People: Foreign
BALÁZS, Béla (1884–1949). Hungarian writer, librettist (for Bartók), scriptwriter and film theorist. Worked in Germany after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, lived in Moscow from 1931 to 1945. His first book, The Visible Man (1924) insisted on the autonomy of cinema as a new art and explained montage as ‘micro-physiognomy’. The Spirit of Film (1930) stressed mise-en-scene over montage and argued for asynchronous sound, while Theory of Film (1945) laid out a taxonomy of film technique.
BENJAMIN, Walter (1892–1940). German literary critic and confidant of Brecht who committed suicide in France while fleeing from Fascism. Benjamin’s reputation as a prescient and subtle cultural critic has risen sharply with the republication of many articles, including his celebrated ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, now a canonic text in modern art theory. His few remarks on cinema, particularly on Vertov and Chaplin, appear in this essay.
BRYHER [Annie Winifred Ellerman] (1895–1983). Daughter of English shipbuilding magnate Sir John Ellerman, who adopted this pen-name for her work as film critic and historical novelist. Married to Kenneth Macpherson, the editor of Close Up and director of Borderline, she financed the activities of the Pool group, based in Switzerland. Her Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929) was the first book in English wholly devoted to Soviet cinema. An autobiography, The Heart to Artemis (New York 1962), chronicles the wide range of her interests, which moved away from cinema after the 1930s.
CHAPLIN, Charles (1889–1977). English-born music-hall comedian who entered films while touring America in 1914 and soon became an international star, directing, scripting and performing in all his films until A Woman of Paris (1923), which had a profound influence on many Soviet filmmakers. But appreciation of Chaplin the performer was more common, and Soviet writings of the 1920s are full of references to ‘Charlie’ as a icon of irreverent grace and pathos; indeed admiration for Chaplin remains high in the Soviet Union today. Eisenstein’s affectionate essay, ‘Charlie the Kid’, was written for a collective work in the series ‘Materials on World Cinema History’, Charles Spencer Chaplin (Moscow 1945), which also included essays by Kozintsev, Yutkevich and Bleiman.
CHOMETTE, Henri (1896–1941). Elder brother of René Clair who made two notable short experiments in ‘pure cinema’ in the mid-1920s within the French avant-garde film movement, then worked on commercial narrative projects.
FAIRBANKS, Douglas (1883–1939). Legendary in his prime as the dashing hero of a series of spectacular swashbucklers, which he also conceived and produced, from The Mark of Zorro (1920) to The Iron Mask (1928). These were as popular in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, so that Fairbanks’ visit to Moscow with his equally famous wife Mary Pickford in 1926 was a major public event (and inspired an ingenious tribute by members of the Kuleshov group, The Kiss of Mary Pickford). Formed United Artists with Griffith, Chaplin and Pickford in 1919, and extended an invitation to Eisenstein to work in Hollywood after hailing Potemkin as ‘the greatest cinema of modern times’ in Berlin in 1926.
FREUND, Karl (1890–1969). A newsreel cameraman in Germany from 1908, before becoming the virtuoso cinematographer for Murnau, Lang, Dupont and Ruttmann in the 1920s. Emigrated to America in 1929 and directed occasionally, while becoming one of Hollywood’s leading cinematographers.
GANCE, Abel (1889–1981). A controversial French director from 1911, who began to make large-scale impassioned epics from 1919 and won Griffith’s admiration with his anti-war J’accuse (1919). La Roue (1921–4) excited poets and painters throughout Europe with its rhythmic effects, while irritating many by its sentimental narrative: extracts were widely shown and may have reached the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. Parts of his massive Napoleon (1927) were shown in Moscow by Ilya Ehrenburg in 1926, but this compendium of stirring visual rhetoric was to prove Gance’s undoing, unseen in its original form until the late 1970s, and his sound films were generally anticlimactic.
GODARD, Jean-Luc (b.1930). A critic turned filmmaker and leader of the New Wave of iconoclastic young filmmakers who revolutionised French cinema in the early 1960s. Wrote enthusiastically about Barnet’s later films, shown by Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française, and included frequent references to Eisenstein before espousing Vertov in the aftermath of May 1968 (see Introduction n. 106), and contributing to the Cinetracts series of ‘agit-films’ with Marker. Later popularised the equation ‘Hollywood-Mosfilm’ in his Maoist work of the early 1970s.
GRIERSON, John (1898–1972). Promoter of the documentary film movement in Britain and Canada and a leading commentator on Soviet cinema between 1926 and 1935.
GRIFFITH, David Wark (1875–1948). Credited with transforming the early one-reel film, of which he made several hundred between 1908 and 1913, into the epic narrative of Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, the two most widely admired American films before Citizen Kane, Griffith’s work was known in Russia before the Revolution. The influence of Intolerance on Soviet theories of montage has long been part of the mythology of origins, but recent research shows that the film was in fact viewed with critical approval and regarded more as an avatar than a model (V. Kepley Jr, ‘Intolerance and the Soviets: A Historical Inquiry’, Wide Angle, 1979, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 22–7).
KEATON, Buster (1895–1966). Keaton entered films after a successful career in vaudeville in 1917, but his best work as a performer was done between 1920–2 in a series of superb comedy shorts. The popularity of these in the Soviet Union is attested by the number of quotations in films by the Kuleshov group – especially in Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925). Now often regarded as a superior director to Chaplin, his feature career lasted only until 1927, when a contract with MGM and mounting personal problems marked the beginning of a long decline.
LANG, Fritz (1890–1976). Early architectural studies were reflected in the impressive visual organisation of Lang’s thrillers and visionary excursions into the past (Die Nibelungen, 1923–4) and future (Metropolis, 1926), which made German cinema a worldwide influence in the 1920s – and nearly bankrupted their production company, Ufa. Eisenstein gained his first experience of montage by working with Esfir Shub on the re-edition of Lang’s Dr Mabuse. From 1935, Lang contributed to the development of the American film noir and became a major influence on the French New Wave.
LEGER, Fernand (1881–1955). An independent Cubist painter whose democratic commitment and delight in the spectacle of urban life led him to experiment with the ‘plastic potential’ of film in the early 1920s. After analysing the ‘mechanical elements’ in Gance’s La Roue, he made Ballet Mécanique with Dudley Murphy in 1924 and designed sets for L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine.
L’HERBIER, Marcel (1890–1979). A founding member of the French ‘impressionist’ avant-garde inaugurated by Delluc, who cultivated a distinctive brand of highly cultivated melodrama, often involving well-known artists such as Leger and Mallet Stevens. His 1929 masterpiece L’Argent synthesised social realism and elaborate mise-en-scène, but the elegant artificiality of his sound films was overtaken by new currents of realism in the French cinema of the 1930s.
LINDER, Max (1883–1925). Chaplin acknowledged the influence of Linder’s dapper comedy on his early work, and the French star was already internationally recognised by 1914, before war injuries hampered his subsequent career. Two periods in America, for Essanay in 1916–17 and United Artists in 1921–2, produced only one triumph, a parody of Fairbanks’ Three Musketeers, The Three Must-Get-Theres (1922). Two years after an attempt to revive his career in France with a film for Gance in 1923, Linder committed suicide.
MARINETTI, Filippo Tomasso (1876–1944). Italian novelist, poet, dramatist and impresario of Futurism. Launched the first of a series of Futurist manifestos in 1909 and attracted a group of painters, who visited Paris under his guidance, and modernised their style accordingly. Paid at least two visits to Moscow: the first in 1914 was marked by conflict with the Russian Futurists, led by Mayakovsky, who rejected Marinetti’s bombastic nationalism and praise of war. On a second visit he studied briefly with Meyerhold, having embarked on a theatrical career. Although Marinetti’s commitment to Fascism led to his ostracism in many progressive quarters, the rhetoric of his and other Italian Futurist manifestos recurs in Russian and Soviet declarations, such as ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ (1913) and the Eccentric Manifesto of 1922. His ‘Manifesto of Futurist Cinema’ (1916) contains a remarkably complete anticipation of the directions that would be explored by experimental filmmakers in the years that followed.
MARKER, Chris (b.1921). French documentary-essayist, responsible for a series of highly personal film reports from many parts of the world since 1952, including Siberia, Cuba, China and Japan. In 1968, he contributed to the Cinetracts, ostensibly anonymous agitational films addressing radical students and workers; and in 1971 he ‘discovered’ Alexander Medvedkin and released the latter’s neglected Happiness (1935) with an accompanying documentary, The Train Rolls On.
MEISEL, Edmund (1874–1930). Austrian-born composer. Worked with Max Reinhardt and wrote scores for Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin 1926, and October 1927; Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony of a Great City 1928; Ilya Trauberg’s The Blue Express 1929.
MONTAGU, Ivor (1904–84). Co-founder of the Film Society in London in 1926, which involved him in a first (unsuccessful) journey to the Soviet Union in search of films to show and the start of a lifelong interest in the Soviet cinema and its leading directors. He accompanied Eisenstein on his visits to France and Britain in 1929–30 and to Hollywood in 1930; translated Pudovkin’s writings and Eisenstein’s Film Form essays; and played a leading part in using film in the anti-Fascist campaigns of the 1930s. His election film for the British Communist Party, Peace and Plenty (1939), incorporated many Soviet lessons in an original and effective manner; and through the Progressive Film Institute he ensured that many Soviet films remained in distribution in Britain during the 1930s. He also served as associate producer of three of Hitchcock’s British films and after World War Two worked at Ealing Studios.
PICKFORD, Mary (1893–1979). Joined Biograph in 1909 and soon became a box-office attraction, which led to a series of shrewd business moves giving her complete control of all aspects of the films that made her ‘The World’s Sweetheart’ by 1916. Formed United Artists in 1919 with Griffith, Chaplin and Fairbanks, whom she married the following year. Vastly popular in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, she visited Moscow with Fairbanks in 1926 and inadvertently appeared in The Kiss of Mary Pickford, a comedy about a studio employee whose dreams come true. Retired from acting in 1933 after an unsuccessful and long-postponed transition to adult roles.
REINHARDT, Max (1873–1943), Austrian-born theatre director and proprietor with whom many future film directors and actors gained their first experience, among these: William Dieterle, F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Otto Preminger, Elizabeth Bergner, Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt. His lavish productions forged the style which became widely known as ‘Expressionist’ on both stage and screen, and his handling of crowd scences had a similar influence in both media. He directed four early films in Germany: Sumurun (1908), The Miracle (1912), The Isle of Bliss (1913), Venetian Night (1914); then in the United States after the Nazis came to power he co-directed, with Dieterle, one of Hollywood’s most successful popular Shakespeare adaptations, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1935.
RUTTMANN, Walter (1887–1941). Director best known for his films Berlin Symphony of a Great City 1928; World Melody 1929.
STROHEIM, Erich von (1885–1957). Emigrated to the United States around 1906 from his native Austria and joined Griffith’s company as bit-part actor and assistant, in which capacities he worked on Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Created a familiar image of the stiff-necked Prussian officer in many films, including Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), but had less success as a fanatically demanding director in the 1920s, with all his films after Foolish Wives (1922) suffering degrees of studio interference. In the mid-1930s he appealed to Eisenstein to find him work in the Soviet Union, when his troubled career seemed beyond redemption. His severely truncated Greed (1923–5) has become a legend of both megalomaniac extravagance and Hollywood inflexibility.