A BREAK IN THE FILM

The most irritating interference of all was when the film broke, and, like the ‘celluloid rain’, it was a disaster that mainly occurred in provincial cinemas. Before the distribution system was properly introduced into Russia, exhibitors in Moscow and St Petersburg were in the habit of reselling used prints to provincial cinema owners. Distribution companies inherited this unfortunate habit and passed on second-hand copies to less well-off cinemas. The wear and tear increased in proportion to the distance from the centre. Let us take one of the furthermost places, Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia. In 1913, when the metropolitan cinemas were dominated by film palaces with musical winter gardens, The Yakutian Borderlands still urged its readers to be patient:

We are happy to note that Priyutov’s cinematographic performances have improved. The pictures are now clearer and more distinct; the film does not break so often, but the lack of lighting during the interruptions… alarms the public,…there is a lot of stamping and whistling… The public must understand that the cinematograph is a new invention… Rome wasn’t built in a day, gentlemen!34

In 1910 there occurred an event that received much comment in the film press:

On 15 November, after the end of a performance in the Kirsanov Theatre of Illusions, the projectionist, N.Melioransky, tried to poison himself. His only pleasure in life was the knowledge that

he was a useful member of the local community, which had always been delighted with his excellent work. But the very last night of the season turned into total disaster: one of the pictures, Cupid’s Darts

[Strely amura] was so badly worn that it kept on breaking off inside the projector, each break being greeted by the audience with loud laughter and rude remarks. Not understanding the real reason for the breakdowns, they turned on their former hero and made him the butt of their derision. The proud

youth was overcome with shame and went off to poison himself. Luckily his life was saved.35

Like vibration, a broken film became an established feature of film reception. The frustration accompanying the event was a popular subject for poets writing in film magazines. One stanza from a poem entitled ‘The Film Broke’ [Porvalas’ lenta] may serve as an example:

The film broke—and in the dark Boredom, unbidden, hung in the air. Two empty, hurried, nervous notes Echoed from the piano’s soul.36

At the beginning of the 1910s a special gadget appeared in many film projectors: the so-called isolation shutter (as David Shepard tells me, they were called ‘heat glasses’ in America). The reason for this was that if the projector stopped the hot beam of light could set fire to the broken film. The isolation shutter was a device (two devices, to be accurate: one centrifugal, the other antifrictional) which automatically prevented the beam reaching the film whenever the projector stopped. A transparent barrier, made of heat-absorbing filtering material, came down between the film and the light source. As a result, whenever such an emergency occurred, a grey frozen image would appear on the screen instead of a white square.

The emergency freeze-frame turned out to be an important event in the history of film reception. For some spectators the sudden halt created as unforgettable an impression as the sight of the still image coming to life at the Lumières’ demonstrations. A reviewer for The Theatre Paper wrote:

Once, at a private viewing, I saw a picture suddenly stop dead. The technician had halted the machine for some unknown reason and the actors froze in rigid poses on the brightly lit screen. It was a most unusual sight— almost frightening. A funny old woman, a jolly fat man, an elegant dandy, who had all just been playing out some kind of silly nonsense or other, suddenly, as if at the wave of a magic wand, froze in absurd, meaningless poses. It did not even resemble a photograph or a slide show. One could feel something mystical happening… When the projector beam was obstructed, the actors remained motionless and grew dimmer in the semigloom—you could feel the chill of death emanating from the screen. But suddenly the projector started up again and the clowning recommenced. Nevertheless the tragic motif of the accidental interruption was not forgotten. It made a deeper impression on me than anything else I had ever seen in the cinematograph.37

The critic Mikhail Brailovsky was struck by the changes in tone and light caused by the greyish shutter filter (it was either made out of thin metal mesh or consisted of a water and glycerine bath): it reminded him of Moscow during the general strike of 1905:

Stop the regular movement of the film through the projector for just one moment and, instead of a living picture, you get a grey, dull, lifeless image —one without perspective or relief. Life on the

screen momentarily disappears and dies. And of course we have only recently witnessed how the life of a vast capital city begins to die when the mechanism that moved it is temporarily stopped.38

Like the vibrations in Ellis’s skits on cinema, a breakage in a film was a popular subject to imitate in home entertainments. Alexander Fevralsky relates what Lidiya Ilyashchenko, one of Meyerhold’s actresses, told him about the game they used to play at Fyodor Sologub’s literary salon in 1914–15:

After dinner, when all the older, more sedate guests were leaving, Fyodor Kuzmich [Sologub] used to give us younger ones a wink and we would stay behind. Then the real fun would begin… The best game was playing cinemas. We would hang up a large sheet, put out the lights and place a bright lamp behind the sheet. We acted between the lamp and the sheet, on which our shadows stood out clearly. Sologub’s wife, Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, supplied all the things we needed. Fyodor Kuzmich would put his feet up on the sofa and dictate the ‘scripts’, which we would act out straight away. We tried to act mainly in profile, as the screen only conveyed silhouettes. Of course we only parodied cinema really. We hammed it up, sometimes in street-theatre style—we were drama students, after all. In one of Sologub’s scripts I was Fata Morgana. I put a paper cap shaped like a sugar loaf on my head and tied a long piece of string to it that cast a zig-zag shadow on the screen. Vsevolod Emilevich [Meyerhold] did not take part himself. He sat beside Sologub and sometimes shouted out ‘Marvellous!’ in that famous voice of his. Sometimes ‘the film broke’ and we would freeze in the most improbable poses. Sometimes the cinema would start to run backwards (it really used to happen then) and we would all move in the opposite direction, laughing uncontrollably.39

One should not be too surprised to find the effect of the broken film simulated in Andrei Bely’s 1918 film script for his own novel Petersburg (1913). The stylistic feature of the ‘break’ (figura obryva, in Bely’s own words) appealed to the author primarily as a literary device. It occupies a special place in his work on Nikolai Gogol, Gogol’s Mastery [Masterstvo Gogolya]:

The first volume of Dead Souls is a pile of ‘breaks’ heaped up one on top of another; they both represent the author’s ideas and stress details that are interpreted in different ways…the ‘break’ sets you thinking by stressing contrasts… Every short chapter is a heap of scraps, colourfully painted and strung on a living thread solely by the device of the ‘break’.40

Having traced the role played by this device in Gogol’s prose, Bely turns to his own novel Petersburg as an example of how it worked in post-Gogolian literature showing that its narrative, too, was a string of breaks. Another structural analogy of the sudden unmotivated ending, claimed Bely, was provided by the cinematograph:

the fluttering images of unnaturally excited people are chasing someone. The scene ends with a scuffle and a crash. Suddenly the screen is filled with the shape of a triumphant cockerel, and the intertitle: Pathé—The End.41

When in June 1918 Bely was asked to ‘write a script adapting his novel Petersburg for the cinema’42 _he

obviously saw the ‘break’ as the most natural compositional device for a film script. The prologue to the script was conceived as a deliberate piling up of ‘pictures’ (no fewer than eighteen), without any narrative context. The pictures were to acquire significance later on, when each of them would take its own place in

the plot. By this method, Bely apparently aimed to evoke a sense of déja vu in the more important scenes, a sense of recognition in a new context.43 _{Bely had never written for films before, and we can only marvel at}

his audacity as a scriptwriter (albeit the audacity of a layman) when, for example, at the beginning of Part Two he suggests simply ‘repeating’ two scenes from the prologue or beginning the narrative from the point where the relevant scene of the prologue had ‘broken off’:

Picture 18.

An exact repeat of picture 9 of the prologue, with all the details… But it is not cut off once the viewers have seen it, as it is in the prologue; instead we see the figure of Anna Petrovna standing by the embankment. She has grown older and fatter and is wearing a very worn foreign-looking dress. She is chewing her handkerchief and staring at the windows of a yellow, three-storey house. She cannot make up her mind what to do.44

Here, as in the case of the ‘rain’ in Sologub’s script for Miss Liza, we can see the author attempting to project his experience as spectator into his attempts at screenwriting. There is nothing strange about this— it is probably the usual way for a beginner to set about writing a film script. What is noteworthy is that, by so doing, both Bely and Sologub were making a statement about the phenomenology of the medium itself. Scratches and ‘breaks’ belong in the world of reception, not in that of the film itself; incorporated into the film they become metacinematic elements. Both scripts remained unrealised, but, viewed from the perspective of the later development of cinema, Sologub’s and Bely’s ideas seem to anticipate the metacinematic cinema of the 1960s—for example, Ingmar Bergman or Alain Resnais.