Silent Soviet Americanism
- Published: 22/01/2010 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: Realtime
Here is something unusual: a five-hour, American-style action serial made in the Soviet Union in 1926, during the honeymoon period of the country's new communist system when avant-gardism was encouraged in the arts (revolutionary art for a revolutionary society). The Socialist Realism axe would come crashing down at the end of the decade, but this was the amazingly fertile period of freedom that produced great poetry by artists like Yesenin and Blok, surrealistic novels like Yuriy Olesha's Zavist, and music like Dmitri Shostakovich's opera, The Nose, that still sounds modern today.
MISS MEND (USSR, 1926, B&W) directed by Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep and starring Natalya Glan, Boris Barnet, Vladimir Fogel, Igor Ilyinskiy, Ivan Koval-Samborskiy, Sergei Komarov and Natalya Rozenel. Full-screen, 250 min. Silent with English intertitles. Extras include two documentaries about American influences on the serial and about Robert Israel’s new musical score. A Flicker Alley DVD release (All regions, NTSC, two DVDs)
The cinema was equally fertile, with directors such as Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov creating works that took the art in new directions. But although these innovative productions delighted an international audience for art films, they didn't make much of an impression on Soviet audiences, who were much more attracted to American movies that featured glamorous stars, super-melodramatic plots and non-stop action. Even the Soviet cultural officials had to concede this, and for a while advocated a filmmaking style that used the crude methods of American serials like The Perils of Pauline to get the socialist message across to general audiences.
Barnet and Otsep's Miss Mend, a serial in three parts, was one of the results. From the very first scene, where pretty heroine Vivian Mend (Glan) is being manhandled by police who are breaking up a strike at the American Rockefeller and Co in the United States, the intrigue and mayhem never let up for a minute of its over-four-hour total duration.
But the smashing of the strike is only part of a vastly more sinister plot being undertaken by the utterly evil chemist Chitche (Komarov) and his mysterious Organization, which has as its aim not only the destruction of socialism, but also the annihilation of all of Soviet Russia. He has developed chemical and bacteriological weapons, commissioned by stockbrokers and banks, that will be set off by radio waves to kill millions of Russians.
Chitche's main purpose is to experimentally test the weapons that he will use in his was against Bolshevism, with the attack on Russia merely a sideline. "I propose these tests be carried out in Soviet Russia," he announces to his sponsoring Organization of bankers and capitalists. "This way, we'll combine scientific research with the practical benefit of eliminating this harmful nation."
A trio of American journalists (Barnet, Fogel and Ilyinskiy), the heroes of the story, learn of the plan and, through some comic plot juggling, join forces with Vivian Mend to follow Chitche and his evildoers to Leningrad, intent on foiling the plan. But there are complications: Mend has become the obsessive romantic interest of one of the kingpins of the plan, who has been wooing her using a fake name.
Miss Mend's storyline is great fun. It is based on a Russian novel of the same name and period by 'Jim Dollar', actually a woman named Marietta Shaginian who had as her aim the creation of "cinema as literature". Her model was the mainstream American movie of the time, all action without a pause for character development. But even more interesting is its cartoonish depiction of evil American businessmen and their ways. Sometimes it hits sensitive targets: at one point during the attack on strikers a black worker is killed. When a policeman looks at the corpse, he sneers, "No big deal. He's black." But at other times the characterisations are so broad, and the villains' evil so unmitigated, that they seem to be refugees from de Sade's Juliette.
Not so Vivian Mend herself. Although she is, like most of the characters, basically a sketch, she is magnetic. She is completely her own woman, unmarried and raising the little boy left behind by her murdered sister. She picks up on things quickly and knows how to deal with most all of the emergencies that confront her. Actress Glan is a beautiful woman with unforgettable eyes.
A documentary called Miss Mend and Soviet Americanism, included on the second disc, was created and is narrated by Soviet culture specialists Ana Olenina and Maxim Pozdorovkin, who repeatedly make the point that the over-the-top chase scenes and fights that occur repeatedly through the serial have a double purpose, first to utilise the methods of American pop cinema, and then to satirise it through gross exaggeration. I wonder.
There is nothing here that goes father than some of the action in some of DW Griffith's melodramas, not to mention Feuillade's French serials of a decade earlier, Les Vampires, for example, with its exploding ships and gassings of entire upper-crust soirees.
Among the incidental pleasures of watching Miss Mend now is spotting improbabilities that viewers of the time might have accepted unquestioningly as conventions. After the most violent fights and disasters, the journalist heroes always seem to have kept their hats with them. At one point, three of them are smuggled from New York to Leningrad in sealed packing crates no bigger than coffins where they sleep peacefully in straw for the entire duration, untroubled by any hygiene-related needs.
The transfer used by Flicker Alley is, for the most part, extraordinarily sharp and clear for such an old and obscure film, and Robert Israel's score, recorded by amazingly adept, sight-reading Czech musicians, effectively heightens the atmosphere of the film without intruding into it. Well worth seeking out.
I ordered my copy from http://amazon.com.
source : bangkokpost.com
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