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3 Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s OKSANA BULGAKOWA Translated by Jeffrey Karlsen Patterns of spatial representation are essential for establishing the styles of different authors or schools, especially in film, where segmentation of space has been crucial to the development of filmic narration based on montage. The introduction of the close-up at the beginning of the twentieth century changed cinema’s conception of spatial representation, which had hitherto in its short history been shaped by compositional principles of painting and of theatrical miseen -scène, with its two-dimensional front plane of the stage. These tableaux were oriented toward the camera, which acted as a mirror or an impersonal eye. The close-up ruptured the integrity of this space and shaped the understanding of spatial representation as dependent on a character’s point of view. The character’s approach toward and retreat from an object (performed literally or understood figuratively as the concentration of the gaze) provided the justification for disrupting the spatial continuum and reassembling its segments. Dreams and visions often served as the plot devices needed to motivate the juxtaposition of different places. D.W. Griffith resorted to such patterns to impart a metaphysical dimension to the spiritual intimacy of characters supposedly separated by great distances. At the start of the 1920s, the leading Russian directors experimenting with montage—Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein—established a new canon of spatial representation. It responded to the tenets of architects who, like El Lissitzky, declared, “We no longer want space that will be understood as the painted coffin for our bodies.”1 Cinematic space was understood first and foremost as virtual, constructed space. The narrative canon and the camera angle were not supposed to be motivated by an individual’s point of view. In the 1930s, this representational system was substantially revised. The change was brought about by the same directors who had devel51 oped the spatial canon of the 1920s. Tracing this shift in the conceptualization of the spatial canon becomes all the more fascinating when we discover that behind purely professional decisions lay a new system of opinions, indicating a change in cultural paradigms. Creative Geography, Total Vision, and Cubist Pulverization of Space One of Kuleshov’s first montage experiments, in 1920, involved “creative geography.” A woman (Alexandra Khokhlova) walks along Petrovka Street past the Mostorg store, and a man (Leonid Obolensky) walks along the Moscow River embankment. These places are about two miles apart in the real world. Kuleshov describes their movement in cinematic space as follows: They see each other, smile, and begin to walk toward one another. Their meeting is filmed on Prechistenskii Boulevard. This boulevard is in an entirely different section of the city. They clasp hands, with Gogol’s monument as a background, and look—at the White House!—for at this point, we cut in a segment from an American film, The White House in Washington. In the next shot they are once again on Prechistenskii Boulevard. Deciding to go farther, they leave and climb up the enormous staircase of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. We film them, edit the film, and the result is that they are seen walking up the steps of the White House. When we showed this film fragment, everyone understood that Mostorg is on the banks of the Moscow River, that between Mostorg and the river is Prechistenskii Boulevard, where Gogol’s monument is located, and that across from the monument is the White House.2 One of Vertov’s first montage exercises was similarly connected to the annihilation of geographical fixedness: “You are walking down a street in Chicago now, in 1923, but I force you to bow to the late Comrade Volodarsky, who is walking along a street in Petrograd in 1918 and who responds to you with a bow.”3 But Vertov did not follow Kuleshov’s practice of using narrative continuity to foster a unity of space by having the hero move from one place to another: “The coffins of popular heroes are being lowered into their graves (filmed in Astrakhan in 1918), the graves are covered (Kronstadt, 1921), a gun salute (Petrograd, 1920), eternal remembrance, people doff their hats (Moscow, 1922).”4 52 OKSANA BULGAKOWA Proceeding along this course, Vertov created a montage of a universal city made from documentary segments of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. The freedom with which montage brings together spatial segments suggests a total vision, a “panoptic...

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