Table Of ContentPoster advertising Stenka Razin [Sten’ka-Razin, 1908]
Soviet Cinema
General Editors: Richard Taylor and Ian Christie
The Film Factory
Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939
ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie
Inside the Film Factory
New approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema
ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie
Eisenstein Rediscovered
ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor
Stalinism and Soviet Cinema
ed. Richard Taylor and Derek Spring
Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural
Reception
Yuri Tsivian
Translated by Alan Bodger with a foreword by Tom Gunning
Edited by Richard Taylor
London and New York
First published in Russian in 1991 as The History of Film
Reception: Cinema in Russia, 1896–1930 by Zinātne
Publishers, Riga, Latvia
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Revised English Language edition translated by Alan Bodger
first published 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1991, 1994 Yuri Tsivian
Translation © 1994 Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Tsivian, Yuri
Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception.—
(Soviet Cinema Series)
I. Title. II. Bodger, Alan III. Series
791.430947
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tsivian, Yuri.
[Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino. English]
Early cinema in Russia and its cultural reception/
Yuri Tsivian; translated by Alan Bodger.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino. 1991.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures—Russia (Federation)—History.
2. Motion pictures audiences—Russia (Federation)—History.
3. Motion pictures—Russia (Federation)—Appreciation.
I. Title.
PN1993.5.R9T7713 1994
791.43ā0947–dc20 94–2200
ISBN 0-203-99289-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-07135-6 (Print Edition)
For Roman Timenchik
Contents
List of illustrations vii
General editors’ preface viii
Acknowledgements x
Abbreviations xii
Note on transliteration, translation and the Russian calendar xiii
Foreword xiv
Tom Gunning
Introduction 1
PART I
1 Early cinema architecture and the evolution of the social composition of cinema 12
2 Projection technique as a factor in aesthetic perception 39
3 The acoustics of cinema performance 65
4 The reception of interference 85
PART II
5 Shifting textual boundaries 100
6 The reception of the moving image 108
7 The reception of narrative categories 129
8 The reception of narrative devices 140
Postscript 170
Notes 172
Bibliography 198
Index 211
Illustrations
Frontispiece: Poster advertising Stenka Razin [Sten’ka-Razin, 1908]
(Between pp. 66–77)
1 The Splendid-Palace cinema in Riga
2 The Vulcan cinema in Moscow: several houses knocked into one auditorium
3 The long auditorium
4 Advertisement for the Just Like Paris cinema in St Petersburg
5 The rectangular period of cinema architecture: the AT in Riga
6 The rectangular period of cinema architecture: the Shantser in Kiev
7 The foyer of the Marble Palace
8 Advertisement for the Saturn in St Petersburg, 1913
9 Anna Karenina [1914]: the tragic heroine contemplates her destiny
10 Satirical views of cinema
(a) M. Mikhailov’s 1910 caricature of cinema’s ‘impossible juxtapositions’: Lev Tolstoy
and Glupyshkin (the Russian name for the French comedian, André Deed)
(b) P.W.’s view of a ‘typical’ scene from a 1910 film, the ‘dance of the Apaches’
(c) I. Stepanov’s 1913 depiction of the ‘embarrassed’ viewer stealing incognito into the
‘electric theatre’
11 ‘Cinema’s dispute with theatre’, from the journal Theatre and Art, 1914
12 Film posters
(a)A Wild Force [Dikaya sila, 1916]
(b) Life is a Moment, Art is Forever [Zhizn’—mig, Iskusstvo—vechno, 1916], starring
Ivan Mosjoukine
(c) The Abyss [Bezdna, 1917]
(d) Married by Satan [Venchal ikh Satana, 1917]
(e) The Autumn of a Woman [Osen’ zhenshchiny, 1917]
(f) We Are Not Guilty of Their Blood! [V ikh krovi my nepovinny!, 1917]
General editors’ preface
Cinema has been the predominant popular art form of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in
Europe and North America. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the former Soviet Union, where
Lenin’s remark that ‘of all the arts for us cinema is the most important’ became a cliché and where cinema
attendances were until recently still among the highest in the world. In the age of mass politics Soviet cinema
developed from a fragile but effective tool to gain support among the overwhelmingly illiterate peasant
masses in the Civil War that followed the October 1917 Revolution, through a welter of experimentation,
into a mass weapon of propaganda through entertainment that shaped the public image of the Soviet Union
—both at home and abroad and for both élite and mass audiences—and latterly into an instrument to expose
the weaknesses of the past and present in the twin processes of glasnost and perestroika. Now the national
cinemas of the successor republics to the old USSR are encountering the same bewildering array of problems,
from the trivial to the terminal, as all the other ex-Soviet institutions.
Cinema’s central position in Russian and Soviet cultural history and its unique combination of mass
medium, art form and entertainment industry have made it a continuing battlefield for conflicts of broader
ideological and artistic significance, not only for Russia and the Soviet Union but also for the world outside.
The debates that raged in the 1920s about the relative revolutionary merits of documentary as opposed to
fiction film, of cinema as opposed to theatre or painting, or of the proper role of cinema in the forging of
post-Revolutionary Soviet culture and the shaping of the new Soviet man, have their echoes in current
discussions about the role of cinema vis-à-vis other art forms in effecting the cultural and psychological
revolution in human consciousness necessitated by the processes of economic and political transformation of
the former Soviet Union into modern democratic and industrial societies and states governed by the rule of
law. Cinema’s central position has also made it a vital instrument for scrutinising the blank pages of Russian
and Soviet history and enabling the present generation to come to terms with its own past.
This series of books intends to examine Russian and Soviet films in the context of Russian and Soviet
cinema, and Russian and Soviet cinema in the context of the political and cultural history of Russia, the Soviet
Union and the world at large. Within that framework the series, drawing its authors from both East and West,
aims to cover a wide variety of topics and to employ a broad range of methodological approaches and
presentational formats. Inevitably this will involve ploughing once again over old ground in order to re-
examine received opinions but it principally means increasing the breadth and depth of our knowledge,
finding new answers to old questions and, above all, raising new questions for further enquiry and new
areas for further research.
Yuri Tsivian’s book fulfils several of these objectives and opens up two major fields of enquiry. On the
one hand, it brings to our attention one of the great lost periods in cinema history, that of pre-Revolutionary
Russia, against much of which post-Revolutionary Soviet cinema was enjoined to react. Tsivian draws out
the distinctive characteristics of that cinema, from the specific meaning of close-ups to the insistence on
ix
unhappy endings, from the ambiguous significance of the foyer to the pervading influence of Symbolism
and its peculiar obsessions. On the other hand, as Tom Gunning points out in his foreword, Tsivian takes
reception studies further than they have previously been taken by Western academics by expanding the
context of reception to include the whole experience of film viewing in Russia at the turn of the century.
This in turn raises new questions that can be applied back to reception studies of cinema in other countries.
Tsivian’s book is therefore a significant contribution to the study of cinema history as a whole.
The continuing aim of the series is to situate Russian and Soviet cinema in their proper historical and
aesthetic context, both as a major cultural force in Russian history and Soviet politics and as a crucible for
experimentation that is of central significance to the development of world cinema culture. Books in the
series strive to combine the best of scholarship, past, present and future, with a style of writing that is
accessible to a broad readership, whether that readership’s primary interest lies in cinema or in Russian and
Soviet political history.
Richard Taylor and Ian Christie
