NATASHA

repeated images of the soldiers' descent down the stairs.* The scene, by the way, was entirely fictional: there was no massacre on the Odessa steps in 1905 - although it often appears in the history books.

Nor was this the only time when history was altered by the mythic images in Eisenstein's films. When he arrived at the Winter Palace to shoot the storming scene for October, he was shown the left ('October') staircase where the Bolshevik ascent had taken place. But it was much too small for the mass action he had in mind, so instead he shot the scene on the massive Jordan staircase used for state processions during Tsarist times. The Jordan staircase became fixed in the public mind as the October Revolution's own triumphant route. Altogether Eisenstein's October was a much bigger production than the historical reality. He called up 5,000 veterans from the civil war - far more than the few hundred sailors and Red Guards who had taken part in the palace's assault in 1917. Many of them brought their own guns with live ammunition and fired bullets at the Sevres vases as they climbed the stairs, wounding several people and arguably causing far more casualties than in 1917. After the shooting, Eisenstein recalled being told by an elderly porter who swept up the broken china: 'Your people were much more careful the first time they took the palace.'⁶¹

Meanwhile, Meyerhold was storming barricades with his own revolution in the theatre. It began with his spectacular production of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe (1918; revived in 1921) - a cross between a mystery play and a street theatre comedy which dramatized the conquest of 'the clean' (the bourgeois) by 'the unclean' (the proletariat). Meyerhold removed the proscenium arch, and instead of a stage constructed a monumental platform projecting deep into the auditorium. At the climax of the spectacle he brought the audience on to the platform to mingle, as if in a city square, with the actors in their costumes, the clowns and acrobats, and to join with them in tearing up the curtain, which was painted with symbols - masks and wigs -of the old theatre.⁶² The war against theatrical illusion was summed up in the prologue to the play: 'We will show you life that's real - but

* Usually described as 'temporal expansion through overlapping editing'. See D. Bordwell and K. Thompson, Film Art, An Introduction, 3rd edn (New York, 1990), p. 217.

28. Liubov Popova: stage design for Meyerhold's 1922 production of the Magnanimous Cuckold

in this spectacle it will become transformed into something quite extraordinary.'⁶³ Such ideas were far too radical for Meyerhold's political patrons and in 1921 he was dismissed from his position in the commissariat. But he continued to put on some truly revolutionary productions. In his 1922 production of Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck's Magnanimous Cuckold (1920) the stage (by the Con- structivist artist Liubov Popova) became a kind of 'multi-purpose

scaffolding'; the characters were all in overalls and identified themselves by performing different circus tricks. In Sergei Tretiakov's 1923 play The Earth Rampant, adapted from La Nuit by Marcel Martinet, a drama about the mutiny of the French troops in the First World War, there were cars and machine-guns, not just on the stage but in the aisles as well. The lighting was provided by huge searchlights at the front of the stage, and actors in real soldiers' uniforms passed through the audience to collect money for a Red Army plane.⁶⁴

Some of Meyerhold's most interesting techniques were close to those of the cinema, in which he also worked as a director (he made two films before 1917) and (thanks to his impact on directors like Eisenstein and Grigory Kozintsev) arguably had his greatest influence.⁶⁵ In his 1924 production of Ostrovsky's The Forest, for example, Meyerhold used montage by dividing the five acts into thirty- three small episodes with pantomimic interludes to create contrasts of tempo and mood. In other productions, most notably that of Gogol's The Government Inspector in 1926, he placed certain actors on a little stage trolley and wheeled it to the front of the main stage to simulate the cinematic idea of a close-up. He was deeply influenced by movie actors such as Buster Keaton and, above all, Charlie Chaplin, whose films were shown in cinemas right across the Soviet Union. Chaplin's emphasis on mime and gesture made him close to Meyer-hold's theatrical ideal.⁶⁶

That ideal was expressed by the system known as 'biomechanics', which was not unlike the reflexology and rhythmic gymnastics of the Delsarte-Dalcrozean school, insofar as it approached the actor's body as a biomechanical device for the physical expression of emotions and ideas. Meyerhold would have his actors trained in the techniques of the acrobatic circus, fencing, boxing, ballet and eurhythmies, gymnastics and modern dance so that they could tell a story through the supple movements of their whole bodies or even just their faces.⁶⁷ The system was consciously opposed to the Stanislavsky method (in which Meyerhold was trained at the Moscow Arts Theatre between 1898 and 1902), in which the actor was encouraged to identify with the inner thoughts and feelings of his character by recalling moments of intense experience in his own life. In place of such free expressivity, Meyerhold insisted on the actors' rhythmic regimentation. He was

very interested in the Red Army's programme of physical culture (synchronized gymnastics and all that) and in 1921 he even took command of a special theatre section for physical culture in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which aimed to use the army's system of gymnastics for the 'scientific organization of labour' in an experimental military settlement.⁶⁸ This aspect of labour management was the crucial difference between biomechanics and the Delsarte-Dalcrozean school. Meyerhold envisaged the actor as an artist-engineer who organizes the 'raw material' of his own body on the scientific principles of time and motion. He saw his system as the theatrical equivalent of 'scientific management' in industry. Like all the Bolsheviks, he was particularly influenced by the theories of the American engineer F. W. Taylor, who used 'time and motion' studies to divide and automate the labour tasks of industry.

Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism. Its premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole manufacturing process accorded with his view of the Russian working class. He saw Taylorism's 'scientific' methods as a means of discipline that could remould the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines. All this was of a piece with the modernist belief in the power of machines to transform man and the universe. Meyerhold's enthusiasm for mechanics was widely shared by the avant-garde. One can see it in the Futurists' idealization of technology; in the fascination with machines which pervades the films of Eisenstein and Vertov; in the exaltation of factory production in left-wing art; and in the industrialism of the Constructivists. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylor and of another great American industrialist, Henry Ford, inventor of the egalitarian Model 'T', which flourished throughout Russia at this time: even remote villagers knew the name of Henry Ford (some of them believed he was a sort of god who organized the work of Lenin and Trotsky).

The most radical exponent of the Taylorist idea was Aleksei Gastev, the Bolshevik engineer and poet who envisaged the mechanization of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of production to the thinking patterns of the common man. A friend of Meyerhold, Gastev may have been the first person to use the term 'biomechanics', sometime around 1922.⁶⁹ As a 'proletarian poet' (the 'Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers', as he was described by

fellow poet Nikolai Aseev),⁷⁰ Gastev conjured up the vision of a future communist society in which man and machine merged. His verse reverberates to the thunderous sounds of the blast furnace and the factory siren. It sings its liturgy to an 'iron messiah' who will reveal the brave new world of the fully automated human being.

As head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, Gastev carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance, by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' - a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian (and Czech) verb 'to work': rabotat'. Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought bio-mechanization would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed, he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a Utopia where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' identified by ciphers such as 'A, B, C, or 325, 075, o, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controller. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a