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p S. Yutkevich

p While we were preparing to make “Lenin in Poland”, a new film about Lenin, our star actor Maxim Shtraukh was producing “Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder" in the Mayakovsky theatre and I was staging “Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui" in the Moscow University Student theatre, two plays by Bertolt Brecht, a playwright very akin to us in spirit and style. Jules Renard was obviously right when he wrote in his Journal : “We do not have the same thoughts, but we do have thoughts of the same colour.”

p In writing the scenario Yevgeny Gabrilovich and I did not intend to follow the superficial features of Brecht’s poetical scheme, however I often turned to Brecht as I pondered on our new picture of Lenin.

p “What should we fear in our profession? We must fear the multiplication table,” wrote the poet Mikhail Svetlov. “You did not invent the fact that nine times nine equals eighty-one. It was not your idea that one should love one’s country.

p “But you should tell people how to love it, you should not simply repeat patriotism, but you should continue it. Otherwise you will be like the man who invented the wooden bicycle, not knowing that a metal one already existed."  [195•1 

p One thing was clear to us: we had no right to repeat what we had discovered in our earlier films. One cannot transfer a sculptor’s methods to the cinema or the theatre. You cannot act a “monument”. But we needed to create a sound basis in our scenario if we were to create the image of the living Lenin. I am now as convinced as ever that any innovative intention must first of all be grounded in the dramatic structure of the future film.

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p This is where Brecht came to my rescue with his concept of “Verfremdung”, “distancing” or “alienation”. To alienate an event or a character, he said, means primarily to strip the event or the character of everything which is self-explanatory, familiar and obvious, and so arouse amazement or curiosity. The idea of the technique is to allow the spectator to make fruitful criticism from a social standpoint. The old drama did not allow dramatists to depict the world as many people today see it to be. The course of one human life typical for many, or a typical conflict between people could not be depicted using earlier dramatic forms.

p From this point of view the material of the film seemed to be sufficiently “alienated”, for everything in it was capable of arousing the necessary sensation of unfamiliarity. For the first time we were taking the risk of showing Lenin away from the familiar setting of revolutionary Petrograd or Moscow in the environment, little known to the audience, of pre-war Poland, surrounded by Zakopanie mountain folk and Krakow social democrats, and, finally, in a prison cell in the provincial Austrian town of Neuemarkt—New Targ.

p So it was in the selection of material for the film that we were given our first chance of re-thinking the subject. But, as experience showed us, the mere “distancing” of the material is not enough, and the unfolding of this material through the medium of traditional drama and out-dated direction would have led us to failure.

p The image of Lenin is the most precious thing in the heart of a Soviet person, and for that reason there could be no room for a recipe, cliche or “playing to win”. Mere diligence in studying iconog’raphy, mere painstaking imitation of attempts by painters, sculptors and photographers to catch Lenin’s features would not suffice. We had to remember that this was a legendary image, and it seemed to me that it was one which must be approached with all the tremulation of an artist, summoning the power which is unique to art, the power of poetry.

p In order to enter into the spirit of the age and to recreate it in images, it would not have been enough merely to make a painstaking study of the historical material, and this task could not be solved by analysis alone. WHat was needed here was that synthetic generalisation which Lev Tolstoy so aptly defined as “poetry”.

p The solution is in poetry: that is the road which the Soviet artist will take when he is faced by the task of depicting in art scenes of our great history, the road which will be the shortest way to the hearts of Soviet spectators.

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p But as one approaches the image of Lenin, it appears that the inertia of one’s thought is still extremely strong. In practice, caution in regard to the image of Lenin turns into timidity reinforced by various theoretical taboos which fetter the artist’s will and imagination. But what need is there for an art which cannot communicate anything to the audience other than what it could discover from other sources, such as history books, political articles and contemporary memoirs?

p It goes without saying that in making films about the history of the revolution it is indeed essential to rely first of all upon accurate facts and documents. They must be assimilated comprehensively. However this knowledge is only the first stage of the artist’s creative quest. It not only predicts, but commits him to the next step, that of the artist’s comprehension of and his profound personal relation to those facts and documents. Only when they have been passed through the artist’s creative personality will they become artistic phenomena.

p This gave rise to the need not only to disclose the facts of Lenin’s life, but also to show him as a thinker and as a many-sided personality. What will the audience learn that is new if we conscientiously ennumerate the events and gatherings which took place in the Krakow and Poronin periods of Lenin’s stay in Poland, and if we limit ourselves to reproducing the day-to-day details of that time? In the final analysis this would be nothing more than an illustration of what is already very well known.

p But then try to imagine what Lenin thought about in those sleepless nights spent on a prison bed in New Targ, what a truly dramatic effect the tragedy of the war had on him for it was a war which threatened to destroy his life’s work, think of how tensely he was tormented by his enforced helplessness in the very days when mankind, wallowing in its own blood, thirsted for those sole words of prophecy which would have shown it the way out of the hell of war. To depict this could become the aim of art.

p And all this feverish, relentless process of thought spurred on by history, this bundle of sensations in which hopes and disappointments, visions and conclusions mingled together with the heartache and the strength of mind, all this was to form the essence of the drama upon which our scenario was based. Hence emerged the first new element of our conception of the film. It would be a monologue, where the dominant element of the sound fabric would be the voice of Lenin’s thoughts. The second innovative element of the dramatic structure of the screenplay was that it would exploit a different approach to time and space, dealing with the twelve days which Lenin spent in prison, and not being a mere chronological story of the events.

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p The internal monologue was necessary not to convey the incoherence or the imperfection of the cerebral organism, or as an experiment to record the labyrinths of the subconscious, but to study the process by which Lenin’s thoughts were formed.

p Possibly it was in those very tormenting nights in the New Targ prison cell that Lenin first conceived of the idea of turning the imperialist war into civil war, an idea brilliant in its simplicity and effectiveness, and subsequently proven correct by the whole development of history. We felt that this basic and profoundly modern idea must have come to Lenin in the process of extensive contemplation modified by everything which Lenin saw and observed in pre-war Poland.

p For this reason his thoughts on the historical destinies of Russia and Poland, on the nature of patriotism, the dangers of nationalism and chauvinism, and finally on those human feelings—friendship, love, faithfulness—which come under trial in every man’s life during tragic moments of history, are so important. I am convinced that the internal monologue provides immeasurably more opportunities for undertaking this task than the usual dialogue.

p What seems to be of even more importance for contemporary cinema is that there should not be only the internal monologue of the character, but also a kind of internal monologue originating in the author of the film himself. It may not be physically heard from the screen, this voice of the author’s thoughts, but must penetrate every inch of the film, expressing the personal, biased, internal theme which moves the artist. If, in a work of art, you are not aware of the author’s obsession with his theme, a theme which urgently demands to be expressed, then it will remain a mere catalogue, an illustrative enumeration of events and facts. One must not limit oneself to hiding behind the camouflage of the character no matter how important or great he may be in his own right. Lehin was a genius of humanity, but the simple fact of his physical presence on the screen does not make the film a piece of art.

p Lenin the man belongs to history, but the circle of his ideas and his thoughts is vast and all-embracing. More than that, they are modern and vital. Our 20th century is the century of Lenin, and the destiny of all mankind and of each of us (whether he is aware of it or not, whether he likes it or not) is predetermined by his scientific insight.

p One of these insights which affects me especially is to be found in his famous article on Communist subbotniks “The Great Beginning”, where Lenin formulates the qualitatively new psychological traits which appear in man under liberated labour: 199 his feeling of responsibility not only for the fate of “close” people, but also for those who are “distant”, his victory over the atavism of instinctive desire for possessions which have been perverted by the laws of the capitalist system.

p The ideological battle-ground is vast, embracing not only the political, economic and social spheres of man’s activity. This battle between the old and’ the new penetrates the very depths of the human psyche, involving the whole complex system of moral, ethical, emotional and aesthetic categories. Here a special role is to be played by art, particularly such a penetrating and infectious form as the cinema.

p To Lenin’s great idea of the world brotherhood of working people and of human solidarity, his belief in the victory of the new, the socialist features in man’s consciousness, bourgeois philosophy contraposes the thesis of the immutability, immanence of a human nature which is incapable of freeing itself from inborn instincts and from a metaphysical fear of the uncognisable laws of the universe.

p Lenin is forever alone in our film. He has been cut off from his homeland and his party; he is doomed to a life of an emigre, a life that is far from cheerful. In addition he has just been locked up in a prison cell. This is where we meet the theme of the vanquishing of solitude, a theme I find extremely important. No, a man whose whole life was undividedly dedicated to fighting for the happiness of “distant” people, a man who was fated not to explain the world but to change it, cannot be alone. In the ideological and aesthetic struggle this film on Lenin should be a defender of an eradicable faith in man, and it could not fail to be a film about vanquished solitude and about human happiness.

p But all these thematic overtones, so dear to the authors of the film, would have remained merely at the level of “good intentions" if the whole fabric of images in the work were not saturated by them, if they did not find sufficient embodiment in all aspects of the film, and most important, in the acting.

p As I think about the acting problems, I recall a screen test we made. This was a very meaningful experience for me. I asked Maxim Shtraukh to act out the scene we had chosen, the one in which Lenin first appears in the prison cell, with no previous rehearsal. I asked him to forget the equipment, to forget the footage and just to behave in an organic and natural manner, following his intuition, or, to be more precise, to be guided by all the experience which we had amassed in the films we had already made together. This at first seemed a strange problem to both of us, since we had been educated in the Meyerhold and Eisenstein tradition of exact and finely-regulated acting and had always 200 regarded all kinds of improvisation with a certain suspicion, linking it in our minds with dilettantism and vagueness. However it appeared that we too needed to discover some new characteristics of this kind of exercise in front of the camera (he as an actor, and I as director in the filming and editing), characteristics which emerged as a kind of synthesis between strict form and the naturalness and freedom which and modern film director and actor always need.

p The tradition of the montage cinema in which the strict composition of a self-containing and extremely plastically expressive shot dictated that the actor fitted into the shot with the exactitude of a centimetre, was taken to its logical conclusion and spent itself in films like “Ivan the Terrible" by Eisenstein. Neither of us could bear the dilettantism, apparent “simplicity” in a character’s screen behaviour which replaced this great craftsmanship. That meant we had to look for a new, third way.

p I tried my first steps along this way during our screen test. I gave the order “roll it" and the actor came on camera wearing an overcoat and hat. He faced a bare prison room with a bed, a table and a stool, and began unhurriedly, easily and meticulously tolive in this environment. I was immensely interested to observe, from my position behind the camera, the process of the actor’s thinking, the working of his imagination, the way he took off his hat and coat and looked around for somewhere to hang them up.... The way he felt the hardness of the mattress, looked through the grated window, tapped on the wall out of habit as a veteran prison conspirator. How he sat down at the table and began to think.... Then he decided to lie down.... Unlaced his boots.... Threw off his jacket and stretched out, deep in thought.

p I did not hurry him nor make any suggestions nor limit him in any way. The film was rolling, and with it scenes of real life were winding onto the spool, of which we became convinced the following day as we watched the strips on the screen.

p After the shooting I asked him to record a few sentences from the screenplay, the text of the thoughts which were supposed to accompany this scene in the film. I then synchronised this recording with the film in order to try myself out, to see if this fabricated synthesis of sound and acting would be successful. I thought the result was fantastic and was particularly aware of this success when the sound broke off, and I had a very strong feeling that instead of this pause, I wanted to hear more and more of this voice, the voice of Lenin’s thoughts. This meant that it would not be dull or boring to the audience.

p Nor should it have been!

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p I had given myself a very clear idea of how I was going to work with the actor from then on. I gave Shtraukh the greatest possible freedom, and only corrected his action as far as the camera was concerned. I tried to select this position not from considerations of external decorativeness, but from that of the greatest expressiveness and, at the same time, of simplicity. While we were shooting “Stories About Lenin" I said that I do not often risk coming too close to the portrayer of Lenin, the actor Shtraukh, using close-ups, as this could be taken as a certain superfluous importunity or tactlessness in respect to the image. At that time I was worried about the problem of choosing expressive means, and now once again this problem cropped up and caused me a great deal of thought. But this time I felt that we had won the right (and this right really did have to be morally won) to come close to Lenin. An actor’s eyes are his main means of expression (Meyerhold taught us this through theatre), and one must remember that the camera lens looks a hundred times more searchingly into the actor’s eyes and always discovers truth or falsehood in them. This time I took the risk of revealing by means of the close-up the truth of Lenin’s image which Shtraukh had accumulated over many years.

p Before dealing with editing, I should like to say a few word; about montage in general. Some Western theoreticians have declared that the montage is hopelessly outdated, and works of research have been produced maintaining the invalidity of the montage approach for contemporary cinema. If by the term “montage” one means those purely superficial devices which were inherent to the silent film era, then, naturally, many of them have today lost their effectiveness. But montage for me has never been simply a sum of stylistic devices, just as Eisenstein did not see it that way. But it is in fact Eisenstein’s montage which is said to be outdated, not only for the reason that sound has brought new principles into the organisation of material, but mainly because the Eisenstein method (as they call it) presupposes an over-active effect upon the viewer. Montage, it is claimed, chooses certain phenomena, foists them upon the viewer, fully expresses the author’s idea and hypnotises through the power of its rhythmical effect. That is exactly what certain adherents of modern cinema do not like. They consider that the viewer should be left to himself, and that the artist should not foist any of his own conclusions upon him. The era of “objective” cinema, which is obliged only to show, presuming the adult intellect of the viewer, has, they say, now dawned. But I believe that something completely different lurks behind this superficially noble screen of respect for the viewer.

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p I feel that the cinematographic narration is not only a technical category, but also an ethical one, and the question of montage also seems to me a philosophical problem. Behind this praise for the “sequence”, that is, entire sections of film untouched by the editor, which, it is claimed, has replaced the montage approach, lurks a whole system of attitudes which on the one hand reveal an open, sometimes directly expressed desire to de-ideologise the cinema. The montage in its new role, in a changed form, of course, perfected, more flexible and complex, continues to be a vital weapon of principle in our battle for political cinema.

p It gives me pleasure to recall the thoughts of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, who had this to say about screen-play and montage:

p “But I think the essential thing is the development, the modification of the screenplay. That is what supplies the structure, the bones of a film. If a director takes a whole heap of useless scenes, that is because the structure was not thought out in advance. The most important thing in editing is to cut, cut and cut again, to cut even the scenes which are dearest to your heart, those which have cost you the most effort in shooting. If a scene i$ not good, that means, if it does not get with the overall effect, it must be ruthlessly cut out.”   [202•1 

p That is wonderful advice to all directors, the advice of an artist who could not possibly be called retrograde. I think that the most important thing in a film is its architectonics, which naturally includes all its elements, not only visual but audio as well. Architectonics which is subjugated to the overall intention of the writer and director.

p Architectonics, in which one must be able to sacrifice the part for the sake of the whole.

p Architectonics which will influence the viewer through its wholeness and through the balance of all its parts.

p The magical power of rhythm, not of tempo, but of a complicated, multiform rhythm, continues to be the main pattern of a film, and it is the editing that creates this rhythmical power.

p Editing was of particular importance in our film, for the screenplay had neither subtle intricacies of plot, nor superficially dramatic effects, nor a story in the accepted sense of the word. So its rhythmical structure had to be all the more powerful and precise, and this structure is created primarily not by the word, but by depiction.

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p I see the documentary aspect of the film as extremely important, as fundamental. This is precisely why we reproduced Lenin’s house with such accuracy. Mountain carpenters built it professionally from real logs. I went to great trouble to shoot some scenes in a real Catholic church (and not in the studios as my producers suggested). Then I obtained some excellent carved bee-hives for the apiary scenes. (I rooted them out in the Krakow Ethnographical Museum.) All this was not for the sake of naturalistic authenticity, but because I was convinced that the problem of the relation and the points of contact. between the so-called “artistic” and the “documentary” is one of the most important problems in modern art, and that the line of demarcation does not lie at all where we previously had assumed it did.

p Such of Eisenstein’s films as “October”, “The Old and the New”, for example, fell into the category of documentary-when the Brussels film critics declared the results of a survey of the world’s best documentary films. Moreover “Battleship Potemkin" was for many years not included in the category of “feature” films in the West. And I consider the film “Strike” (much less known in the West) to be the key work of art, out of which grew all the new tendencies—Italian neo-realism, the English documentary school, and subsequently the “free cinema”, and the best Japanese films, not to mention cinema in countries of the socialist community. We were justified in classifying Eisenstein’s films as artistic, feature films. It is clear, however, that as an artist Eisenstein was able to reproduce our history and our modern life with such power and convincingness that by millions of viewers less familiar with these films they were seen as true historical documents.

p Another special characteristic of the modern film technique, as I see it, is to be found in orchestration and in its variety of textures. Contemporary painting has taught us to derive aesthetic pleasure from a montage of textures.

p In architecture, for example, we take pleasure in contrasts between matt and reflecting surfaces, in the conflict of wood and glass, the juxtaposition of rough natural textures with surfaces which are smooth,and polished.

p We have learned to appreciate the uninhibited, natural qualities of materials, of colour, of the alternation of symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes, the elegance of functional streamlining, and many other features which have become familiar both in everyday life and in applied art.

p A puppetry interlude was unexpectedly woven into the fabric of the film, a scene which will be emotionally comprehensible to the Polish viewer, though it may seem strange to other audiences. This 204 new and unfamiliar film texture was just as risky as was the texture of the real documentary films, made by Pathe in 1913-1914, which I managed to unearth with the assistance of the workers at the State Film Archives.

p I took the risk, as I did in “The Bathhouse”, of deforming part of the documentary scenes by adapting them, and so giving them the quality I needed to provide a contrast with Lenin’s thoughts. I also tried to employ a “triptych”, in which ordinary newsreel tilms leading up to the outbreak of war served not only as a quotation, but took on a generalising nature.

p This also permitted me to exploit a system of visual repetitions in the montage, where scenes of a prancing pig or acrobatic acts from a ore-revolutionary entertainment film create a visual counterpoint which serves to intensify the “distancing” effect I was striving for.

p As I used all the means of modern cinema to recreate the image of Lenin on the screen, I never once forgot Jules Renard’s good advice:

“Never be content—that is the whole essence ot art.