by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Movies are always quoting something. More often than not, they’re quoting other movies, other people’s ideas about what cinema should be. They quote ideas about art and drama in their construction. The early filmmakers quoted their ideas about photographs when they shot the first moving pictures. Griffith’s editing grew out of his own conception of theater and action; there’s a reason he called his movies “photo-plays.” Sometimes filmmakers quote the same things to different results. The filmmakers of the Russian Empire, member of the same tradition Sergei Eisenstein was rebelling against with his films, were quoting the same theater as Eisenstein’s beloved Griffith: the dramatic tradition of the late 19th century. But while Griffith saw in theater action, moments of heightened emotion, his Russian contemporaries saw the power of the stage, the subtle power of people moving through a space. So when Yevgeni Bauer and Yakov Protazanov made their films in the 1910s, what the sought to create in their images was an impossible theater. Every screen was a stage, every long take a carefully framed, hyperreal bit of theater. These are images which look different depending on where you’re sitting. Bauer and Protazanov’s protagonists are often in the corners of the frame, lurking as if on a stage. Heads pop in and out of the frame on the side. There is a coiled strength, a suspense to these images that reaches its apex with Protazanov’s The Queen of Spades, made in 1916. There are no close-ups here, no iris shots, no soft focus. When the camera moves, often in diagonals, it’s like a revolving set, the whole world lurching towards us.