canes. Canes. Panama hats… My legs carried me out of range of the machine guns. But it was not at all frightening… These days went down in history. History for which I so thirsted, which I so wanted to lay my hands on!55

    Eisenstein would use these images in his own cinematic re-creation of the scene in October (19Z8), sometimes known as Ten Days That Shook the World.

    Enthused by the Bolshevik seizure of power, Eisenstein joined the Red Army as an engineer on the northern front, near Petrograd. He was involved in the civil war against the White Army of General Yudenich which reached the city’s gates in the autumn of 1919. Eisen-stein’s own father was serving with the Whites as an engineer. Looking back on these events through his films, Eisenstein saw the Revolution as a struggle of the young against the old. His films are imbued with the spirit of a young proletariat rising up against the patriarchal discipline of the capitalist order. The bourgeois characters in all his films, from the factory bosses in his first film Strike (1924) to the well-groomed figure of the Premier Kerensky in October, bear a close resemblance to his own father. ‘Papa had 40 pairs of patent leather shoes’, Eisenstein recalled. ‘He did not acknowledge any other sort. And he had a huge collection of them “for every occasion”. He even listed them in a register, with any distinguishing feature indicated: “new”, “old”, “a scratch”. From time to time he held an inspection and roll-call.’56 Eisenstein once wrote that the reason he came to support the Revolution ‘had little to do with the real miseries of

    social injustice… but directly and completely with what is surely the prototype of every social tyranny - the father’s despotism in a family’.57 But his commitment to the Revolution was equally connected with his own artistic vision of a new society. In a chapter of his memoirs, ‘Why I Became a Director’, he locates the source of his artistic inspiration in the collective movement of the Red Army engineers building a bridge near Petrograd:

    An ant hill of raw fresh-faced recruits moved along measured-out paths with precision and discipline and worked in harmony to build a steadily growing bridge which reached across the river. Somewhere in this ant hill I moved as well. Square pads of leather on my shoulders supporting a plank, resting edgeways. Like the parts of a clockwork contraption, the figures moved quickly, driving up to the pontoons and throwing girders and handrails festooned with cabling to one another - it was an easy and harmonious model of perpetuum mobile, reaching out from the bank in an ever-lengthening road to the constantly receding edge of the bridge… All this fused into a marvellous, orchestral, polyphonic experience of something being done… Hell, it was good!… No: it was not patterns from classical productions, nor recordings of outstanding performances, nor complex orchestral scores, nor elaborate evolutions of the corps de ballet in which I first experienced that rapture, the delight in the movement of bodies racing at different speeds and in different directions across the graph of an open expanse: it was in the play of intersecting orbits, the ever-changing dynamic form that the combination of these paths took and their collisions in momentary patterns of intricacy, before flying apart for ever. The pontoon bridge… opened my eyes for the first time to the delight of this fascination that was never to leave me.58

    Eisenstein would try to re-create this sense of poetry in the crowd scenes which dominate his films, from Strike to October.

    In 1920, on his return to Moscow, Eisenstein joined Proletkult as a theatre director and became involved in the Kuleshov workshop. Both led him to the idea of typage - the use of untrained actors or ‘real types’ taken (sometimes literally) from the street. The technique was used by Kuleshov in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1923) and, most famously, by Eisenstein himself in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October. Proletkult

    would exert a lasting influence on Eisenstein, particularly on his treatment of the masses in his history films. But the biggest influence on Eisenstein was the director Meyerhold, whose theatre school he joined in 1921.

    Vsevolod Meyerhold was a central figure in the Russian avant-garde. Born in 1874 to a theatre-loving family in the provincial city of Penza, Meyerhold had started as an actor in the Moscow Arts Theatre. In the 1900s he began directing his own experimental productions under the influence of Symbolist ideas. He saw the theatre as a highly stylized, even abstract, form of art, not the imitation of reality, and emphasized the use of mime and gesture to communicate ideas to the audience. He developed these ideas from the traditions of the Italian commedia dell’arte and the Japanese kabuki theatre, which were not that different from the practices of Delsarte and Dalcroze. Meyerhold staged a number of brilliant productions in Petrograd between 1915 and 1917 and he was one of the few artistic figures to support the Bolsheviks when they nationalized the theatres in November 1917. He even joined the Party in the following year. In 1920 Meyerhold was placed in charge of the theatre department in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the main Soviet authority in education and the arts. Under the slogan ‘October in the Theatre’ he began a revolution against the old naturalist conventions of the drama house. In 1921 he established the State School for Stage Direction to train the new directors who would take his revolutionary theatre out on to the streets. Eisenstein was one of Meyerhold’s first students. He credited Meyerhold’s plays with inspiring him to ‘abandon engineering and “give myself” to art’.59 Through Meyerhold, Eisenstein came to the idea of the mass spectacle - to a theatre of real life that would break down the conventions and illusions of the stage. He learned to train the actor as an athlete, expressing emotions and ideas through movements and gestures; and, like Meyerhold, he brought farce and pantomime, gymnastics and circus tricks, strong visual symbols and montage to his art.

    Eisenstein’s style of film montage also reveals Meyerhold’s stylized approach. In contrast to the montage of Kuleshov, which was meant to affect the emotions subliminally, Eisenstein’s efforts were explicitly didactic and expository. The juxtaposition of images was intended to engage members of the audience in a conscious way - and draw them

    towards the correct ideological conclusions. In October, for example, Eisenstein intercuts images of a white horse falling from a bridge into the Neva river with scenes showing Cossack forces suppressing the workers’ demonstrations against the Provisional Government in July 1917. The imagery is very complex. The horse had long been a symbol of apocalypse in the Russian intellectual tradition. Before 1917 it had been used by the Symbolists to