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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a ‘proletarian poet’ (the ‘Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers’, as he was described by
fellow poet Nikolai Aseev),
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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 pressure gauge or a speedometer’.
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This was the Soviet paradise Zamyatin satirized in his novel
We,
which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the Benefactor. Zamyatin’s novel was the inspiration of George Orwell’s
1984.
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Thanks to the influence of Meyerhold, two great artists were brought into the orbit of the cinema. One was Dmitry Shostakovich, who worked at Meyerhold’s theatre from 1928 to 1929, during which time, influenced no doubt by its production of
The Government Inspector,
he composed his Gogolian opera
The Nose (
1930). In his student
days, between 1924 and 1926, Shostakovich had worked as a piano accompanist for silent movies at the Bright Reel cinema on Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad.
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It set the pattern for his life - composing for the cinema to earn some extra money and keep himself out of trouble (in total he would score the music for over thirty films).
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Writing for the screen had a major influence on Shostakovich’s composing style, as it did on the whole Soviet music school.
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The big film sound of the Soviet orchestra and the need for tuneful melodies to appeal to the masses are obvious enough. No composer in the twentieth century wrote more symphonies than Shostakovich; none wrote better tunes than Prokofiev - in both cases certainly an effect of writing for the cinema. Films using montage, in particular, demanded new techniques of musical composition to reflect their polyphonic dramaturgy. They required a new rhythmic treatment and faster harmonic shifts to deal with their constant cross-cutting between the frames,* the sharp joins between the scenes, and to highlight the associations between themes and visual images. These cinematic qualities are discernible in many of Shostakovich’s works - notably the music for
The Nose
and his Third (‘May Day’) Symphony (1930), with its fast-paced montage of musical tableaux. Shostakovich once explained that in writing his film music he did not follow the standard Western principle of illustration or accompaniment, but sought rather to connect a series of sequences with one musical idea - so that in this sense it was the music which revealed the ‘essence and the idea of the film’.
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The music was to be an added element of the montage. This ideal was best expressed in Shostakovich’s first film score, for
The New Babylon
(1929), a cinematic reconstruction of the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune in 1871. As its director Kozintsev explained, the purpose of the music was not just to reflect or illustrate the action but to take an active part in it by communicating to the audience the film’s underlying emotions.
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Meyerhold’s other new recruit to the cinema was the poet Maya-kovsky, who wrote some thirteen film scenarios and (a man of
* Soviet films that used montage had a far higher number of different shots (in
October,
for example, there were 3,200 shots) compared to the average (around 600) in conventional Hollywood films during the 1920s.
extraordinary looks) starred in several films as well. Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had been close friends since before the war. They shared the same far-left outlook on politics and theatre which found expression in their partnership on
Mystery Bouffe.
Mayakovsky played the part of the ‘Person of the Future’ - a proletarian
deus ex machina
who appeared on stage hanging from the ceiling - in the first (1918) production of his play. It was, he said, referring to himself and Meyerhold, ‘our revolution in poetry and theatre. The mystery is the greatness of the action - the bouffe the laughter in it.’
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Mayakovsky spread his talents wide: to his poetry and his work in theatre and the cinema, he added journalism, writing radio songs and satires, drawing cartoons with brief captions for the
lubok-like
propaganda posters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and creating advertising jingles for state stores and slogans for the banners which appeared on every street. His poetry was immersed in politics, even his intimate love lyrics to his mistress Lily Brik, and a good deal of his best-known verse, like the allegory
150,000,000
(1921), a Soviet parody of the
bylina,
which tells the story of the battle between Ivan, the leader of the 150 million Russian workers, and the Western capitalist villain Woodrow Wilson, was agitational. Mayakovsky’s terse, iconoclastic style was tailor-made for political effect in a country such as Russia where the
lubok
and
chastushka
(a simple, often bawdy, rhyming song) had real roots in the mass consciousness, and he imitated both these literary forms.
Forward, my country,
move on faster! Get on with it,
sweep away the antiquated junk! Stronger, my commune,
strike at the enemy, Make it die out,
that monster, the old way of life.
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Mayakovsky embraced revolution as a quickening of time. He longed to sweep away the clutter of the past, the ‘petty-bourgeois’ domesticity of the ‘old way of life’
(byt),
and to replace it with a higher
and more spiritual existence
(bytie).*
The battle against
byt
was at the heart of the Russian revolutionary urge to establish a more communistic way of life.
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Mayakovsky hated
byt.
He hated all routine. He hated all the banal objects in the ‘cosy home’: the
samovar,
the rubber plant, the portrait of Marx in its little frame, the cat lying on old copies of
Izvestiia,
the ornamental china on the mantelpiece, the singing canaries.
From the wall Marx watches and watches
And suddenly
Opening his mouth wide,
He starts howling:
The Revolution is tangled up in philistine threads
More terrible than Wrangelf is philistine
byt
Better
To tear off the canaries’ heads -
So communism
Won’t be struck down by canaries.
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In much of his writing Mayakovsky talked of his desire to escape this humdrum world of material things (‘it will turn us all into philis-tines’) and to fly away, like a figure from Chagall, to a higher spiritual realm. This is the theme of his long poem
Pro eto (About This)
(1923), written in the form of a love song to Lily Brik, with whom he was living, on and off, in Petersburg and Moscow in a
menage a trois
with her husband, the left-wing poet and critic Osip Brik. In his autobiography Mayakovsky records that he wrote the poem ‘about our way of life in general but based on personal material’. He said it was a poem ‘about
byt,
and by this I mean a way of life which has not changed at all and which is our greatest enemy’.
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Pro eto
chronicles Mayakovsky’s response to a two-month separation imposed by Lily Brik in December 1922. In it, the hero, a poet living all alone in his
* The word
byt
(‘way of life’) derived from the verb
byvat’,
meaning to happen or take plat e. But from the nineteenth century,
bytie
took on the positive idea of ‘meaningful existence’ which became central to the Russian intellectual tradition, while
byt
became increasingly associated with the negative aspects of the ‘old’ way of life. + Leader of the White armies in southern Russia during the civil war.