Ida Z's Film Class Notes: Russia

Russia

During this era
Russian filmmakers
1) introduced a distinctive approach to the new art.
2) First, they explored subject matter with a melancholy tone.
3) Even before the war, Russian audiences favored tragic endings.
4) As one film trade journal put it, “ ‘All’s well that ends well!’
This is the guiding principle of foreign cinema.
5) But Russian cinema stubbornly refuses to accept this and goes its own way.
Here it’s ‘All’s well that ends badly’—we need tragic endings.”
6)The pace of many Russian films was slow,
7) with frequent pauses and
8) deliberate gestures enabling the players to linger over each action.

This slow pace
1) derived from a fascination with psychology.
2) One appeal of these films was the display of intense, virtuoso acting.
3) In this, Russian filmmaking was heavily influenced by Italian, German, and Danish films.
4) Russian producers consciously sought actors and actresses who could duplicate
Asta Nielsen’s popularity.
5) Many Russian films of this period were also somewhat comparable to the Italian diva
films, which made intensity of acting the main appeal.
6) Russian acting, however, was less flamboyant and more internalized.

The two most important Russian directors of the war period,
1) Evgenii Bauer and
2) Yakov Protazanov,
3) were masters of the brooding melodrama.

Bauer
1) From a training in art, Bauer entered the cinema in 1912
as a set designer and soon became a director.
2) His mise-en-scène was characterized by deep, detailed sets
3) and an unusually strong sidelighting;
4) he also occasionally used complex tracking shots
5) Several of Bauer’s films carried the Russian love for melancholy to extremes,
centering on morbid subject matter.
6) In The Dying Swan (1917), an obsessed artist tries to capture death in his painting
of a melancholy ballerina; when she is suddenly transformed by love, he strangles her in
order to finish his masterpiece.
7) Bauer was the main director at the Khanzhonkov company, where he was given
free artistic rein.
8) The final scene of The Dying Swan reveals the heroine’s corpse serving as the artist’s
model.

The Dying Swan (Evgenii Bauer, 1917)

End titles: Be Still, Gizella, do not move. That is where beauty and peace lie.

Protazanov
1) began directing in 1912,
2) and he worked mostly for Yermoliev.
3) Several of his main films of this period were prestigious adaptations
from Pushkin and Tolstoy.
4) They starred Ivan Mozhukhin, a stage actor who had become immensely popular in
films.
5) Mozhukhin was the epitome of the Russian ideal in acting;
a)tall and handsome,
b)with hypnotic eyes,
c)he cultivated a slow, fervent style.
6) He starred in the title role of Protazanov’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel Father Sergius,
7) made in 1917 between the February and October Revolutions and released in early
1918.
8) After a brief self-exile in Paris, Protazanov returned to become one of the most
successful directors in the USSR when filmmaking revived there during the 1920s.
9) In the following scene, Protazanov uses:
a) sidelighting and
b) staging in depth
10) to enhance the tragic atmosphere as the protagonist resists seduction by a jaded
society woman.

Father Sergius (Yakov Protazanov, 1917)