In the 1910s both cinema cameras and projectors were driven mainly by hand, which meant that the speed at which a film was run depended on the cameraman and the projectionist. When camera speed and
projection speed coincided, the film ran normally and there were no objections from the audience. But, as Kevin Brownlow and Barry Salt have reminded us, although the two speeds were meant to coincide, this did not occur often.16 Projectionists had no reservations about exploiting to the full the potential for
improvisation offered by the difference between the two speeds. Dmitri Kirsanov, a film director particularly noted for his feeling for slow rhythm,17 recalled the way films were shown in his home town of
Yurevo (now Tartu):
I well remember the impressions of my first visits to the cinema. It was a long time ago, when the cinematograph first appeared, and since the Kinematograph, where I used to go, was in a provincial town where lethargy was a rule of life, I saw most of the films at a kind of slowed-down pace. It was just like watching a modern slow-motion film. Consequently, the thing that most appealed to me in the cinema was the slow and unnatural movements of the actors. I used to think, of course, that the ability to move like that was a special artistic gift, and I tried—without success—to imitate the inimitable movements of cinema. 18
It was, of course, rare for the whole film to be shown in slow motion. Usually the projectionists, who were thoroughly familiar with the films and the audience’s reactions to the various scenes, altered the projection speed to match the shots: they speeded it up though the longueurs and slowed it down for the sentimental scenes. The most constant correlation was that between projection speed and genre: chases and comedies were speeded up in projection. In one of his essays G.K.Chesterton expressed his dissatisfaction with this practice:
In order that a man riding on horse should look as if he were riding hard, it is first necessary that he should look like a man riding on a horse. It is not even an impossibly rapid ride, if he only looks like a Catherine wheel seen through a fog. It is not an impression of swiftness; because it is not an impression of anything.19
In his monograph on Abel Gance, Kevin Brownlow mentions that some projectionists used to synchronise the film with the accompanying musical score, following the conductor’s baton rather than watching the screen. There do not appear to be any complaints about this practice in the 1910s, but for rapid editing it could be disastrous. Sergei Eisenstein recalled that Edmund Meisel, who wrote the score for The Battleship Potemkin (1926),
ruined a public showing of Potemkin in London, in the autumn of 1929, by having the film projected slightly more slowly than normal, without my agreement, for the sake of the music. This destroyed all the dynamics of the rhythmic relationships to such a degree that for the first time in Potemkin’s whole existence the effect of the ‘lions jumping up’ caused laughter.20
The considerations which most of all affected the choice of projection speed were those of the ‘picture turnover’ factor. A reviewer for The Theatre Paper, complaining of the lifelessness of plastic representation inherent—in his opinion—in the ‘mechanistic’ nature of screen movement, did not hesitate to include the projectionist in his criticism:
Moved by some alien, heteronomous will, the screen heroes only parody what is enacted in front of the lens of the studio camera. They walk as no one in real life ever walks; they gesture like puppets,
and at the last performance they acquire the magic ability to move and act with great speed and a truly amazing and fabulous alacrity.21
The last remark reveals the author to have been a regular cinemagoer. In the 1910s the cognoscenti avoided the late performances for fear of falling victim to the projectionist who was in a hurry to get off home. Cine- Phono, with the gravity befitting a specialist journal, explained what happened in such cases:
If the film is made to run at—let us say—double speed, with thirty-two instead of sixteen frames a second, then all the movements on the screen will seem twice as fast as in real life. For example, the steps of a man walking normally will look like rapid jumps: walking turns into running; every calm fluent gesture is turned into a jerky, convulsive twitch.22
Even if viewers somehow managed to come to terms with the arbitrary behaviour of the projectionist, the last performances could turn out to be disastrous for particular styles of acting. While the Mack Sennet kind of comedy could not exist without speeded-up movement, the statuesque plasticity of the Russian actor needed to be projected if not in slow motion exactly then certainly not at an accelerated speed. I have already mentioned (in another context) the Italian ‘diva’ style of acting, which constructed a trajectory of movement as a progression from one significant pose to another. The Russian cinema of the 1910s—not uninfluenced by the theories of dramatic timing associated with the Moscow Art Theatre—raised this style of acting to the level of a conscious aesthetic programme. As Kevin Brownlow observed, Russian cinema seems to have only two speeds: ‘slow’ and ‘stop’.
This ‘stretched’ style, recognised as a unique attribute of Russian cinema, was also accompanied by attempts to give it a theoretical basis. At one time it was energetically sponsored by the journals The Projector and Pegasus. The former wrote:
It may sound paradoxical for the art of cinema (which got its name from the Greek word for movement) but the style of our best cinema actors amounts to moving as slowly as possible. The art of the screen relies on mime in just the same way as theatre relies on words. On the stage, actors try to speak distinctly, clearly, and without undue haste; on the screen it is even more essential to mime clearly and distinctly, and hence as slowly as possible. Every one of our best actors has his or her own style of mime: Mosjoukine has his steely hypnotic stare; Gzovskaya—her tender, endlessly varied facial lyricism; Maximov’s mime is tense and nervous, while Polonsky’s is full of refinement and grace. But all of them subordinate their acting—with an unusual economy of gesture—to a rhythm that rises and falls particularly slowly.23
We can easily imagine how frequently cinema actors used to complain about projectionists. In fact in 1914 this conflict was the subject of an open letter from Ivan Mosjoukine to The Theatre Paper, in which the actor vigorously brushed aside all accusations that he had got the rhythm of a particular role quite wrong, and laid the blame for this entirely on the projectionist:
When the film is being shot the camera is run at a precisely set speed. It reproduces movements on the screen which correspond exactly to the actor’s movements in front of the camera. If the same speed is used when the film is being projected the audience will see living people with fluent, slow movements… The gentlemen who own our cinemas recognise no such laws. Apart from those few ‘first-class’ cinemas which do take an interest in artistic considerations, what most of them do, when
the programme is a long one and has to be shown three times a night (which cannot be done using the normal, prescribed tempo), is to order the ‘lad in the box’ to ‘speed it up’. The poor actors, through no fault of their own, jump and twitch like cardboard clowns and the audience, not initiated into the secrets of the projection box, dismisses them as untalented and inexperienced. I cannot tell you what it feels like when you see your own normal movements transformed into a wild dance at the whim of this mere boy. You feel as if you were being slandered on all sides without having any way of proving your innocence.24
The acting fraternity and the projection room staff were constantly at loggerheads; their hostility was traditional. The film director Nikolai Shpikovsky, not without a certain fondness, described how, in the 1920s, the great stage actor Ivan Moskvin, a tyro in the cinema, successfully took on the air of an old hand at the game:
They say that at a working run-through of The Station Master [Kollezhskii registrator, 1925], Moskvin stated that the reason for his poor acting in one part of the picture was that the projectionist was cranking the handle too fast. This is quite superb—and touching. If the Moskvin of the theatre strikes us as an exclusively unique and fresh actor on the screen, then this is only because it turns out that he loves cinema and cares about the handle of the projector!25
But there was also a feedback between the projection box and the audience. If the film was going too fast the audience used to shout ‘Don’t rush the picture!’ [Ne goni kartinu!]. If the film was going too slowly they would call out ‘Turn it, Mickey!’ [Mishka, verti!]. In the 1910s all projectionists were called ‘Mishka’ (just as all Moscow cabmen were called ‘Vanka’), and the phrase ‘Turn it, Mickey!’ came from the immensely popular 1911 satirical show The Cinematograph, staged in the Distorting Mirror Theatre [Krivoe zerkalo] in Petersburg. ‘Don’t rush the picture!’ still exists as a Russian conversational idiom, though with no reference to films, which are no longer manually operated.
Early projectionists were particularly fond of playing with speed in those cases when the slow tempo was expected to be an integral part of the event. Speeding up funerals and official ceremonies became notorious long before the idea occurred to René Clair. In 1915 the journal Pegasus fulminated at what by then seemed to be an established practice: ‘solemn funeral processions are turned into crazy gallops through the streets; individuals do not gesture, they twitch; hands flail about in the air—goodness only knows what’s going on.’26
Traditionally, the kinesics of social life in Russia presumed an inverse relationship between the importance of an event and the speed with which it unfolded: as the importance of an event or a person increased, the action slowed down. The rule affected theatrical mise-en-scène, diplomatic protocol and, to a certain extent, the kinesics of everyday behaviour. Russians generally judged American films to be ‘too hectic’ [suetlivyi], and a standard epithet for a foreigner was ‘fidgety’ [vertlyavyi].
Old textbooks for theatre actors stressed that a Russian noble of the Middle Ages (a boyar) ought to be portrayed as being fat and slow—long before such an image became a standard caricature of a boyar. It was tacitly assumed that events officially appoved of as ‘historical’ unfolded at such a slow tempo that the jerky medium of film was unable to record them correctly. Recommendations were sounded restricting the ‘cinematisation’ of historical events that formed part of the educational curriculum in Russian schools.27 In
the ‘Conclusion of the Standing Commission of the National Lecture Committee on Questions Relating to the Use of Film in Schools and Public Lecture Halls’, dated 11 November 1915, one point stood out: ‘for
technical reasons the movements of the actors in cinematic images are accelerated and therefore sometimes comical. This is quite out of place in the presentation of historical events’.28
A year beforehand N.A.Savvin, an active educationalist, raised the alarm in The Education Herald:
In Princess Tarakanova [Knyazhna Tarakanova, 1910] the messengers give such hilariously exaggerated bows to the Empress that you cannot help wanting to burst out laughing… In the last part of Nero [Nerone e Agrippina, Italy, 1914] the actor playing the Emperor sprints around the vast hall. Napoleon’s mincing little walk…[in the film The Year 1812 [1812 god], Russia, 1912], Petronius in Quo Vadis? [Italy, 1912] with his ungainly movements… All this bears absolutely no resemblance to real life!29
The magazine Life and the Lawcourts, hearing of a forthcoming series of films based on the Old Testament, also expressed its concern: ‘the script of the history of the Jewish people, which ran on the “screen” of the whole world for six thousand years, testifies that the “Great” Max Linder did not appear in it.’30
According to censorship rules, newsreels involving the Imperial Family had to be projected at a specified speed, and the owner of the film theatre had to be present in the projection box while the film was being shown.31 Although I know of no record of any particular case, this requirement indicates that some
projectionists with ‘progressive’ views may have speeded up their machines in order to poke fun at the Tsar.