When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.
But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.
The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.
Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.
No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.
His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."
In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.
Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see?
After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.
Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."
Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)
(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.
An old friend from the Navy is currently working in St. Petersburg, Russia. I asked him if he knows what's going on to mark the centenary of the October Revolution. He replied, "Not much. Tomorrow (October 25) they will show some revolutionary films on the side of the Hermitage, and apparently there's an evening of live jazz at the Museum of Soviet Slot Machines, but I think they are going to let it slip past into history."
How gratifying, I thought, for all those who have convinced themselves that Marxism has been consigned, in the words of Ronald Reagan's clever speech writer, to "the ash heap of history," that what John Reed called the Ten Days That Shook the World is being commemorated with so little fanfare in the city where it all happened.(1) It surprises me, since Russian president Vladimir Putin has called the fall of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe that Russia ever experienced.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of the "revolutionary films" being screened on the wall of the Hermitage Museum is Sergei Eisenstein's October, which was finished in time for the 10th anniversary in 1927 but which, at the eleventh hour, Eisenstein had to radically re-edit, delaying its release until the following spring.
"WEDNESDAY, November 7th, I rose very late. The noon cannon boomed from Peter-Paul as I went down the Nevsky. It was a raw, chill day." That is how John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, wrote of this day in 1917. It was October 25 according to the Gregorian calendar then in use in Russia, which is thirteen days slow. The Russian "October Revolution" was actually the second Russian Revolution of 1917. The first, in March, deposed the Czar and led to creation of the Duma, a government body, led by Alexander Kerenski, that sought to rein in the seething forces of change that had finally found their moment. Kerensky was seen by the Bolzheviks, one of the many political parties in the Duma, as a reactionary figure, determined to maintain the status quo in Russia. This was unacceptable to them, so, after meticulous planning, they staged another revolution in October that deposed Kerensky and dissolved the Duma. Kerensky resigned on November 7, 1917.(2)
Ten years later, after a short civil war, Russia was transformed. Knowing that socialism was designed with an industrialized workers' state in mind, the USSR set about transforming itself from a nation of mostly unskilled peasants into something closer to Marx's proletarian state. Two unexpected blows, however, changed the course of the revolution: Lenin died in 1924, and his appointed successor was Stalin, who immediately came into conflict with the other great leader of the revolution, Leon Trotsky. (Trotsky later claimed that Lenin was possibly poisoned by Stalin.) The resulting power struggle ended with the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR in 1929.
This power struggle happened to coincide with the making of Eisenstein's film October - or, rather, its final editing. It was supposed to be shown, along with other films commissioned for the Jubilee, on November 7. As Jay Leyda related in Kino, his overview of Russian Cinema, "When October was not shown at the jubilee, and when Trotsky's open anti-Government campaign began, the wildest rumours flew around Eisenstein and his film, believed even by people who saw Eisenstein arriving at the studio cutting-room every day: that Eisenstein and Alexandrov had joined Trotsky's faction, that the film had been destroyed, that parts of it had to be remade, that Eisenstein was forbidden to touch his film, etc. etc."(3) The film that was eventually shown to the public in the spring of 1928 was quickly attacked by Russian critics, but was acclaimed in the West. Few observers in the West could have known what Eisenstein had been forced to excise from his film. Of the 13,000 feet of film that Eisenstein claimed made up the completed film prior to the re-editing, only 9,100 feet was left in the resulting film released to the public. What the 3,900 feet of missing film contained was every shot or sequence that showed Trotsky as a hero of the revolution. One of the reasons for the success of the October Revolution was winning the allegiance of the military. Key to that important ingredient was Trotsky, whose genius in leadership can be seen in the deployment of soldiers in Petrograd. All of these facts had to be either skirted in the narrative of October or completely eliminated.
How central was Trotsky to the success of October? In John Reed's book Ten Days That Shook the World, the name "Trotzky" appears 84 times. By comparison, "Lenin" appears 91 times, while "Stalin" appears just 3. In the Redactor's Notes included in the Project Gutenberg edition of Reed's book, it reads:
The original book of this text had a number of newspaper clipings [sic] from the 1920's and 1930's included. Most of these relate to the violent deaths encountered by those playing a part in this book. Others reveal that Eisenstein made a film of "Ten Days". Stalin, who is not mentioned in the book, suppressed the work.
Reed's book was one of the very few that attempted to give Americans a clear, if not non-partisan, account of the events in Russia that scared the daylights out of so many in the West. Its title became attached to Eisenstein's film for publicity purposes. While both works are accounts of the same events, Eisenstein's film is not a work of reportage or even of reconstruction.
Stanley Kauffmann, writing about a later, failed effort by Eisenstein to express his vision, nonetheless saw in it "the unique Eisenstein flavor - a distortion of reality that creates higher realism: a combination of masterly screen composition and masterly theatricality."(4)
Because of its highly subjective approach to events familiar to every historian of the Russian Revolution, even knowledge of those events and the figures involved doesn't prepare one for Eisenstein's October. It is impossible to properly assess its accomplishments without a full understanding of the pressure Eisenstein was under to be true to history while being true to his art.
In the 1920s, the two greatest Russian filmmakers were Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Both recognized the essential ingredient of film art was montage, a term more complex than "cutting" or "editing." Pudovkin extolled the use of montage in order to create a chain of images that tell a story. Eisenstein, however, insisted that montage was about bringing images into collision. As summed up by Dwight Macdonald:
'In his article, "The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture", in Transition for Spring-Summer, 1930, Eisenstein denounced the idea that montage is "a junction of elements" as "a most pernicious method of analysis". He continued: "By what then is characterized montage ...? By collision.... By conflict. By collision.... From the collision of two given factors arises a concept. Linkage is, in my interpretation, only a possible special case.... Thus, montage is conflict. The basis of every art is always conflict."'(5)
For October, Eisenstein employed what he called "montage of associations," creating metaphors that give the viewer a better understanding of a character or of an event. For example, in the opening shots of October, the March revolution deposing the Czar Nicholas II is reduced to a group of people pulling down a statue of the Czar, intercut with hundreds of upraised rifles and scythes. The statue finally appears to disintegrate before our eyes. Later in the film, the same statue is shown to reassemble itself miraculously at the moment when Kerensky invokes "God and Country".
Some of these "associations," however, are not as simple and require interpretation. As Marie Seton wrote in her biography of Eisenstein: "[It is] difficult to understand without explanatory notes as Potemkin was simple ... History marched across the screen as never before. But historical action suddenly became suspended while Eisenstein wove a visual commentary, the nature of which was nearer to Socratic discourse on the nature of things than to Art, as it was later to be interpreted in the light of Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism. October was an esoteric work of art permeated with symbols of ambiguous meaning to the majority — a work on several levels all developing simultaneously. Being diffuse as well as monumental, October had the power to tire all but the most inquiring mind. No human character served as a focal point and no single emotion ran as a thread through the whole. An encylopaedia of images, the imagery rose to a crescendo that could too easily leave many spectators exhausted by the mental gymnastics required to follow the discursive line."(6)
I have seen other films that tell historical stories - stories that involve a great many details and characters familiar to afiocionados of history but bewildering and impenetrable to a casual observer. Masahiro Shinoda's brilliant and ambitious Assassination requires a familiarity with the period of Japanese history in which the Shogunate fell and the emperor was restored to power. Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, which, with incomparable effectiveness, chronicles the last days of French colonial control of Algeria - a story remarkably like October. Except that no two revolutions are alike.
I believe that Seton, for whatever reason, was deliberately misrepresenting Eisenstein's accomplishment. There is plenty in October that is perhaps "esoteric" and "ambiguous," but any reasonably curious viewer will find nothing in it that is inscrutable or obscure. Eisenstein not only made the film for the masses, he made it in the same spirit that liberated the masses. While trying to free society of dogma, he gave society enough credit to have the ability to follow everything he was doing. When Eisenstein employs shock editing that throws images at us so fast it becomes impossible for us to rationally absorb every one of them, he is also aware of our sub-rational vision, capable of absorbing images subliminally. Like Charlie Parker's saxophone solos, when October shock-editing sequences are slowed down and the images, often only a few frames in length, are examined individually, they are in perfect order, even in collision with one another, with the effect that Eisenstein wanted the viewer to perceive.
Eisenstein's great achievement was to express the revolutionary fervor of his time in terms of revolutionary art. What he failed to do, however, was realize how easily his revolution could be perverted. All the while he was satirizing Kerensky and his betrayal of the March 1917 revolution, depicting him living in the Czar's quarters of the Winter Palace, another traitor of the revolution was tightening his grip on power.
I'm afraid that it is too much to ask an audience today to care much for Eisenstein's film if they no longer care about the history it is telling. Today's citizens of St. Petersburg, a city whose name has been changed three times since 1917, can look back on the Revolution with horror or nostalgia, but it was a moment in history, a very loud and portentous parade, that they would as soon forget.
Throughout Reds, the film that Warren Beatty made about the last years of John Reed's life,(7) you can see some of the people, by then extremely old, who were alive in 1917. Some of them remembered the era with an almost tangible nostalgia. Others tried to forget it. Still others had succeeded in forgetting it. If history has an ash heap or a garbage heap on which it throws the ideas and names for which it has no more use, anyone with a little patience can still find a treasure there if they do some digging.
(1) In Chapter IV of Reed's book, he writes, 'And Trotzky, standing up with a pale, cruel face, letting out his rich voice in cool contempt, "All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries, Bund-let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!"'
(2) Kerensky died in obscurity more than fifty years later in New York City!
(3) Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960)
(4) Stanley Kauffmann, "Bezhin Meadow," The New Republic, March 1, 1969.
(5) Dwight Macdonald, The Responsibility of Peoples and Other Essays in Political Criticism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957).
(6) Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (New York: Grove Press, 1960). It should be noted what Dwight Macdonald wrote about Seton's book, "a peculiar volume whose rich documentation of Eisenstein's career, feelings and ideas conflicts constantly with her political line, which is favourable to the Stalin regime."
(7) Trotsky is a prominent figure in REDS, and is played by the Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski.
