Ian Christie on Russian Cinema

Who was Jay Leyda, the author of Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film?

Leyda was a young American film enthusiast who, seized by the example of Russian cinema, had this extraordinary idea that he would go to Moscow and sit at the feet of the world’s greatest film maker and theorist: Eisenstein. He wasn’t the only person who had that idea – famously Samuel Beckett thought exactly the same and wrote to Eisenstein, but never got a reply. Leyda did get a reply, and went and studied with Eisenstein at VGIK, the film school, in the early 30s. He was an intern on Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, and took an extraordinary gallery of photos of the making of that film which are absolutely crucial now, because the film was lost: it was censored, banned, shelved, and then accidentally destroyed during the war. So Leyda knew Soviet cinema from the inside, and he decided in the 50s that he would write a proper history about it.

I think the great thing about this book is that, although it was written during the height of the Cold War, it manages to be incredibly sympathetic to different aspects of early Soviet cinema. It’s true that Leyda was politically and temperamentally quite sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but it’s not the work of an apologist in any way – it’s the work of a friendly observer. It’s much more about art than politics.

I first read the book in the mid-60s and it became an absolute bible for me – it really was one of those books that shape your life. I read it with great enthusiasm, but there’s a lot I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’t pay any attention to the beginning – which talks about pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema – I just plunged into the 20s. But Kino was the only source on the pre-Revolutionary period for years, until we finally got to see those films in the late 1980s.

There’s a section which Leyda called ‘witnessed years’; there’s a whole different tempo about that, where he’s actually talking about things he saw, and a tremendous feeling of excitement. It’s very scrupulous about what he had and hadn’t seen, and there’s absolutely no attempt to cover things that he gets from secondary sources. It also lets his own opinions hang out – it’s beautifully written, of course, but its sophistication is in making clear where he stands in relation to the material he could and couldn’t get at. Very few histories do that: they flatten things out. Of course it has blind spots and weaknesses, but that’s part of its charm and its probity. I think it’s an absolute model. It’s one of those books, and there are just a handful of them, that when you go back to it – I’ve been going back to it for decades now – you always find different things in. They were always there but you never noticed them: and that, I think, is the mark of a truly great book.

Is this the book that opened your eyes to Russian cinema?

Oh completely! It was an absolute vade mecum: I mean you couldn’t orient yourself in relation to Soviet cinema without it. And if you were one of those who grew up with it then it shaped your view, but that’s just how strongly marked one was by the book.

And Yuri Tsivian’s book – Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception?

Tsivian had this idea to try to reconstruct the history of early Russian cinema – the stuff that Ledya didn’t deal with, and that all the Soviet avant-garde despised – and to approach it through a deeply contextual history. A revolutionary book! The first major book in film studies that doesn’t deal with films per se at all, but with the experience of going to the cinema: Why do people go the cinema? How do they feel about going? What happens to them inside the cinema? What do they talk about? There’s even a chapter about things going wrong in the cinema – which I think is absolutely the most original idea: what happened when the film broke?

What sort of answers does he come up with to those questions?

I think what Tsivian shows is that because of the situation in Russia at the time that cinema arrived, reactions were a bit different than elsewhere. There wasn’t the automatic assumption that cinema was only for oiks: the intelligentsia and the newly emerging rich were also fascinated by it. For instance the daughter of a Siberian gold merchant opened a couple of cinemas catering especially for the upper classes. One was called ‘Just like Paris’, with private boxes. And although the views of the labouring classes aren’t recorded, you do have a range of high-quality responses to cinema, which shows that it kind of went from top to bottom in Russia. There’s a wonderful chapter on the rise of the foyer, and how important it became as a place to meet your friends.

So cinema in Russia was a social occasion – like an artistic salon in which to discuss your responses to the performance?

Exactly. Not to say that that was the whole response, but the point was that there were some quite distinctive Russian features, and unlike in Britain and elsewhere, where cinema was for the ‘carriage trade’, in Russia it would seem that the middle classes and the affluent were quite attracted to it. It’s an extraordinary book on the phenomenology of the cinema experience. He uses incredibly varied sources: poets, journalists, writers of all kinds are frisked to get the little asides.