Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design

SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 5 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 3 Number 1 © 2009 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.3.1.5/1 Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design Emma Widdis University of Cambridge Abstract Keywords This essay examines debates around set design in Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Contrary to the common critical assumption that early Soviet film was remarkable for location, rather than studio, work, it argues that set design was a space in which film-makers explored the specificities of the camera’s relationship with materiality. The notion of faktura (texture), particularly potent in avant-garde culture, was equally prevalent in discussion of cinema, and this essay explores its meanings and significance, discovering how early Soviet film-makers and theorists sought to exploit cinema’s multi-sensory, and specifically, tactile (or haptic) impact on the spectator. Using case studies of two rare films, Abram Room’s The Traitor (1926) and Lev Kuleshov’s Your Acquaintance (1927), it examines how the materials of set design were used to create a powerful tension between surface and depth, two- and three-dimensional space. Abram Room Lev Kuleshov set design faktura hapticity The period 1926–27 was a rich one for Soviet cinema: films released included Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1926), Dziga Vertov’s Sixth Part of the World (Shestaia chast' mira, 1926), Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), FEKS’s Devil’s Wheel (Chertogo koleso, 1926) and The Overcoat (Shinel', 1926), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (Mat', 1926), Fridrikh Ermler’s Katka’s Reinette Apples (Kat’ka—bumazhnyi ranet, 1927), Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (Tret’ia meshchanskaia, 1927), Fedor Otsep and Boris Barnet’s Miss Mend (1926) and Barnet’s own Girl with a Hatbox (Devushka s korobkoi, 1927). This remarkable mix is testament to the creative hybridity of film production under NEP. The same two years also produced two films that are now almost unknown: The Traitor (Predatel', September 1926), directed by Room, with Sergei Iutkevich as ‘assistant’ and khudozhnik (set and costume designer), and Kuleshov’s Your Acquaintance (Vasha znakomaia, November 1927, also known as The Journalist [Zhurnalistka]), for which the constructivist artist Rodchenko is listed as khudozhnik.1 Neither has been preserved in its entirety, but the extant material gives us a rich sense of how two different directors – and two different designers – experimented with how cinema could convey the sensory properties of the material world.2 The pared-down, modern sets of Your Acquaintance appear to be in marked opposition to the richly ornamental surfaces of The Traitor. Both films, however, were experiments with the formal properties of film, and attempts to maximize the expressive capacity of orthochromatic film stock. Both probe the nature of the film screen as a pictorial surface, and its representation of three-dimensional 1. Another designer, Vasilii Rakhal's, was also involved in the design of both films. Rakhal's was then principal designer in the First State Film Factory. Iutkevich suggests that Rakhal's’s expertise enabled the realization of his designs. It is likely that he played the same role alongside the ‘artist’ Rodchenko in Your Acquaintance. Sergei Kozlovskii provides a biography of Rakhal's, describing him as ‘practical’, and emphasizing his realistic ‘treatment of material’ (Kozlovskii and Kolin 1930: 33). Rakhal's, who worked in the Khanzhonkov studio before the Revolution, has an impressive list of films to his name, and was SRSC 3 (1) pp. 5–32 © Intellect Ltd 2009 5 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis much praised for his work with Sergei Eisenstein in particular. 2. The Russian State Archive of Cinema, Gosfil'mofond, holds the extant material for both films. The Traitor consists of five reels (Parts 1, 2 and 5: 26 minutes), Your Acquaintance of only one reel (Part 2). 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 6 space; in both – but in very different ways – the film set plays a vital part in the visual patterning of this surface. Early Soviet cinematic set design has received little critical attention. Indeed, the designer (in Russian, the kino-khudozhnik) is an often-forgotten figure in film history and production. In this early period, however, in Russia and elsewhere, the hegemony of the director was not yet established; the very structure and organization of the film-making process was in flux. Philip Cavendish has suggested that, in early Soviet cinema, ‘the key dynamic in the film-making process as far as the visual language of cinema is concerned with the creative partnership between director and cameraman’ (Cavendish 2008: 6). This correction to largely directorfocused views of cinema in these first decades is an important one. Cavendish focuses particularly on the stylistic impact of the evolving technology of lighting, which provided a consistent point of discussion in the cinema press. I suggest that physical elements of the mise-en-scène – set, costumes, make-up, props – played a similarly important role. As the technical capabilities of the still-young medium of film were tested and explored, debates about set design reflected the emergent aesthetics of Soviet cinema. In the pages of the cinema press in the late 1920s, we can trace a battle for a role for the khudozhnik within the film production process. Not merely a question of practical organization, this debate was one about the nature of filmic representation itself, about the creation of filmic space and the nature of spectatorial experience. In this essay, I will explore how the theory and practice of set design evolved during the second half of the 1920s, and examine how the material properties of ‘things’ contributed to the aesthetics of silent cinema. Discovering the practical exigencies that shaped the construction and decoration of cinematic space, and how film practitioners grappled with them, we can trace evolving understandings of filmic representation. Two sets of questions are important. First, how did evolutions in set design contribute to an exploration of the qualities of the cinematic screen as surface? Early film theorists and practitioners were preoccupied by the paradoxical relationship between the flatness of the screen and the illusion of three-dimensions that it was so uniquely equipped to portray. How were the material properties of mise-en-scène used to create patterns, planar intersections and volumes on screen? How did cinema practitioners use textile and texture to maximize the affective, sensory capacities of their medium? Second, how did set design reflect the ideological complexity of material objects themselves during this period? Debates about sets can be viewed as part of a larger set of questions regarding the status of ‘things’ in Soviet Russia. Props (the rekvizit) – are an integral part of film design, and many early accounts and theories of cinema shared an interest in the relationship between the film camera and physical objects. In the Soviet context, the question of how film should picture the object world – and in particular, the object world of domestic interiors – was tied to ideological preoccupations. What was the place of material objects in revolutionary society? What was the relationship between things and people? These were questions at once aesthetic and ideological, and film was a medium through which they could be debated, tested and perhaps resolved. 6 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 7 To address these questions, I will provide a brief account of the development of set design in Russian cinema, and explore the key preoccupations of set designers in the 1920s, with particular focus on the concept of materiality (faktura). The Traitor and Your Acquaintance will then serve as case studies, exploring how the material properties of the mise-en-scène contribute to the film-makers’ manipulation of cinematic space. Both films probe the nature of the cinematic screen as surface; I will attempt to show, moreover, that both explore the material density of the object world, and the extent to which cinema is able to capture and convey sensations that are more than simply specular. Critical approaches The limited existing scholarship dedicated to film set design has tended to focus on the evolution of the relationship between set and narrative. Charles and Mirella Affron offer a taxonomy of film design, ranging from ‘Sets as Denotation’ (largely invisible, non-signifying background), through to ‘Sets as Artifice’ (highly visual and responsible for a large part of the film’s overall impact) (Affron and Affron 1995: 37–40). These categories reflect a key tension in the evolution of set design: is the set an independently expressive part of the film, or a servant of the plot? This debate, which C.S. Tashiro describes as a tension between ‘visible expression and invisible neutrality’ (Tashiro 1998: xvi), underpinned the debates on the role of the kinokhudozhnik that took place in the Soviet cinema press during the 1920s. The Affrons’ categories are limited by an apparently unproblematic assumption that a good set is one that ‘serves’ the narrative. Tashiro, by contrast, is concerned to show how the impact of design can exceed the limits of narrative. Citing Leon Barsacq’s insistence that ‘one of the fundamental requirements of the cinema [is] to give the impression of having photographed real objects’ (Barsacq 1976: 7), he suggests that ‘those objects have meanings of their own exploited by the designer that have nothing to do with the script’ (Tashiro 1998: 6). Drawing on architectural theory, and with a focus on costume drama (where the potential for lavish design is most clear), Tashiro proposes that we engage with the ‘affective’ power of the material mise-en-scène. The suggestion that ‘things’ on film have an impact on the spectator that is affective – emotional and sensory – is based on an understanding of cinematic spectatorship as a process of imaginative (and multi-sensory) participation in the space of the film. As such, Tashiro’s approach has much in common with recent theoretical reinterpretations of film spectatorship as a form of material practice, such as Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion (2002), and Laura Marks’s work on ‘touch’ (Marks 2000, 2002). Marks uses the term ‘hapticity’ to describe cinematic strategies that draw the spectator into a visceral contact with the image, a contact that is at once tactile and visual. Seductive as they are, however, categories such as the ‘haptic’ acquire critical rigour only if they are linked to renewed engagement with the concrete materiality of the ‘affective space’ of a given film: what is it, and how is it made? This is particularly relevant in the period under consideration here, when the real space of cinema – the set, and the lighting and photographic practices that captured it – evolved, as practitioners explored the scope and limits of their medium. Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 7 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3. Berthomé suggests poverty as the principal reason for the weakness of Soviet studio work, and preference for location shooting (Berthomé 2003: 82). 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 8 In their recent volume, Bergfelder, Harris and Street have explored the development of set design in France, Britain and Germany, focusing on the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, as ‘the moment in film history in which set design was given more prominence and attention that perhaps during any other period’ (Bergfelder et al. 2007: 25). In Hollywood, the establishment of the studio system brought ever more lavish production design (Ramirez 2004); in Germany, the influence of expressionism brought about a wholesale revolution in the role of the film designer, most famously realized in Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, 1920); in Paris, émigré Russian designers linked to L’Albatros group were pioneering ‘a modern, performative conception of décor’, with a new emphasis on multidimensional space (Bergfelder et al. 2007: 58). Despite the influence of Russian émigrés on film design in the period under discussion, Bergfelder et al. do not discuss Soviet cinema itself. This omission is consistent in histories of production design: Barsacq, one of the only writers even to address Soviet cinema, discounts its studio work, praising it instead for the ‘perfection of its exterior shots’ (Barsacq 1976: 46).3 The so-called ‘poverty’ of early Soviet set design is commonly attributed to the underfunded state of film production during the 1920s. Looking more closely at interior sets of this period, however, and at the debates surrounding design in the film press, we discover a rich vein of experimentation. The evolution of Soviet set design has much to tell us about how practitioners sought to shape the spectator’s sensory engagement with the screen – and, by association, how they believed that film could contribute to the renewed relationship between human subject and material world that was so much a part of the Soviet revolutionary agenda. Designing Soviet film Although the Revolution of 1917 had brought new imperatives, both practical and ideological, to Soviet cinema, it had not brought an entirely new cast of characters, or new equipment. Many of the most important khudozhniki working in film during the 1920s (including Viktor Simov, famous for his work with the Moscow Arts Theatre, Evgenii Bauer, Sergei Kozlovskii, Vladimir Egorov and Vladimir Balliuzek) had been working before 1917. The majority of them, moreover, had begun their careers in theatre. A theatrical model of spatial organization dominated early Russian cinema, with some of the very first films even being shot on theatre stages. Where Russian theatre had a rich tradition of set and costume design, however, the new art was generally considered theatre’s poor relation: Cavendish describes the ‘blatantly artificial and fragile stage-sets’ of the first films, and histories of pre-Revolutionary cinema generally concur that ‘décor’ was often prepared merely days – even hours – before filming (Cavendish 2004: 206). It was rare for studio films to merit individually constructed sets: standard painted backdrops, generally made from fabric and pertaining to particular historical periods, etc. were used on several films; and furniture, props and costumes were taken from studio stores, or simply hired. The principal evolution of set design in pre-Revolutionary film was the creation of depth of field. Cloth backdrops were replaced, in 1911–12, by the ‘fundus’ system: a series of screens (‘flats’), creating multiple levels 8 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/7/09 10:13 AM Page 9 within the set, offering different positions for the camera.4 Evgenii Bauer, the only pre-Revolutionary Russian film-maker routinely considered to have attained a high level of innovation in set design, is well known for the complex architecture of his sets. Kuleshov recalls how, working as a young designer for Bauer, he learned to create the illusion of depth through the spatial complexity of a set if there were two rooms, they must be at different levels and connected by a staircase (Kuleshov 1920: 79). Columns, architectural friezes, etc. provided further articulation of three-dimensionality, and from around 1914 on, foregrounded details (architectural shapes or single objects, known as the dikovinka) were used to create perspective. The material ‘volume’ of real objects was used to focus the spectator’s eye, giving an illusion of reality, and hence of depth – and ‘real’ space. These evolving practices placed a growing significance on the mise-en-scène – and on textile in particular. Drapes (drapirovanie), fabric screens, etc. articulated the movement towards depth of field. These textiles were often patterned, and their designs and textures were used to create contrast and variation in the orthochromatic scale, which offered a range of tones from deep black to extreme white (Miasnikov 1973: 31). The task of the designer – in collaboration with director and cameraman – was to maximize the expressive potential of this range. Although by 1917 several private production studios were successfully established in Russia, during the early years of Soviet cinema there was little or no money available for complex set design. The second half of the 1920s, by contrast, was a period of technical consolidation and professionalization. A younger generation of set designers, unbound by theatrical heritage, came to prominence, including Kuleshov, Aleksei Utkin, Vasilii Rakhal's (who worked extensively with Eisenstein) – and Evgenii Enei (part of the FEKS collective). In 1924, a design department opened as part of the State Film Academy (GTK: Gosudarstvennyi tekhnikum kinoiskusstva); the first cohort of students graduated in 1927. In the cinema press from 1925–28, a debate on the role of the film khudozhnik took place.5 Part of broader discussions about the ‘rationalization’ and ‘professionalization’ of the film production process, this was also a process of role definition, marking the boundaries between different members of the film-making collective. As such, it was about the very nature of cinematic representation, and closely linked to complex debates on the shape and form of Soviet revolutionary art. In addition to complaints of poor-quality work (Agden 1926: 16), the principal accusation levelled at set designers during the 1920s was that of ‘excess’ and ‘pomposity’ (pompeznost'). Writing in 1925, Pudovkin called for modern set design to avoid the lavish ‘chaos’ characteristic of preRevolutionary films: the task of a ‘real’ kino-khudozhnik, he claimed, was to ‘create a calm décor, which does not attract the eye’ (Pudovkin 1925: 2). In the face of increasing suggestions that good set design meant a set that was fully integrated with the film’s narrative and poetics, the very role of the designer was under threat: a pseudonymous opinion piece in Soviet Cinema dismissed the ‘self-indulgence’ and ‘absurdity’ of the sets of Caligari, and Protazanov’s Aelita (1924), praising instead the ‘reality’ of Eisenstein’s Strike (Stachka, 1924), and declaring that it was time for the ‘artist’ to ‘disappear’ from cinema (Irinin 1925: 32). Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 9 4. Cavendish claims that this system was introduced in the autumn of 1911 for the sets used on Chardynin’s Kreitserova sonata (Cavendish 2004: 214). The Italian film, Cabiria (Pastrone, 1913) is usually credited with inaugurating a new era in cinema, where threedimensional sets began to replace two-dimensional backdrops. It was released in Russia during the 1915–16 season. Barsacq discusses the impact of Cabiria on the evolution of set design more generally (Barsacq 1976: 36). 5. See for example, Maklis (1925), Kozlovskii (1925), Agden (1926), Kolupaev (1925, 1926). SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 10 In February 1928, set designers published a resolution, seeking to define their role as a valuable and ‘creative’ member of the production collective, and insisting that the name of the khudozhnik must feature on a film’s promotional material (Anon. 1928: 3). Veteran Sergei Kozlovskii published a number of short articles during the 1920s, and then a booklength volume in 1930, defending the khudozhnik as more than mere labourer (Kozlovskii and Kolin 1930: 22). Kozlovskii’s book was at once manual and manifesto, and it enacted a key shift in the role of the khudozhnik by a shift of nomenclature – from khudozhnik-‘decorator’ to khudozhnik‘architect’. If the ‘decorative’ had no role in the new ideological value system, ‘construction’ certainly did. This lexical shift reflects an opposition that was central to the emergent aesthetics of cinema in this period. It distinguishes the ‘decorative’ from the ‘architectural’, the art of surface from that of volumes. As such, it raises questions about the range of influences – theatrical and artistic – to which Soviet set design was subject, and its place in the broader evolution of Soviet performance design. The sets and costumes of Sergei Diaghilev’s international ballets russes productions (1909–28) had a far-reaching influence on the development of theatrical design across Europe, and their so-called ‘Russian spirit’ in décor found its way into film, when émigré Russian designers in Paris formed L’Albatros, a production company initially under the leadership of Ermol'ev (and later Lazare Meerson). Barsacq suggests that the Albatros film-makers were influenced by the ballets russes’s combination of the naturalism of the Moscow Art Theatre with the decorative impulse of the symbolist World of Art group (a broad artistic grouping to which several artist-designers were linked) (Barsacq 1976: 38). As John Bowlt points out, the ‘naturalist’ and the ‘ornamental’ aspects of the ballets russes stagings were linked in viewing the stage set as decoration – that is, as a two-dimensional backdrop. As such, Bowlt rejects any possible continuity between the ballets russes and Russian constructivist theatre design, and looks instead to the work of innovative members of the Russian avant-garde in pre-Revolutionary theatre, when ‘stage design in Russia moved from surface to space’ (Bowlt 1977: 26). Bowlt describes constructivism as having broken down the ‘decorative’ aspect of theatre, ‘transforming the stage into a truly three-dimensional experience’. The ballets russes, with its luxuriant excess of decorative pattern, is an art of surface; constructivism is one of volumes – the organization of forms in their interaction with space. Bowlt’s theory is premised on the same opposition between two modes of representation that underlay Kozlovskii’s re-naming: the decorative and the architectural. This opposition is central to any examination of film set design in this period. Can film be mapped onto Bowlt’s simple evolutionary model? As Antonia Lant has shown, the play between ‘the flat and the volumetric’ was a fundamental feature of silent cinema (Lant 1995). Noel Burch has described the development of cinema during its first two decades as a journey towards a Renaissance perspective, ‘in a sense a recapitulation of the decades of work which went into the constitution of monocular perspective in painting’ (Burch 1990: 2). For Burch, this journey was one of progress – from flat, planar models with a fixed camera, evenness of lighting and painted backdrops towards the illusion of depth 10 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 11 that was cinema’s ‘three-dimensional vocation’. We have traced this evolution in developments in the practice of film set construction. The relationship between surface and depth in film of this period is more complex than this might suggest, however. Rudolf Arnheim’s description of cinema as ‘neither entirely two-dimensional or entirely three-dimensional, but something in-between’ (Arnheim 2006: 12) offers a more evocative way to think about the conscious interplay between surfaces and volumes that we can discern in experiments in set design in the early Soviet period. The flat screen, and the black-and-white film stock, posed particular challenges in the presentation of the object world in all its textural and threedimensional reality. But that very surface was equally a source of filmic power. Broadly speaking, experiments with the mise-en-scène during this period can be seen as explorations of the camera’s relationship with materiality. Soviet film-makers were very familiar with developments in European cinema during the 1920s. ‘Expressionist’ currents in German cinema provoked much discussion. Sets such as those designed by émigré Andrei Andreev for Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923) were criticized because of their painterly style – for treating the screen as a pictorial surface. The French ‘Impressionist’ film-makers grouped around Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein (and including another émigré, Dmitri Kirsanoff) were also well known, largely due to Il'ia Erenburg and Vladimir Pozner: Iutkevich recalls seeing Kirsanoff ’s Menilmontant (1926), which was well known in Russia at the time, despite no official release (Cavendish 2008: 48; see also Erenburg 1926: 24). These two currents represented opposite poles in the theory of set design, from the painterly, stylized anti-realism of the expressionists, to the impressionists’ belief that film was uniquely equipped to reveal the ‘photogenic’ quality of the world. Between them – and with its own unique agenda – Soviet cinema sought its own direction. In 1926, the FEKS group produced their adaptation of Nikolai Gogol'’s The Overcoat. Evgenii Enei’s designs for this film, clearly linked to expressionism, were an important moment in the evolution of Soviet set design.6 In the same year, Rakhal'’s work for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was praised for its lack of artifice, for the ‘real’ energy of its representation of real life. Between these poles, the future of set design was up for grabs. It was at this interesting moment in the evolution of cinematic space that Aleksandr Rodchenko and Sergei Iutkevich began to work in film. Rodchenko’s interest in material structures – and specifically the relationship between surface and volume – found a natural outlet in cinema. Iutkevich’s artistic training and work in avant-garde theatre had created in him an interest in new connections between background (set) and action.7 These men’s work on Your Acquaintance and The Traitor respectively was part of a broader search for set designs that corresponded with Revolutionary ideals. Specifically, both films were experiments with the affective power of the mise-en-scène. The material of film Abram Room’s statement in 1925 that ‘theatre is an art of seeming, film is one of being’ (Room 1925: 56), threw down a gauntlet for the new generation of Soviet set designers. Discussions of set design during the 1920s show a preoccupation with ‘reality’ and ‘podlinnost'’ (authenticity) that was characteristic of the period. This drive to improve the quality and Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 11 6. Enei’s work was critically praised: Sokolov (1926: 28) mentions particularly the ‘polished surfaces’, and links the work to Andreev’s designs for Raskolnikow. 7. Raised in St Petersburg, Iutkevich was trained as an artist in Kharkov. In his memoirs, he recalls his first encounter with Aleksandr Blok’s symbolist play Balaganchik as a formative moment in the evolution of his artistic consciousness. Iutkevich’s first theatrical set designs were for Foregger’s Moscow-based theatre, where he worked alongside Sergei Eisenstein (Eisenstein and Iutkevich were set designers – with Galadzhev, another former member of Mir Iskusstva – for Foregger’s first staging in 1922). Like Grigorii Kozintsev, Abram Room and Sergei Eisenstein, Iutkevich also worked with Vsevolod Meierkhol'd, and in 1922, at the age of only eighteen, he was a founding member of the ‘Eccentric’ group that included Kozintsev (with Leonid Trauberg), and a signatory to the manifesto pamphlet, ‘Eccentricism’ (Ekstsentrizm). Iutkevich’s worked as ‘assistant and artist’ alongside director Room for The Traitor and Bed and Sofa, before directing his first feature films, Lace (Kruzheva, 1928), and Golden Mountains (Zlatye gory, 1931) (Moldavskii 1975). SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 12 professionalism of Soviet film-making was marked by a specifically Soviet interest in ‘reality’, a quest for a new art that would be suitably revolutionary. Soviet cinema would distinguish itself by a new attitude to the material world – a rejection of the ‘staged’ quality of pre-Revolutionary cinema, and an embracing of the new, the real and authentic. In contrast to the expressionist sets of Caligari, and the vast studio sets emerging in Hollywood, Soviet film-makers would favour the energy of outdoor shooting, the life of the streets. As Leo Mur proclaimed in a manifesto article of 1926, ‘The life of the interior is a forbidden arena for the film camera’ (Mur 1926: 3). Ideological principles, then, seemed to dictate a wholesale rejection of studio sets and their illusions. The problem faced by film-makers, however, as Mur himself acknowledged, was that ‘the greater part of a person’s life takes place not under the sky but under a ceiling’ (Mur 1926: 3). If cinema was to picture sovetskii byt (Soviet everyday life), and to offer ideological lessons for its improvement, then it needed to find a way to picture interior spaces. It must configure new visions of the relationship between people and the material objects of domestic space. The studio – and with it, set design – could not be rejected entirely. Viktor Shklovskii’s declaration, in 1927, that Soviet cinema was entering a new phase, a ‘second period’, in which it would become ‘a factory of the relationship with things’, captures the complexities of this issue. Criticizing Dziga Vertov’s ‘life caught unawares’ poetics, Shklovskii called for film not simply to capture the object world, but to ‘elucidate a relationship’ to it (Shklovskii 1927: 112–13). Set design had a key role to play here: as K. Gazdenko put it in an article of 1927, ‘The task of the designer is to express his attitude to the surroundings, to inspire the spectator with it, to set him on a path to a new life’ (Gazdenko 1927: 10). Set design was a vital part of what was considered good filmic faktura. This important term, a commonplace in Soviet cinematic discourse during the 1920s, has no single translation into English: it is best understood as ‘texture’ or materiality, but also refers to the working of that material in an artistic context. For the Soviet avant-garde, as Maria Gough suggests, faktura acquired a particular meaning as a potent ‘index of material presence’, signalling the revolutionary proximity between art and reality (Gough 2005: 11–12). Constructivist theorist Aleksei Gan distinguished the avant-garde view of faktura from what he called a traditional ‘artistic’ understanding. Where the term might traditionally describe simply ‘the handling of a surface’, for the avant-garde it meant ‘the selection and processing of the raw material’, and ‘the organic condition of processed material’ (Gan 1922: 62–64). Thus faktura was part of a broader emphasis on the sensory rediscovery of the material world. In the cinema press, faktura had a broad range of application, from the strictly practical to the conceptual. ‘Good’ cinematic faktura seems to have described authentic materials (architecture, furniture, objects, costume) and the combination of construction, lighting and camerawork that would convey those materials in their full affective power. Kozlovskii, for example, recalled the mid-1920s as a period when he ‘sought new types of faktura’, emphasizing an interest in different types of material surface (Miasnikov 1975: 45). In 1925, Iutkevich criticized the poor quality of Soviet cinematography for not 12 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 12:03 PM Page 13 exploiting the faktura of different materials, for making ‘silk look like calico’ (Iutkevich 1925a: 43). For my purposes, the interest of faktura lies in its implied preoccupation with a form of representation that was threedimensional and multi-sensory – specifically, tactile. Good faktura would make you feel the material. Other terms that recurred in descriptions of film sets (specifically ‘relief ’/‘in relief ’ [rel'efno] and ‘volume’ [ob''em]) were similar. This emphasis on the tactile was common to the artistic avantgarde of the period, and is most potently expressed in Vladimir Tatlin’s intent to ‘put the eye under the control of touch’, which provides a powerful metaphor through which to consider experiments in cinematic space during this period. Faktura describes the thinginess of things, and art’s relationship to it. As such, it draws our attention not only to the textures and materials of set design, but also to its objects. Things mattered in early Soviet Russia. Although mass propaganda and the avant-garde were united in their attack on byt, stressing the ‘reactionary force of material objects’, a number of artists – Vladimir Tatlin, Liubov' Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksandr Rodchenko – were engaged in the project of making what Christina Kiaer has called ‘active socialist things’, with a role in everyday life (Kiaer 2005: 50–51). Boris Arvatov’s essay ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing’ (1925) pictured objects transformed by socialism, and able in turn to ‘transform’ everyday life and, ultimately, also human subjects. For Arvatov, material culture had transformative potential: ‘The ability to pick up a cigarette-case, to smoke a cigarette, to put on an overcoat, to wear a cap, to open a door, all these “trivialities” acquire their qualification, their not unimportant “culture”’ (Kiaer 2005: 34). This recognition of things ‘as an actively “shaping” principle’, the belief that the interaction between human subject and material object was a crucial building block for a new world order, was central to Revolutionary artistic discourse during the 1920s and its traces in film theory and practice are very clear. An article by N. Kaufman, published on 11 October 1927, just one week before the release of Your Acquaintance, reveals the complexity surrounding the relationship between cinema and ‘things’. Kaufman claimed that cinema is the only art in which material objects acquire ‘life’. While careful to reject the over-aestheticized ‘fetishism of things’ that characterized the work of ‘some’ western avant-garde film-makers, he did suggest that film could ‘take a dead object […] and make a poem from it […] reveal its hidden, independent essence, its inner beauty’. It could, moreover, extend this transformative power beyond the limits of the screen, and alter our perception of the material world (Kaufman 1927: 5). In his cautious references to the western avant-garde, Kaufman was alluding to the ‘materialist’ theories of the French ‘impressionist’ film-makers, who provided a consistent point of reference, and considerable controversy, in Soviet film journals during the 1920s. Delluc’s Photogénie (1920) was published in Russian in 1924. Purporting to offer a new definition of film’s particular ‘essence’, it suggested that cinema provided an apprehension of reality that was ‘more than real’, creating an experience for the spectator in which the world would ‘come alive’. To this end, Delluc provided a list of objects that were innately ‘photogenic’ (largely natural phenomena such as the sea and clouds, but including Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 13 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 8. Bela Balasz, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) (1924) was published in Russian as Vidimyi chelovek. Ocherki dramaturgii fil'ma, translated by K. Shutko (Moscow, 1925). 9. This was a publication of the paper given to the film committee the Gosudarstvennyi institut istorii iskusstv (GIII) on 7 March. See Deriabin (2004: 653). 3/3/09 3:32 PM Page 14 patterned textile (with a dark background)) (Delluc 1920: 33–77). Textile offered a compelling combination of textural density, movement and pattern, which, for Delluc, rendered it ideally suited to the cinematic medium. In the Soviet press, Delluc’s pantheistic celebration of the material world was generally discredited by 1927, criticized for ‘passivity’ (Mur 1925: 4–8). As Shklovskii had said, the power of cinema was to transform phenomena, not simply to reveal them – as such, it was part of the broader revolutionary project to remake the physical world. Despite this, the influence of photogénie can be felt across much discussion of film, and is particularly evident in debates on set design. In an article on set design published in Russian in 1928, Leon Moussinac quoted Bela Balasz’s description of the camera as a ‘microscope’ that could reveal – and even redeem – the physical world’ (Moussinac 1928: 6).8 In 1929, V. Kolomarov declared that: ‘Cinema is the only art capable of conveying the living faktura of the real world’ (Kolomarov 1929: 29).9 In defiance, however, of Delluc’s distinction between photogenic and non-photogenic objects, he joined Pudovkin and other Soviet theorists and practitioners in proclaiming film’s transformative power, its ability to render anything photogenic: from ‘enormous battleships’, to the ‘steel lace of bridges and railway lines’ or ‘the countless armies of the tiniest attributes of our century, from tin cans to cigarette packets’ (Kolomarov 1929: 29). While rejecting the ‘poetic’ aspirations of the Impressionists, therefore, Soviet critics and practitioners called for cinema to reveal the faktura of the physical world, to better acquaint them with the objects that surrounded them – to aid in the project of reformulating the relationship between man and the material world. It is no coincidence that Kaufman’s article of 1927 was illustrated by stills from Room’s Bed and Sofa and Kuleshov’s Your Acquaintance (chairs). Both were films in which director and designer colluded in a striking treatment of material objects. Both films are interesting for their use of faktura, for their play with the relationship between surface and depth. As directors, both Room and Kuleshov played an active part in the construction of their films’ sets. In neither case did this indicate a lack of interest in the material properties of mise-en-scène, however. Kuleshov’s training as a designer is clear in his pointedly pared-down set, against which key objects acquire dramatic status. Room’s declaration in 1925 that ‘cinema is above all realism, life, everydayness, things (predmetnost')’ indicated his desire to capture the ‘thinginess’ of the world (Room 1925: 56). Bed and Sofa and the later A Severe Youth (Strogii iunosha, 1936), develop an interest in texture and materiality that was already evident in The Traitor. The Traitor: textile, pattern and surface Sergei Iutkevich’s career began in the theatre, as a set designer, so it was natural that he should begin in film in the same role. As designer, he was responsible for two films: The Traitor in 1926 and the much better-known Bed and Sofa. The Traitor was Room’s second film, following The Bay of Death (Bukhta smerti, 1925), and has been described as an ‘eccentric melodrama’ (Bagrov 2005: 75). The screenplay was adapted from a short story by Lev Nikulin with the help of Viktor Shklovskii (then employed by the screenplay 14 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 15 department of the First Factory). It belonged to the popular detective/adventure genre that proliferated in Soviet film production in the mid-1920s, transforming the revolutionary tale of a saboteur into an adventure yarn. The first half of the film was set in pre-Revolutionary Russia, the second in the Soviet period. It was not a critical success, and recent scholarship, based on the limited extant material, has largely concurred (Grashchenkova 1977: 34). Iutkevich himself suggests – with the benefit of hindsight – that Room enlisted him and Shklovskii to compensate for the weakness of Nikulin’s original screenplay (Iutkevich 1947: 135). Grashchenkova’s comment, however, that the film’s ‘cinematic faktura is clearer than its narrative’ bears further consideration (Grashchenkova 1977: 35). Images of the set were published in Soviet Screen in July 1926, before the film’s release (Figure 1), and after release, Iutkevich’s designs attracted Figure 1a: The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926), advertised on the cover [back] of Sovetskii ekran 1926 (28). Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 15 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 16 Figure 1b: The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926), advertised on the cover [front] of Sovetskii ekran 1926 (28). significant attention and even praise, with one reviewer suggesting that he ‘makes the set into a participant in the action’(Prim 1926). In an article of 1925, with a revealingly material metaphor, Iutkevich called decoration the ‘dress’ (plat'e) of a film: ‘The [director’s] taste is expressed in the choice of material, and in the design’ (Iutkevich 1925a). He is careful, here and elsewhere, to emphasize the significance of lighting as the film’s principal ‘tailoring’: ‘Light and space are [a film’s] most important material. A film depends […] not on the “colours” of wallpaper and ornament, but on the play of light and shadow […] the revelation of the faktura of real materials’ (Iutkevich 1925b: 7). This latter statement, which predates Iutkevich’s work on The Traitor, appears curiously counter to the design of that film. The set of The Traitor is constructed around a stylized excess of contrasting decorative textures and patterns. Indeed, in an essay published in a brochure to accompany the film’s release, Iutkevich described it as an exercise in ‘the volumes and textures of surfaces, silken, shiny, lacquered’ (Iutkevich 1926: 315). 16 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 17 Figure 2: Wanda’s boudoir. The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). The brothel that provides the principal location in the film’s preRevolutionary sections is a playful and excessive blend of baroque and art-deco. At a primary level, of course, this excess signals the retrograde and decadent morals of the protagonists, and Iutkevich’s conscious exploitation of baroque excess tapped into an established ideological meaning system: ‘a parody of the over-padded style of a Russian Watteau’ (Iutkevich 1926: 315). The courtesan Wanda’s boudoir has a raised platform at the rear of the set, covered with oriental carpet, and functioning as a bed/divan (Figures 2 and 3). This is distanced from the spectator by Figure 3: Wanda’s boudoir, with folded screen. The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 17 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 18 Figure 4: The screen descends. The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). multiple levels of decoration and textile: an apparently diaphanous folded curtain in the foreground creates an almost theatrical ‘stage’. It is framed by a decorative wallpaper frieze of stylized ships and waves. Later, the folded curtain turns out to be a screen that descends suggestively in the shape and design of a fan, illuminated from behind, creating a strong geometric pattern, which sits alongside the striking design of the wallpaper that surrounds it (Figure 4). A further beaded curtain to the left simultaneously screens and reveals the bed as the site of carnal pleasure. These foregrounded patterns flatten the screen, drawing our attention to its surface. They coexist, however, with decorated carpets and wall hangings in the depth of field (a guitar suspended above the bed, scattered cushions, etc.), which draw the spectator’s eye towards the intimate depths of the shot. Thus the film sets up a curious play between surface and depth. The art-deco style of The Traitor echoes that of many western films of the period – and with similar intent. In 1928, Robert Mallet-Stevens observed with regret that modern – and specifically art-deco – sets were habitually used to signal ‘debauched’ or at best demi-mondaine environments (Albrecht 1986: 52). Room and Iutkevich feature a playful bath, which turns out to be a divan, and echoes what Donald Albrecht notes as a fascination with luxurious bathrooms in modern film design during the late 1920s and 1930s, specifically ‘to heighten a scenario’s exotic titillation’ (Albrecht 1986: 120). In Lazare Meerson’s designs for Jacques Feyder’s Gribiche of 1925, for example, a strikingly luxurious bathroom provided a series of reflective surfaces in a quintessentially modern combination of technological modernity, hygienic physicality and seduction. Bergfelder et al. 18 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/7/09 10:15 AM Page 19 suggest that cinema’s love affair with art-deco style can be linked to filmmakers’ experiments with the relationship between the camera and different material surfaces. They claim that ‘[deco’s] emphasis on texture, smoothness and form does indeed invite a tactile response: we want to touch the perfect surfaces’ (Bergfelder et al. 2007: 263). The influence of art-deco style on Soviet studio sets is clear in other films, particularly in the work of Vladimir Egorov, whose designs for Meierkhol'd’s Portrait of Dorian Grey (Portret Doriana Greia, 1916) exploited art deco’s stylized shapes and surfaces. In its self-conscious excess, however, The Traitor bears comparison with Marcel L’Herbier’s The Inhuman Woman (L’Inhumaine, 1924). Although the only one of L’Herbier’s films to be released in Russia was The Flood (Le Torrent, released as Vodovorot, 1923), it is clear from the cinema press that Soviet film-makers were familiar with French productions of the period (Pozner 1925). L’Inhumaine was a self-conscious homage to modern design, for which the director recruited a remarkable roll-call of the foremost representatives of the new style: Fernand Leger, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Rene Lalique for ‘props’, Guido Cavalcanti for the film’s interiors. The interior shots of singer Claire Lescot’s home are marked by the ornamental excess that characterized art deco: geometric flooring, multiple levels, lozenge patterning and heavily patterned, sculpted fabric. The geometric volumes of Robert Mallet-Stevens’s modernist external architecture sit incongruously alongside the highly patterned surfaces of the interiors, placing an opposition between the decorative and the architectural at the centre of the film. In a similar way, perhaps, the apparent excesses of The Traitor’s mise-en-scène can be seen as part of an enquiry into the nature of cinematic space. The ideological meaning system of the film’s interiors is not straightforward. Its ‘Soviet’ sections exhibit the same excess of surface decoration as the pre-Revolutionary sets. Natalia, a contemporary example of femininity, is marked by the same sensory relationship with objects that distinguishes the pre-Revolutionary courtesan Wanda. She plays with a fish on a stick, toying mischievously with her male companions (Figure 5). Later, she appears in silk pyjamas in a highly modern, art deco-style interior, reclining on a fur rug (Figures 6 and 7). The reflective surfaces of the set’s columns and the undulating silk of Natalia’s pyjamas contrast with diaphanous curtains and strong shadows, creating a scene of considerable textural intensity. The rug ends in a strikingly absurd bear head, a further element that competes for attention in the film’s cluttered mise-en-scène. This interior was directly criticized in a contemporary review: ‘In the guise of everyday life, the film shows superficial picnics, large “chic” apartments, recherché knick-knacks, and elegant ladies’ pyjamas’ (Khersonskii 1926: 24–25). The same critic described the film as an ‘aesthetic rebellion’, accusing Room of a ‘pure experiment in formalism’, and even describing some of the sets as ‘cardboard’. This formalist criticism has been applied to much of Iutkevich’s work – Jay Leyda, for example, describes ‘a pleasure in plastic effects that sometimes diluted the dramatic aims of his films’ (Leyda 1960: 256). In his later writings, Iutkevich himself suggested that the set in The Traitor was unsuccessful, because it was not organically tied to the narrative of the film. It was, he said, a technical exercise: ‘since it was my “debut”, I decided to show off everything I could do, to produce Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 19 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 20 Figure 5: Natalia toys with a toy. The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). what they call a “calling card”’ (Iutkevich 1947: 135). The film involved 30 specially constructed pavilions, an enormous number by contemporary standards. To dismiss the set of The Traitor as an exercise in artistic self-promotion, or an unfocused ideological attack, however, is to do it an injustice. One year later, in Bed and Sofa, the cluttered, over-decorated interior of Liudmila’s apartment clearly served as a negative signifier of petty-bourgeois entrapment. There too, however, the decorative patterns of the set’s textiles, wallpapers and objects had a visual impact that exceeded the symbolic. In both films, I contend, Room and Iutkevich use pattern to experiment with the construction of cinematic space. In his later writings, Iutkevich discussed the three key tasks of the set designer: first, the organization of space; second, control of the relationship of volumes and structures within the set. Third, and for our purposes most importantly, the designer is responsible for cinematic faktura for ‘capturing and conveying’ different materials (Iutkevich 1947: 136). The set of The Traitor is an attempt to use faktura as a means of structuring cinematic space. Textile and pattern have two key functions in the film. First, Iutkevich exploits heavily ornamental – and often clashing – surfaces as backdrop. This cacophony of pattern flattens the filmic surface. In a later scene, for example, we see two men drinking and playing chess, against a background textile patterned with vines, mountains and even a large stork (Figure 8). The pattern competes aggressively for attention with the protagonists and the action. Its refusal to operate as backdrop upsets perspective, distorting the screen’s illusion of depth, drawing our attention to the surface, flattening it. This is characteristic of the film’s conscious play with spectatorial perception. Appearances are deceptive: a 20 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 21 Figure 6: Natalia’s Hollywood-style boudoir. The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). bath turns out to be a divan, a curtain turns into a fan-shaped screen, an anomalous bear’s head occupies centre stage in an interior. Just as Natalia coquettishly waves a toy fish, so Iutkevich playfully seduces the spectator into a process of constant readjustment. Expected hierarchies of significance are thrown into question: action does not dominate over Figure 7: Natalia – film star. The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 21 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 22 Figure 8: The Traitor (Abram Room, 1926). set; characters appear no more alive than the things that surround them. As one contemporary reviewer exclaimed: ‘Everything is acting/ playing (igraet).’ This ‘play’ cannot be interpreted; it yields no obvious meaning. It is in its very meaninglessness, however, in the consistent blurring of figure and ground, that Iutkevich’s most significant experiment in cinematic faktura lies. Despite the frontal impact of these extreme patterns, Iutkevich’s set design also plays with depth of field. Diaphanous fabrics such as net and tulle create transparent partitions and vary the levels of action within the frame. Transparent screens of this kind enact cinema’s movement between two- and three-dimensional space. On the one hand, they draw our attention to the nature of the screen as surface; on the other, they engage us in an act of seeing through that surface, they invite perception of depth and threedimensionality. In its innate fluidity, moreover, textile recreates the screen as textural and material. Antonia Lant has analysed the use of transparent curtains in de Cordova and Samuelson’s She of 1925. She suggests that the layering of textile is used to make two- and three-dimensional spaces (the surface of the curtain and that which lies beyond) coexist: ‘the curtain itself, with its figures, slight folds and undulations, slight thickness, not quite one with the skin of the screen, portends this spatial rending’ (Lant 1995: 53). In related terms, analysing Buñuel’s Le Chien andalou (1929), Andrew Webber analyses the cinematic properties of lace, and its appeal to the early film-maker. He writes, ‘As a cover, corporeal or architectural,’ lace draws attention to what is undercover: it is flat but indicates with its porosity the attraction of hidden depths. Lace is a lure, presenting a device amenable 22 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 23 to both exhibitionist and voyeur, especially in conjunction with the right forms of lighting. And by drawing the viewer to it and into its ornamental fabrication, it is also the sort of viewing material that engages the visual into the haptic. It is tactile to the eye of the beholder, and if the lace at the window is to be seen through, it demands an intimate kind of physical proximity. (Webber 2007: 93–94) For Webber, lace is emblematic of the film eye’s particular form of ‘looking’ – its capacity simultaneously to see, and to see through, to dwell on surface, while at the same time penetrating towards depth. This is a suggestive way to think about The Traitor. The contrasting patterns and textures set up a creative play between surface and depth. While the stylized excess of pattern is painterly in feel, treating the screen as a flat, pictorial surface, the film does not allow the spectator’s eye to rest at a distance from this surface, drawing it instead, through those transparent screens, into three-dimensionality. In this way, the spectator moves between different modes of perception, which – following Alois Riegl – we might call the ‘haptic’ and the ‘optical’. Riegl (who began his career as curator of oriental textiles) argued that the lack of distinction between figure and ground in abstract ornament impedes the process of recognition. Since we cannot see form, we are drawn into an alternative mode of contemplation, one that is multi-sensory. The abstract encourages an imaginatively tactile response that figurative representation does not. In the terms of the film theorist Laura Marks, Iutkevich’s patterns force our eye to ‘rest on the surface of its object rather than to plunge into depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture’ (Marks 2002: 8). This is what Marks calls ‘haptic looking’. For Marks, as for Giuliana Bruno, the ‘haptic’ is a category of sensory identification, where the spectator is drawn into an imaginary physical penetration of the filmic space. Lant, however, takes issue with this definition of ‘haptic’ cinema, arguing that Riegl’s original formulation of the ‘haptic’ as a term of art criticism referred to the ‘pure surface’ of Egyptian art, and is therefore innately opposed to cinematic depth of field. In Egyptian art, Riegl suggested, space relations were transformed into relations on a plane: there was no depth. Riegl’s distinction between haptic and optical was based on a distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ perception. In Lant’s words: ‘Riegl’s understanding of the relation of viewer to art work is not derived from his or her identification with a represented human figure, but rather operates at the level of design’ (Lant 1995: 62). ‘Haptic’ perception is objective – that is, the spectator is fixed in a position external to the work of art. ‘Optical’ modes of representation are subjective – that is, perspective and depth encourage a mobile spectator engaged in an act of imaginative identification with the image. Riegl’s somewhat reductive account of the evolution of western art charts a move from the haptic to the optical, from the objective to the subjective, and thus away from the confrontation with materiality that Egyptian art had offered: ‘with an increased space and threedimensionality the figure in a work of art is also increasingly dematerialized’ (Lant 1995: 62). This provides an interesting approach to The Traitor. The clashing patterns and textures in the set are part of the film’s conscious play between Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 23 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 10. Discussing his next film, Kruzheva (1928), Iutkevich described his desire to capture the faktura of lacemaking: ‘The unusual faktura of lace production captivated me’ (Iutkevich 1925a). 11. The significance of design to the production of Your Acquaintance is suggested by the wealth of archive material retained in the State Film archive, Gosfil'mofond, (f. 1, op. 2, ed. khr. 1: 86). Lengthy inventories detail the film’s ‘décor’, which includes itemized bills (47). Notes retained in this archive state that the film was to be a total of 81 days in the making, of which 24 were needed for ‘preparation’. This level of detail is unusual in relation to the material archived in Gosfil'mofond for other films of the same period of 1926–28. 3/3/09 12:09 PM Page 24 surface and depth. Their frontal nature repels the spectator’s instinctive attempts to penetrate the space, forcing us to rest in a position that Riegl would describe as ‘objective’. We are acutely aware of faktura – of the densely textural, heavily decorative stuff of which the set is made.10 We move alternately between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, ‘haptical’ and ‘optical’ experiences of the screen. As such, the film can be viewed as part of a broader enquiry into film’s relationship with material – a project that was taken up in earnest, but in very different terms, in Kuleshov’s Your Acquaintance, which was released the following year. Your Acquaintance: volume and contrast Your Acquaintance originally called The Journalist (Zhurnalistka) was the sixth feature film produced by Lev Kuleshov, with his wife Aleksandra Khokhlova playing the main role, Kuznetsov as camera operator and Rodchenko as khudozhnik. It was not well received by contemporary critics. In their memoirs, Kuleshov and Khokhlova describe Your Acquaintance as an ‘antifilm’ – that is, as a challenge to conventional narrative cinema: ‘In essence, it’s as if nothing happens in the film. The actors (principally Khokhlova) just live, and the camera carefully follows what happens, with meticulous attention to detail’ (Kuleshov and Khokhlova 1975: 106). This emphasis on ‘detail’ provides a key to the film’s poetics, and is of particular interest in relation to set design. Rodchenko’s work in cinema was confined to four films over a two-year period, during which he was employed as khudozhnik by the First Factory: Your Acquaintance (1927), Obolenskii’s Al'bidum (1927), Boris Barnet’s Moscow in October (Moskva v oktiabre, 1927), and Komarov’s The Doll with Millions (Kukla s s millionami, 1928). In Your Acquaintance, Rodchenko was involved in the design of both costume and set, but his most significant contribution lay in the design of purpose-built furniture for two interior sets: the newspaper office, and the home of the heroine, journalist Khokhlova (who takes the name of the actress). The film’s design attracted considerable excitement in the critical press, and can be seen as a precursor to Rodchenko’s much better-known work on the theatrical performance of Anatolii Glebov’s play Inga, directed by Maksim Tereshkovich at the Theatre of the Revolution in 1929.11 It is particularly interesting for our purposes, however, because of its engagement with the specificity of cinematic space – the relationship between surface and depth. Mikhail Iampolskii characterises the 1920s as a wholesale rejection of pre-Revolutionary cinema’s preoccupation with the creation of depth. The best of the 1920s, he suggests, is an exercise in ‘pure surface’ (Iampolskii 2006: 13). Kuleshov describes how his interest in montage and editing came to dominate over the décor and design that had been his earliest focus. This, he claimed, entailed a re-envisaging of the nature of filmic representation: ‘We have to think of the individual frames of a film as frames similar to the primitive, flat illustrations on antique vases’ (Kuleshov 1918: 62). Instead of striving to overcome the specificity of the medium – the cinematographic – by creating the illusion of depth, film-makers must exploit the very ‘surface’, and the flatness/two-dimensionality (nestereoskopichnost') of the play of light (svetopis') on the screen. The power of cinema lies in the contrast between black and white, and in the ‘formal 24 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 25 resolutions in each still’. This emphasis on the pictorial composition of the individual frame went hand-in-hand with the dominance of montage in Soviet film of this period. Kuleshov describes how Your Acquaintance’s visual style was shaped by his growing understanding of the power of contrast. The majority of the set was dark (constructed out of dark brown or black materials), and Kuznetsov arranged the lighting so that ‘the human face, or the object, stands out clearly, in relief (relef'no), against the background’ (Kuleshov 1929: 188). This term, relef 'no, is important, for it draws our attention to the threedimensional materiality of the objects on screen. The purpose of lighting is to endow objects and people with a ‘sculptural’ quality. This signals an important contradiction, central to the emergent aesthetics of set design in the period. Despite the emphasis on the screen as ‘surface’, and a growing recognition of the power of camera and lighting to transform physical objects, it is notable that the faktura (in this case, the real materiality) of set, props and costume remains a consistent preoccupation: in Kuleshov’s words, ‘The better the faktura of the set’s surfaces, the better the result’ (Kuleshov 1929: 186). Indeed, Kuleshov claimed that the shift towards montage entailed a shift in set design away from a focus on perspective, and towards ‘the material and the quality of material’ (Kuleshov 1929: 185). Kuleshov’s description of the art of ‘ancient vases’ as one of surfaces echoes Riegl’s interest in Egyptian art, and returns us to consideration of ‘hapticity’. The ultimate aim of film is to bring about an encounter with materiality, to reveal and exploit the faktura of the objects, both animate and inanimate, that it photographs. A play between surface and depth is at the centre of Your Acquaintance’s visual style. For all Kuleshov’s proclaimed focus on the screen as surface, this film is particularly marked for its use of light and dark to create depth of field. Exploiting the lessons learned with Bauer, Kuleshov continues to use strong outline shapes (a balustrade, a staircase, etc.) in the foreground, and at middle distance, to articulate the space beyond the frame. Depth is marked by layers of pattern, often created by light. In a shot of the newspaper office by night, for example, light streams through a back-lit window placed on the right at middle distance, creating a path of shadow stripes that leads the spectator’s eye into the depth of the frame (Figure 9). This is characteristic: surface pattern in the film is created by the relationship between volumes. Where much film of the period featured patterned textile, either in costume or in décor, Your Acquaintance has none at all. The heroine’s strongly contemporary aesthetic consists of a simple grey dress with a white collar. Her long pale neck, short hair and dark eyes, often hidden by a simple cloche hat, transform her into an angular composition of contrasting shades of grey. Clothing, indeed, is a distinct part of this film’s mise-en-scène, even becoming thematic when the film’s opening sequence offers a shot of a block-striped scarf – ‘just like Khokhlova’s’. The scarf acts as a signifier of Khokhlova (and as such is described as an ‘unwanted gift’ when a copy is bought by her admirer for his wife). A synecdoche of the heroine herself, its strong contrasting stripes echo the striking shadow stripes of the newspaper office set, and are also a microcosm of the film’s overarching aesthetic, in which volume and mass, light and dark, create a visual contrast. Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 25 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 26 Figure 9: The newspaper office by night. Your Acquaintance (Lev Kuleshov, 1927). Kuleshov’s rejection of patterned textile was pointed, and part of his understanding of cinematic faktura. He advocated the use of grey velvet for covering volumes and structures in the set, claiming that it offered an ideal reflectivity and evenness of surface (Kuleshov 1929: 187). In similar terms, he suggested that the floors of film sets could be covered with the reverse side of carpets – to provide a non-reflective mid-grey surface, rather than the patterns of most carpets (Kuleshov 1929: 190). This rejection of decorative pattern, however, did not mean a rejection of the patterning of the surface of the cinematic screen per se. As we have shown, shadows and reflections create a grid pattern across the dark surface of the newspaper office floor. The office is messy, strewn with scattered cigarette ends and discarded papers. These white objects stand out against the flat grey of the floor, interrupting the spectator’s process of perception, their random distribution making a pattern. They draw our attention to the surface of the screen. Unlike ‘mere’ decoration, however, these objects combine pattern and volume. In terms of the theoretical preoccupations of the period, they have material density – faktura. And when Khokhlova bends to pick up a broken match, they intervene in the filmic narrative, acquiring a concrete materiality, breaking through the surface of the film, demanding a different kind of spectatorial engagement. Things – objects – are central to Your Acquaintance in both theme and style. Kuleshov was against the habitual ‘chaos’ that characterized film sets of domestic interiors. He called instead for a small number of carefully selected details: each element of the décor must be seen as a montage element, and have narrative or symbolic significance. Thus a single glass ornament and a coat hanger in an actress’s room in Your Acquaintance 26 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 27 should convey its owner’s weakness for the pleasures of consumerism (Kuleshov 1929: 189). Elsewhere, as Khokhlova sits at the desk of her admirer Petrovskii, she picks up a toy and fingers it with curiosity, before coquettishly instructing him to give it to her. Just as the young woman in The Traitor used a toy as a device for flirtation, here too the touching of the object is an act of seduction. Like the scarf, the toy comes to function as a symbol of Khokhlova herself. Later, after Khokhlova has been chastised for failing to submit her article to deadline, she stands alone in the office. As she walks around the deserted room, she touches its objects one after another, running her finger across their surfaces, dusting them. The material shapes of the space acquire sensory immediacy for the spectator. When she picks up scissors, she first runs their closed blades across her chest, and their dark outline puckers the light grey of her dress, rendering its material (and hence its materiality) at once tangible and fragile. As she stumbles upon a note announcing that she is to lose her job, the pointed end of the scissors moves to her neck, pressing gently into its flesh, tormenting our already heightened senses (Figure 10). The pointedly tactile impact of these shots is part of the film’s broader poetics. Kuleshov and Rodchenko play with modes of spectator response, shifting between optical and haptic forms of engagement. In one sense, the screen is flattened; in another, it is given material depth and tactile immediacy. Like a child’s pop-up picture, it moves explicitly between two- and three-dimensionality. The effect of this is to make the spectator intensely aware of the faktura of the material world portrayed. Picturing ‘ordinary’ people in Soviet reality, Your Acquaintance was responding to calls for film to engage with byt. Rodchenko formulated the role of the khudozhnik as one of responsibility for the ‘material environment’ of Figure 10: Alexandra Khokhlova. Your Acquaintance (Lev Kuleshov, 1927). Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design 27 SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 28 the film: for the space in which its characters would ‘live’. In practice, however, the byt that Rodchenko was concerned to reveal was far from ‘ordinary’. If The Traitor exploited the shapes and surfaces of art deco, Your Acquaintance is a homage to the revolutionary ideals of Soviet modernism. Donald Albrecht has shown how, during the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, film set design became a showcase for modern architectural designs. For figures such as Rodchenko, film and theatre allowed the possibility of realizing visions of the new world that remained frustratingly impossible in real life. In this film, it was the journalist’s own room that generated most critical excitement. Rodchenko’s designs were upheld as examples of the new functionalism of Soviet everyday life: ‘Rodchenko […] skilfully captures the logical simplicity and utility of our everyday life […]. The struggle for grand forms, a new presentation of the material on the one hand, and the minute facts of life on the other’ (V 1926: 4). This idea of reconciling the ambition for ‘grand forms’ with ‘minute facts of life’ is an excellent summation of the film’s aesthetic ambitions. It describes the highly functional, streamlined spaces that Rodchenko created for his protagonists, bringing revolutionary ideals into ordinary daily life. At a more complex level, it also captures the complex relationship with material objects that is our focus here. Throughout the film, ordinary – even banal – things acquire a physical intensity, and through that a kind of grandeur: cigarette ends turn into a pattern, scissors become larger than life. According to Rodchenko, the task of the kino-khudozhnik was to enact this transformation: It has to be done so that everything appears real, but in fact, everything is stylized. In cinema it is important to remove objects that don’t play a role. Film does not tolerate realism ‘like life’. The film artist has to find the characteristic object […], to reveal ordinary things such that they have never been seen before. (Miasnikov 1973: 22) This complex relationship between realism and stylization is characteristic of many avant-garde manifestos of the period in which devices of exaggeration and stylization were described as revealing the ‘truth’ of reality. In Rodchenko’s formulation, however, lay the additional suggestion that film would reveal new aspects of ordinary objects. It would enable an encounter with materiality, with faktura; it was part of the broader revolutionary project: to rediscover – and remake – the world in new terms. Conclusion The question of film’s power to reveal or transform reality was particularly complex in relation to the mundane objects of everyday life. How could the banal become revolutionary? It is striking that in both Your Acquaintance and The Traitor, female protagonists are shown handling children’s toys. In the functionally driven climate of early Soviet Russia, the toy must have been an object with a curious status. Toys are superfluous objects par excellence, instruments of mere ‘play’, with no obvious use-value. Here, the symbolic link between woman and toy encodes the woman herself as playful, superficial, implicitly superfluous to the serious world of production. Beyond this, however, the power of toys as cinematic things may lie in 28 Emma Widdis SRSC_3.1_02_art_Widdis 3/3/09 8:21 AM Page 29 precisely their lack of function. Their presence in these films is an instance of pure ‘thinginess’: as they are touched, our attention is drawn to them, they exceed functionality and acquire a tangible materiality. In their simple being, therefore, these cinematic toys exemplify many of the arguments presented here. They represent the sheer materiality of things, and film’s relationship with them. This essay has offered a snapshot of the theory and practice of set design in the second half of the 1920s, with a focus on two very little-known case studies. My purpose has been to show the part played by the set in constructing cinematic space. In particular, I have drawn attention to the role of set (its textures, objects and patterns) in the creation of cinematic faktura. I have suggested that decorative textiles contributed to the patterning of the screen, maximizing the expressive potential of the black-and-white film stock. In Your Acquaintance, rejecting ‘bourgeois’ decoration, Kuleshov exploited instead a range of different single shades and textures of material. In one sense, Iutkevich’s ornamental surfaces and Rodchenko’s expressive volumes and perspective can be seen as part of the same endeavour. Both films are a formal enquiry into the relationship between surface and depth. They use very different means (decorative textiles or artfully distributed rubbish) to pattern the surface of the screen. This patterning draws our attention to the screen as surface. Both films refuse to allow us to rest on that surface, however, drawing us into the depth of field – only to expel us once again. This was a key moment in the evolution of cinematic language, and these films are very much part of that evolution, engaged in a working through of its central questions. The most important of these questions was that of spectatorial engagement, an exploration of Riegl’s categories of ‘optical’ and ‘haptic’ experience. It was tied to the Soviet Revolutionary agenda: a fresh, multi-sensory encounter with the material world was part of Soviet cinema’s remaking of human experience. Of course, the debate about depth and surface in film stretched beyond the field of set design, and has not been addressed in full complexity here. I hope, however, to have drawn attention to the function of the texture, textile and things in silent cinema of this period. Antonia Lant describes: ‘the eye’s pleasurable flickering over a surface, perceiving layered space without being able to move closer to run fingers on a stone, or see the gouging of an eye.’ She suggests that ‘recognizing implied, subtle depths over a decorated plane was a delight heightened, dynamized and enlarged through cinema, an engagement badly displayed in the artful juxtapositioning of different representational modes – drawing, bas-reliefs, incised images, printed textile undulation, moving human figures’ (Lant 1995: 73). In the Soviet context, these ‘delights’ acquired particular potency. In film’s experimental play with surface and depth, we can trace the search for revolutionary modes of experience, a quest for a heightened physical awareness of the world. 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Reprinted in Za 60 let. Raboty o kino (Moscow, 1985), pp. 110–13. Sokolov, I. (1926), Kinofront, 2–3, p. 28. Tashiro, C. S. (1998), Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film, Austin: University of Texas Press. Tsivian, Iu. (1996), ‘Two “Stylists” of the Teens: Franz Hofer and Evgenii Bauer’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 264–76. V. (pseudonym) (1926), Gukok, 2 September, p. 4. Webber, A. (2007), ‘Cut and Laced: Traumatism in Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou’, in A. Sabbadini (ed.), Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 92–101. Suggested citation Widdis, E. (2009), ‘Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3: 1, pp. 5–32, doi: 10.1386/srsc.3.1.5/1 Contributor details Emma Widdis is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University, and Fellow of Trinity College. She is the author of Visions of a New Land: Soviet Cinema from the Revolution to the Second World War (2003), and Alexander Medvedkin (2004), co-editor, with Simon Franklin, of National Identity in Russian Culture (2004), and author of other articles on Russian cinema and culture. She is currently working on a cultural history of ‘touch’ in Soviet Russia. Contact: Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ. E-mail: [email protected] 32 Emma Widdis