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p Once upon a time everything was
simple and clear-cut. You had science and you had the arts. Physicists did physics, mathematicians did mathematics and poets wrote poetry. But then as a result of so many new discoveries new sciences arosecybernetics, astrobotany, geophysics and a host of others. Physiologists became mathematicians, biologists became chemists and mathematicians became philosophers. It was not arts men but scientists and engineers who were responsible for the invention of photography, the cinema, radio and television. They began as technological inventions and later became art. And a struggle developed between the “old” arts, such as the theatre, painting and sculpture, and the “new” arts-the cinema, photography and what are known as the applied arts. The cinema was the first of the latter to rise to the rank of an art. Not so long ago photography earned recognition as an art form, while one is still in doubt as to what status to accord the designers of furniture, clothes, crockery and household utensils. As for the designers of cars and refrigerators, one cannot bring oneself to call them artists. Perhaps because it takes a bit of getting used to.

p Advertising would seem to have acquired art status. Aestheticians who try to deny this are wasting their time; advertising has become an essential part of the modern townscape.

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p The ties between science, technology and the arts arc inevitably becoming firmer and more complex. The distance between physicists and poets is being narrowed down, as is the distance between different kinds of poets. An important process is taking place before our very cyes-a new relationship is emerging between life and art.

p It would be marvellous to take a peep forward into the future and see what the theatre and the cinema, television and painting will be like. What of the things that are happening now will the future accept and what will it reject?

p It is difficult for the exponents of art to grasp the theoretical side. A special talent is required for interpreting the complex phenomena of life and art and analysing and predicting their paths of development. But the fact is that our best critics and aestheticians prefer to focus their attention on the past rather than on the present.

p In attempting to find my way in the complex tangle of problems concerning intercommunication and mutual understanding between science and the arts, between the different arts, and between the arts and life, I make no claim to be discovering the truth. I would be only too delighted if somebody be so kind as to explain to me in what conditions sport becomes an art, a designer an interior decorator, or an engineer a musical expert. I should like to know myself way an abstract design on wall-paper or upholstery gives aesthetic pleasure, while the same picture placed in a frame produces quite the oppositeeffect.

p Not so long ago in Leningrad talented architects, sculptors and poets collaborated to produce a memorial cemetery to the fallen in the defence of the city during World War Two. Literature makes a considerable contribution to this magnificent and remarkably harmonious ensemble of architecture, sculpture and decorative lawns. The propylaca would lose much of their expressive power were they not crowned with the superb verses of Olga Bergolts, and the cemetery walls would be nothing but for the moving words carved on them.

p Architecture and sculpture have been related for a long time. As for painting, murals have long been an important clement in domestic architecture. Perhaps the day is not far off when poets will be called in to the architect’s studio.

p From time to time mass spectacles are held in our sports stadiums. Hundreds and thousands of sportsmen weave extraordinarily beautiful compositions on the field. Is this to be classified as sport or art?

p I should very much like to know the answers to these and many other questions. I must know, I need to know, where the boundaries come between art and technology, what separates one art from another.

p We have long since outgrown the old aesthetics manuals. New arts 87 have come into our lives and entered the sacred precincts of the old arts. Some people are raising the cry that the old arts have outlived their time and are doing their best to hasten their death. Others rush to fill the breaches made by the new arts in the fortress walls of the old arts, and launch a crusade to prevent the arts from being defiled. Everywhere the frontiers are being flung open-the cinema has invaded the territory of the theatre, and the theatre has retaliated by invading the territory of the cinema. Television has declared itself to have extraterritorial status. The frontiers are being broken down before our very eyes, the frontiers between the different arts, forms and styles.

p It would be simply absurd to be alarmed by this process and seek to halt it. But we shall be making just as big a mistake if we calmly observe the changes taking place in the world of art, merely taking note of things as they occur. I do not intend to talk about the connection between architecture and literature, sport and ballet, or about the aesthetic qualities of a motor car. I shall be delighted to read what the architects, poets, sportsmen, designers and other specialists have to say on the subject.

p I wish to speak about the theatre and the cinema. We have long since introduced radio and cinema (both literally and figuratively) into the ancient art of the theatre. No doubt television too will find a placein our store of artistic devices.

p Cinematography as an art form was born as imitation of the theatre and to this day makes use not only of the theatre’s actors, but also of many of its expressive devices. At times it is difficult to sec where the theatre ends and the cinema begins.

p More and more frequently we find film-makers restricting themselves to a small number of scenes of action and a small number of characters, ignoring the opportunities they have for freedom of movement and free-play with chronology.

p It is as if the cinema has returned to its source, rejecting fifty years of development. In fact, this is not so. The best films of this new type are not a betrayal of the medium. The cinema broke into the sacred precinct of the theatre, rejected a great number of its own devices and lost nothing as a result.

p Neither here nor later do I intend to deal with examples of uninspired mechanical transference of the expressive means of the one art into the other. It is more interesting by far to examine the prospects of new solutions in works that display true artistic talent.

p The cinema has learned a lot from Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko; it has benefitted greatly from the experience of Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, Diky and Popov. In reminding the film-makers of this I am not trying to rub in how indebted they are to the theatre, 88 but am merely pointing out how fruitful and mutually enriching cooperation between the two media can be.

p The theatre has also been influenced by the cinema and still is. At first timid, and gradually bolder, attempts were made to adopt the techniques of the cinema in the theatre, and plays have been brought closer to film-scripts. Theatres began to use the device of projecting bits of newsreel, stills or movies; the action was broken down into small episodes, chronology was no longer strictly adhered to and so on.

p The theatre has tried practically all the devices of the cinema. We have seen the use of written legends like in the silent films, projected panoramas, fade-outs and flash-backs. Under the influence of the cinema we have made characters utter their inner monologues and thoughts aloud. There is no denying the tremendous impact the cinema has had on the modern theatre.

p Yet the theoreticians of cinema and theatre still persist in the idea that it is fatal for their respective art to make use of the “enemy’s” devices.

p A film-maker is declared to be a slave of the theatre and a stagedirector is declared to be a slave of the cinema as soon as they try to adopt the methods of the other medium.

p It is the numerous pedestrian plays and films that give rise to this attitude. It is hard to say which lost the most-the theatre or the cinema-by pedestrian attempts to transfer plays to the screen. I suspect it was the public that lost the most. But one should not take the mediocre as an example. Really the theatre and the cinema both have everything to gain from taking advantage of one another’s experience. They should be friends, not rivals. They should be learning from one another not just waiting to pounce on one another’s mistakes. There would be no need to appeal to film and stage-directors to make friends and co-operate were it not for a whole host of books, articles and statements by leading exponents of the two media insisting that they should not.

p “Limit the sphere of activity of the cinema and the theatre!”, “ Reexamine the art boundaries”, “Return to the theatre and the cinema their original charm!”—such are the vociferous appeals made by those who would have us keep our art forms “pure”.

p But it is quite impossible to keep the cinema and the theatre from penetrating one another. In all ages art that strove to be in step with the times and relevant to contemporary life had to do away with “accepted” frontiers. New people, new problems, new events wrought havoc with both the form and content of the drama. The development of “mixed arts” and technology had a tremendous impact on the theatre, and the taboos of yesterday became the imperatives of today.

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p The same thing happened in music and painting, and in the cinema too. In the last half century alone tremendous changes have taken place 5n the theatre. The triumph of realism erased the old barriers between the various styles. Actors now had to be versatile. Words were no longer the theatre’s only means of expression. And nobody with any sense thought for a moment of demanding that the styles be kept “pure” or that actors return to specialising, as they had for centuries, as “the lover”, “the narrator”, “the fool” and so on. Nobody suggests that declamation should be restored. There were, of course, a few “prophets” who predicted that the theatre would perish from stage direction and who campaigned for the preservation of the “actor’s theatre” as opposed to such theatres as the Moscow Art Theatre.

p The wheel of history is turned by the objective laws of life, and if the director’s role is more important today than it was a decade ago there is a natural explanation.

p After all, the same sort of thing happened in the cinema with the appearance of talkies, colour and the wide screen.

p Unless we want to find ourselves redundant in art, it is time we stopped harking back to the past, hooking it onto the present and dragging art back.

p The famous Cuban chess player Jose Raul Capablanca once predicted that the game itself would one day reach a stalemate. In his opinion, chess theory was so evolved that players who knew their theory perfectly were equally matched and could not get the better of one another, and the only way out was to enlarge the chessboard by one square and have an additional chessman. His proposal was not accepted. Chess with nine rows of squares is not chess, but a new game. The subsequent development of chess has shown that even cybernetics cannot cope with all the possible combinations.

p The theatre is over two thousand five hundred years old. When all is said and done, its means of expression are not inexhaustible-thc stage and the actors, words, movements and pauses, lightings, music and rhythm. Yet what an unlimited number of combinations of words and movements, characters, thoughts and feelings the old yet evergreen art of the theatre can dispose of! But the life of the theatre depends on one sole condition-that it never stands still but continually searches for new ideas and new means of expression in life.

p The cinema has changed our way of thinking. Knowledge has greatly increased our powers of imagination. The modern audience has a boundless wealth of new associations which audiences in the last century did not have. The modern theatregoer thinks “ cinematographically”. Modern dramatists, stage-directors, and actors are likewise compelled to think cinematographically.

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p However, they must express their ideas in scenic terms. It is disastrous when a theatre thinks sccnically but borrows its means of expression wholesale from the cinema.

p What is wrong with cinema and theatre enriching one another? Why the hysterical cries of “Hands off! That’s mine!”, or the self- righteousinjunctions “It is wrong to steal. You might get into trouble”. After all, we are not mischievous children playing with matches. And anyway, can a match burn the theatre down, or the cinema?

p Let’s take a look.

p What are the specific qualities of the cinema or the theatre these days, which we must keep our hands off?

p Time was when the main specific quality of the cinema was considered to be its almost unlimited opportunities for free transference of action in time and space.

p But this has ceased to be the exclusive monopoly of the cinema, and indeed it never really was. Shakespeare freely transferred the action in his plays from room to street, from Venice to Cyprus and so on. True, the cinema made it possible to carry out such changes of scene far more rapidly than the theatre, and make the process far more natural and convincing. But the difference is quantitative rather than qualitative.

p Of course the theatre and the cinema go to the same sources for their material; their themes and plots, their ideas and characters are in no way exclusive. There arc differences between a play and a film script but both arc essentially dramatic works, and such differences as do exist are gradually being reduced.

p Iskusstvo Publishers and various journals do not publish film scripts simply in order to bring new writers and works of literature to the public eye but primarily so that they may be put on the stage.

p Film-makers frequently read plays with the secret thought at the back of their minds that they might well make a good film. Theatre people seem to entertain no such arriere-pensee in reading film scripts. We have seen how the play Under the Big Top by Ilf, Pctrov and Katayev served as the basis for the screen play of Alcxandrov’s famous film The Circus, how the Tur brothers’ Blue Route became Meeting on the Elbe, Rozov’s The Immortals became The Cranes Are Flying and so on. The only film I can think of that was made into a play was Riskind’s Night Bus adapted by Malyugin as Road to New York. That was a long time ago, and after all one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and this particular swallow was no exception.

p When I read the screen-play of The Defiant Ones by N. E. Douglas and H. J. Smith, I felt nothing but pleasure and envy; pleasure at reading such a superb work, and envy because we still have so few plays of such a high standard. I immediately dismissed the idea of 91 rewriting it as a play. The material and the way it was composed, the pace, were all essentially cinematographic. But I just could not free myself from the impact this screen-play had produced on me, and late one evening while talking to friends the practically insane idea occurred to me of staging it as it was, of trying to make the cinematographic theatrical. Naturally what attracted me most to the undertaking was the deeply humane and tragic theme. But the very form of the screenplay held out a fascinating challenge I just could not resist.

p The production had its shortcomings. Something of the original was lost. But this was a first attempt after all. Only the expressive means of the theatre were employed in turning the film-script into a play. Experience shows that the specific qualities of cinema and theatre reside in the sphere of literary forms.

p What about montage? Well, yes, to a certain extent this is more associated with the cinema than with the theatre, but this does not rncan that it has the exclusive monopoly. An adaptable set, moving •spotlights transferring the light from one object to another, the alternation and even simultaneous presentation of different places, actions and pcople-thcse arc the theatrical methods of montage.

p What about the “angle of vision”? Again only to a certain extent. It is not only the cinema that can show a person or an event from any point, or from the point of view of any character. The painter can see life from any point he chooses, but it will always be from his own particular vantage point. The cinecamera can see the world through the eyes of a coward or the eyes of a man in love. Yet the stagedirector Akimov has on more than one occasion enabled audiences to see the stage as if from below. He has placed the people in the stalls as though on a balcony, in the orchestra pit or on the fourth floor and so on. The Czech stage-designer Josef Svoboda projects his scenery playing with perspective, completely ignoring Gonzaga’s classical laws of stage design. In both cases this produces quite an impact on audiences, and achieves unexpected expressive power.

p The theatre too can show events through the eyes of a particular person. In Diky’s production of Rubbish we are made to see a beer hall with swaying brick pillars, as though we were drunk. We have been made to see plays through the eyes of a child, or a youth, or an objective bystander.

p The audience’s “angle of vision” is always different in every good production. It is merely that the cinema and the theatre have different qualitative possibilities in this field. This is another sphere in which exchange of experience between the two media is carried on successfully, both of them benefitting without losing any of their specific qualities.

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p Both the cinema and the theatre, as any other art, are essentially conventional, but in different ways. The modern cinema requires that both the characters and their environment be three-dimensional, authentic and natural.

p A play staged without a stage-set may be an excellent production, a film done thus is sheer folly. An open section of a house is quite normal on the stage but on the screen is only likely to be the result of an air raid or an architect’s brainstorm. Perhaps the border-line between the two arts follows the meridian of convention?

p The theatre can present a room without a ceiling. Not so the cinema. In the theatre we can have an interlude in front of the curtain. The cinema cannot. In the theatre it is possible to have the author or chronicler appear on the stage, interrupt the action and comment on it. It would be most unnatural in a film. It seems we have found the dividing line between the theatre and the cinema.

p But what about Charlie Chaplin’s films? His art has nothing to do with normal authenticity, with the rules of classical realism. And what about cartoons, puppet films, or ballet and opera films?

p In a sense the theatre is more naturalistic than the cinema. A filmmaker can use various devices of combined shots to create, for example, the impression of a dizzy height, create the illusion of danger when in fact the actors are perfectly safe. The theatre can only do this by actually having the actors raised to a dizzy height. One could find all sorts of cases where the theatre, essentially more bound by convention than the cinema, has to be more natural.

p Where do we find more convention, in Charlie Chaplin’s films based on a remarkable combination of eccentricity, clowning, hyperbole and lyricism, or in the theatre where the shadow of a barred window can represent a prison and a single lamp post can represent a street?

p Montage, angle shots, fade-ins and fade-outs, close-ups and numerous other terms from the vocabulary of the cinema, understood not in the narrow technical sense but in the widest sense, are by no means exclusive to the cinema. Of course the theatre and the cinema use their own methods to achieve roughly the same affects of montage and “blow-ups”. As for fade-ins and fade-outs, each handles them in its own specific idiom, just as the novelist does it with words, the painter with light and colour, and the composer with sounds and rhythm. Montage, fade-ins, mobile camera and cuts are an essential part of film-making and audiences take it all for granted. Tracking and pan shots are as customary in the cinema as scene changes in the theatre. But as soon as these effects are attempted in the theatre, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the familiar becomes something quite new, and a technical device becomes a convention.

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p We can get the audience to agree to accept any convention. The modern audience is prepared to accept the most involved “rules of play”. I imagine the normal devices of the theatre appear just as new, unfamiliar and fresh when transferred to the screen. The important thing is to refrain from transferring the technical devices of one to the other wholesale.

p In the screen-play of The Defiant Ones, the police, following the trail of the two runaways, Gallen and Jackson, keep coming to places where the two men had been shortly before. In the stage version the chief of police and the sheriff are shown the whole time against a single conventional decor which might be swamp, road or prairy. Not because the theatre could not handle a dozen different flats, but because, thanks to the specific means of theatrical convention the pursuers could adequately convey the impression of the chase by always entering from the left and exiting right, without any scenery at all.

p The Defiant Ones was written for the cinema, and the story of the screen-play is the story of a long round-the-clock hunt for escaped convicts. The incredibly determined runaways and the equally determined pursuers are on the move the whole time, and the constant change of places and the various obstacles they have to overcome can only really be shown by the cinema, for the theatre is limited by the size of the stage, the amount of scene changing that is technically possible and so on. We cannot show on the stage the heroes fording a river, how one of them boards a fast-moving train and so on. The theatre has to bow to the cinema when it is a question of swift movement over a considerable period of time. But there is something far more interesting than the hunt in Douglas and Smith’s script, and that is the moral struggle between the white man and the Negro, chained together by the fetters of social inequality and race hatred, and the manhunters. Most important of all is the story of how hatred turns into friendship, the story of the moral awakening of Jackson and Gallen. The possibility of showing this human drama on the stage (referring of course to the possibility of dramatic art as a whole and not only the Gorky Theatre production) finally dispelled all doubts.

p We did not try to present several scenes of action in full detail but merely altered a few details on half of a circular turntable and then revolved it every now and then to create a succession of episodes on the proscenium and forward half of the stage. Thus the idiom of theatre convention enabled us to retain the continuous action proper to the cinema with the means available to the theatre. The only real compromise we were forced to make was that of resorting to the ageold tradition of having an interval, since in our attempt to enrich the lives of the white man and the Negro with numerous details and present 94 the process of their changing relationship with the maximum accuracy we found that we had increased the running time of the play to two and a half hours.

p The experience of certain hlm-makers who have taken the risk of making their films twice as long as the normal accepted length convinces us that the division of a play into acts is not an eternal law of the theatre. It was as though we were projecting onto the stage what takes place on an imaginary screen. It is not for us to judge what the results were, but we claim the right to think and act the way we did.

p The cinema, far from hampering us, actually helped us. It certainly did not make things any easier for us, rather on the contrary, but that is a very good thing.

p Like the cinema, the theatre proceeds from the character of a work in determining the degree and quality of convention to be employed. The same aesthetic principles underlie both arts. One could cite thousands of examples of things that are done successfully in the cinema but not in the theatre. Yet this is only because both arts tend to try to appropriate mechanically the methods of the other. If a creativeapproach is adopted the results are quite different.

p The production of a play or a film is a translation from the language of literature to the language of stage or screen as the case may be. There exist some very fine translations, and also some very bad, illiterate ones. But it can hardly be suggested that translations should be banned merely because some translators are not up to standard.

p Dostoycvsky was one of the most “theatrical” of all writers. His novels lend themselves to dramatisation extraordinarily well. Yet Dostoyevsky objected strongly to attempts to put his works on the stage. In his opinion this could only be done if the plot, composition and characters were specially reworked and adapted.

p A stage version of a book is an independent work of art. The same is true of a screen version. The old film Dowerlesx Bride was far closer to the spirit of Ostrovsky’s play than later screen versions of his plays which appeared to show far greater respect for the original. The film Such Love was greatly inferior to the play of the same name it was based on, despite the fact that Kohout’s play resembled a film-script more than a play-script.

p The same was true of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Despite the apparent “cinematographic” nature of Miller and Kohout’s scripts, they are really theatrical through and through, and the films only served to bring this to light. What was new, and startlingly bold for the theatre was old hat for the cinema.

p This is just an example of the way excessive respect for the author can become the opposite-a mockery of the author’s intentions.

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p The interpreter must be a creative artist. Mimickry is not art.

p Children at a certain age are wont to wet their fingers and carefully rub them over a transfer to produce pictures of animals and toys in their exercise-books, or on walls and window panes. This is not considered a creative act. It is more interesting by far when the child himself draws a flower or a ball.

p As long as we persist in using the achievements of other arts like transfers, substituting saliva for creative imagination, the opponents of alliance between the arts, the champions of strict compartmentalisation will erect more and more new barriers and “no entry” signs on our road.

p The more of these there are, the more our progress will be slowed down, and the more “accidents” there will be. The road must be cleared. Exponents of theatre and cinema must open wide the doors of their creative laboratories to one another. Let each take away as much as he can carry. Neither the cinema nor the theatre will lose anything; on the contrary they will both gain a great deal.

p It is not interpenetration that threatens the specific qualities of theatre and cinema but pedestrianism and uncreativc mimickry. I am by no means convinced that “naturalness” and “veracity” arc essential features of the cinema.

p A one-sided concept of truth to life, the sign of equality that is set up between truth in life and truth in art are fetters that chain us hand and foot. The cinema has by no means exhausted its possibilities.

p The exponents of the different arts can no longer go on cutting themselves off from one another by carefully erected barriers.

p The modern cinema needs Stanislavsky and Meyerhold as much as the modern theatre needs Eisenstein. Prokofiev and Shostakovich are needed not only by music, but also by the cinema, the theatre and painting. For life, which dictates to us the new form and content of works of art comprises everything-people and their relationships in society, science and technology, art and culture.

We must answer for one another, know one another and learn from one another.