11. Historical-Materialist Narration
The Soviet Example
In its widest scope, leftist political cinema has no pertinence as a mode of narration. Political fiction films can appeal to classical narrational norms (e.g., the workof Costa-Gavras) or to conventions of the art-cinema mode (e.g., Man of Marble, 1976). But within left-wing filmmaking we can discern one clear-cut narrational tradition. Although this tradition has influenced both classical and art-cinema norms, it possesses a distinct set of narrational strategies and tactics. These originate in the Soviet "historical-materialist" cinema of the period 1925-1933.1 will take twenty-two films as prime instances of this mode: Strike.(.1925), Potemkin (1925), The Devil's Wheel(ig2&), Mother (1926), Moscow in October (1927), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), October (1928), Zvenigora (1928), Lace (1928), Storm over Asia (1928), Arsenal (1929), The Ghost That Never Returns (1929), The New Babylon (1929), Fragments of an Empire (1929), Old and New (1929), Goluboi Express (1929), Earth (1930X Mountains of Gold (1931), Ivan (1932), A Simple Case (1932), Twenty-six Commissars (1933), and Deserter (1933). (Certainly By the Law (1926), Bed and Sofa (1927), Alone (1931), and others might be added to the list, but the above seem to me the least disputable cases.) After considering the Soviet variant, I will sketch out how the mode changed in later years.
HISTORICAL- M A T ERIALIST  NARRATION
235
Narration as Rhetoric
Like much Soviet art of the 1920s, the historical-materialist film has a strong^rhetorical cast. It uses narrational principles and devices opposed to Hollywood norms for purposes that are frankly didactic and persuasive. Within Soviet culture generally, artists and political workers debated how y aesthetic practices could be translated into utilitarian ones. One position, exemplified by the extreme left wing of Constructivism, called for an end to "art," a hopelessly bourgeois category. But on the whole, both artists and politicians wanted to maintain "the aesthetic" as a distinct (if subordinate) space. Some, like Kuleshov, saw their work as part of a long-range process of basic research; pursued in the scientific spirit, their experiments could eventually reveal the laws of socialist art. Other creators made art obedient to "social command." Here the artwork was endowed with immediate utility as "agitprop." Patriotic music, the mass spectacles celebrating the October Revolution, and much of Mayakovsky's poetry are examples. No matter how practical the end, the social-com mand view clung to a conception of the distinctly aesthetic. "Art," wrote Lunacharsky and Sla-vinsky in 1920, "is a powerful means of infecting those around us with ideas, feelings, and moods. Agitation and propaganda acquire particular acuity and effectiveness when they are clothed in the attractive and mighty forms of art."' Thus, the instrumental aim provided—at least for a time—an acceptable framework for experiment.
In Soviet cinema, the double demand of poetic and rheto-. ric shapes basic narrational strategies. There is the tendency '.' to treat the syuzhet as both a narrative and an argument. Soviet cinema is explicitly tendentious, like the román á these; the fabula world stands ibr a set of abstract propositions whose validity the film at once presupposes and reasserts. Strike offers a very clear instance. Not only is this the story of a single strike, it is a discourse on all the Russian strikes that occurred before 1917. The exact locale and time are unspecified; instead, the film is broken into six parts explicitly labeled as typical stages: seething in the factory; "Immediate Cause of the Strike"; "The Factory Stands Idle";
"The Strike Is Prolonged"; "Engineering a Massacre"; "Liquidation." The film concludes:
Extreme close-up: Eyes stare out at us.
Expository title: "And the strikes in Lena, Talka, Zlatovst, Yaroslavl, Tsaritsyn, and Kostroma left bleeding, unforgettable scars on the body of the proletariat."
Extreme close-up: Eyes stare out at us.
Expository title: "Proletarians, remember!" The film's argument works by appeal to example; the narrative cause and effect demonstrate the necessity for the working class to struggle against capital. While later films did not utilize the nakedly argumentative structure of Strike, they did rely on the presupposition that the narrative should constitute an exemplary case for Marxist-Leninist doctrine.1 Furthermore, Strike's example is a historical one; the fabula is based on fact. Other Soviet films take up this referential impulse, creating a "realistic" motivation for the fabula events.
The most obvious result of "rhetoricizing" the fabula world is the changed conception of character. Narrative causality is construed as supraindividual, deriving from social forces described by Bolshevik doctrine. Characters thus get defined chiefly through their class position, job, social actions, and political views. Characters also lose the uniqueness sought to some degree by classical narration and to a great degree by art-cinema narration; they become prototypes of whole classes, milieux, or historical epochs. Diego's existential crisis in La guerre est finie would be unthinkable in Soviet historical-materialist cinema. As M. N. Pokrovsky put it. "We Marxists do not see personality as the maker of history, for to us personality is only the instrument with which history works."' The single character may count for little, as seen in some films' attempt to make a group of peasants or workers into a "mass hero." Such an approach to character had already been evident in Soviet revolutionary literature and theater of the 1918-1929 era.'1
True, the Soviet cinema recognized degrees of individuation: the anonymous agents of Moscow in October, Eisen-stein's physically vivid but generally apsychological characters like the sailor Vakulinchuk. the more detailed delinea-
tion of individual behavior in pud0vkin, and the intensely subjective charac^rization in Room>s ň]ms Nonetheless, psychological singglarkv remaills quUe rare Sometimes, as in October, the more psychologically motivated the character (e.g., Kerensky, wilh 'his Napoie<,nic Iust for power), tlie surer the character is t0 ^ denigrated as a bourgeois.
Character types find their roles wimm specific generic motivations. There is lne genre of »slydies of revolution," either in historical 0f contemporary settings. Here the film tells a story of sucC(Sssfijl s[rugg|es (Potemkin, October, The End of St. Petersbkrg, Moscow in October, Zvcnigora) or currently emergent ones (Storm over Asia, Mountains of Gold, The Ghost ^hat Never Returns, Goluboi Express, Twenty-six Common). The revolution film may also pay tnbute to heroic faj]ures (Strike, Mother, Arsenal, Vie New Babylon). A second genre porlrayS contemporary problems m Soviet life, usu^ involving remnants of capitalist or feudal behavior (FrUgments ofan Empirei Lace% The Devil-S
Wheel). There is alSo a genre that matĽhes the literary formula oi the "produQUon.. novei. a dam musl ^ buiU {han^
or the countryside mus( be collectivized {Old and New, Earth). Some films combine genres: A Simple Case (historical revolution and ^oblems of contemporary life) or Deserter (emergent revüiuüon plus production goals). All these
genres evidently give the film
an opportunity to create a
fabula that will rm,^ each character emblematic offerees
within a poUtically defined situation.
One task of lend^n^ous narrauve art js (0 create conflicts that both prove the [hesis and furnish narrative interest. In these films, the viexveri$ BkeIy l0 knQW^ orquickiy guess, the underlying arguing t0 be prest,nled and the referential basis of the fabula World (There can be no doubl lhal lhe October Revolution wi], succeed) Most 0f our interest thus falls upon the que$üon of how histor>, [akes the course it does.
In a genera] sen^ [he Soviet historical-materialist film
a1SWiľrc        í/" inhering to the iwo schematic patterns
which Susan R Simeiman idcnlifies in tne roman á these. There is what she «^ [be «slructure 0f confrontation," in which a psycholo^ically unchangmg hero represents a
group in his struggle against adversaries.3 Such is Marfa in Old and New. or the Chinese coolie in Goluboi Express. This structure provides a fairly traditional curve of dramatic conflict. There is also the "structure of apprenticeship" in whichI the typical individual moves from ignorance to knowledge \ and from passivity to action.0 The specific shape which this dramatic development takes in Soviet literature of the period has been summarized by Katerina Clark. She points out that the Socialist Realist narrative often centers on a character who moves from a spontaneous, instinctive form of activity \ to a disciplined, correct awareness of political ends and means.7 Mother, as both novel and film, is the canonic instance. The mother acts spontaneously but incorrectly, and her positive qualities are offset by the danger she poses to the revolution. By accepting the tutelage of her son and the Party, she is able to become a martyr to conscious revolutionary activity. The result of this pattern is that potentially affirmative characters are shown initially in a rather bad light: they may be naive (Mother, the sailor in The Devil's Wheel, Filiminov in Fragments of an Empire) or worse— cowardly (Renn in Deserter), lascivious (Pavel in A Simple Case), rowdy (the delinquents in Lace), treacherous (the peasant in Tlie End of St. Petersburg) or greedy (the peasant in Mountains of Gold). The cause-and-effect chain then works to convert the characters) to disciplined socialist activity. The drama—and the spectator's hypotheses—come to be based on how and when the apprentice's conversion will take place.
To some extent, the didactic aim of the Soviet cinema created a storehouse of topor) or argumentative commonplaces, which the filmmaker" could use to Structure the syuzhet. But these were not so narrow that they stifled experimentation. The narrative-plus-argument pattern was open to poetic exploitation in many ways. The use of character prototypes—the sturdy worker, the activist woman, the bureaucrat, the bourgeois "man out of time"—allowed stylistic embroidering. "The figure of a cinematic character," declared Pudovkin, "is the sum of all the shots in which lie appears."8 It was up to the director not to give the character individuality but to use film form to make the type vivid.
i.
iries.* Such is Marfa in i Goluboi Express. This curve of dramatic COn-'prenticeship" in which •norance to knowledge ecific shape which this i literature of the period ark. She points out that centers on a character •-inctive form of activity - of political ends and film, is the canonic in-sly but incorrectly, and danger she poses to the ge of her son and the :o conscious revolution-tern is that potentially litially in a rather bad he sailor in The Devil's in Empire) or worse— lous (Pavel in A Simple -tree), treacherous (the ) or greedy (the peasant -and-effect chain then to disciplined socialist :or's hypotheses—come apprentice's conversion
:i of the Soviet cinema "gumentative common-\ use to structure the aiTow that they stifled •-argument pattern was rays. The use of charac-:he activist woman, the >ftime"—allowed stylis-cinematic character." il the shots in which he lot to give the character o make the type vivid.
HISTORIC AL-MATERIALIST  NARRATION
Pudovkin could draw on the techniques of poster art and contemporary fiction. Eisenstein on theater and caricature, Dovzhenko upon cartoon art and Ukrainian folklore. Commonplace rhetorical points could be sharpened by stylistic devices. The opening sequence of Arsenal powerfully demonstrates how, given the topos "The czar's war destroys the Russian peasantry." a film's shot-to-shot relations could still be made highly unpredictable. Similarly, in Old and New, Maria's decision to organize a collective is presented so that her misery in the fields ("Enough!") is alternated with her oratory before her friends; impossible to say where one scene leaves off and the other begins. Rhetorical demands pro-D. vided generic and realistic motivation for an experimentation with the'mediu m akin to that in Soviet avant-garde art - generally. Thus Old and New's localized breakdown of classical order and duration is motivated by the whole film's juxtaposition of past and present. In Russian Formalist terms, the rhetorical aim enabled the films to "defamiliarize" classical norms of space and time.
Once the film uses poetic procedures for rhetorical ends, the narrational process becomes quite overt. The narration conies forward as a didactic guide to proper construction of the fabula.
There is an especially clear index of this. In the classical Hollywood cinema of the silent era, the narration almost invariably employed many more dialogue titles than expositor)' ones—usually four to twelve times as many. In some films of the late 1920s, there are no expository titles at all. The reason is obvious: an expository title Creates a self-conscious narration that is only occasionally desirable in the classical film. But the Soviet films I am considering here have a much higher proportion of expository titles. In most of these films, dialogue titles outweigh expository ones by a ratio of only four to one. and some of the films actually contain more expository than dialogue titles. In later years, the Soviets' useof nondiegetic or "contrapuntal" sound montage had a comparably overt effect.
Overt narration is also signaled through nonlinguistic means. Some cinematographic techniques—the dynamic camera angle that creates many diagonals; the abnormally
high or low horizon line; slow and fast motion; the extrem« close-up that picks out a detail; the 28-mm lens that distorts space; vignetting and soft focus—were quickly identify with the Soviet cinema, but despite their often cliched em] ployment, we must see them as striving to suggest a narra| tional presence behind the framing or filming of an event, jj is here that Pudovkin's concept of an "ideal observer" ha some relevance. Critics were quick to spot and personify Ü camera eye; one wrote of Potemkiiv. "It is like some tesque record of a gargantuan news photographer with, genius for timing and composition."9
"Realistic" though such films as Potemkin and Vie Endoj St. Petersburg were often felt to be, the staging of the action] tends to create highly self-conscious narration. The set maj present a perspectivally inconsistent space, as in the warj den's office in The Ghost That Never Returns or in thecafej The New Babylon. Lighting may also be manipulated, when in Storm over Asia the cut-in close-ups of the fox: are lit in ways completely unfaithful to the overall ilium tion of the Mongol home. Figures are often placed against neutral background, either realistically motivated ones peasant or worker fiercely silhouetted against a clout sky) or more stylized ones, as in the initial attack on thj woman on the Odessa Steps (fig. 11.1) or the abstract cut-from The End of St. Petersburg which we examined carlie] (fig. 7-50-7.55). The figures will often be placed in unns rally static poses as well. While Dovzhenko made the m( systematic use of this, we find the device in other films, well: in The Ghost that Never Returns, characters freeze^ place during an attempted suicide; in Tiventy-six Commit sars, a crowd listens to a speech while standingjii abl mally fixed postures. In contrast, the figure behavior niayiť what was called at the time "grotesque" or "ecceiilriqü-stylized figure movement that makes the scene difficult construe as a real event. Strike's dwarfs and clownish bumj are usually cited here, but we could add the petty thieves] The Devil's Wheel, Kerensky and company in October, priest in Earth, and the prison warden in The Ghost Never Returns,
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the propensity lor frontality of body, face, and eye in these films. We have seen how the classical film favors a modified frontality of figure placement; our sight lines are marked out, but the characters seldom face or look directly toward us. The Soviet cinema tends to stage the action much more frontally. Furthermore, the characters frequently look out at the camera. Sometimes this is motivated as another character's point of view, but not nearly as often as it would be in Hollywood. And at some point, frontality becomes an unabashedly direct address to the camera. Again and again characters turn "to us" without the slightest realistic motivation. The end of Strike, with its staring eyes, is probably not the best example, since such concluding confrontations form a minor convention of classical epilogues too.'" But when, in the middle of a scene, a soldier gazes out and asks us, "What am I fighting for?" (End of St. Petersburg), or when a character confides in us (Zvenigora), or mugs and winks at us (Lace), or asks whether it is all right to kill the enemy (Arsenal)* or turns to us for help during a fistfight (Twenty-six Commissars), we must acknowledge that narration is not sXmply_relayingsomeautonomously existent
profilmic event. Now the narration overtly includes the profilmic event, has already constituted it for the sake of specific effects. Ideas of montage within the shot, montage "before filming," and montage "within the actor's performance," so current in the late 1920s, testify to filmmakers' notion that narration should include self-conscious manipulation of the profilmic event, the material that normally pretends to go unmanipulated. This narration is not only omniscient; it announces itself as omnipotent.
What brings together film techniques like intertitlcs, cinematography, and mise-en-scéne is the key concept of Soviet film theory and practice: editing, usually called montage. As conceived in Soviet artistic practice during the 1920s, montage in any art implies the presence of a creative subject actively choosing how effects are to be produced. Summarizing the views of many practitioners. Félicie Pastorello writes aptly:" Montage is an act (and not a look), an act of interpreting reality. Like the engineer and the scholar, the artist constructs his object, he does not reproduce reality."" In objecting that Soviet montage "did not give us the event; it alluded to it," Bazin was putting his finger on exactly this refusal to treat film technique as a neutral transmitter.1" The didactic and poetic aspects of Soviet cinema meet in a technique which insists, both quantitatively and qualitatively, upon the constant and overt presence of narration.
It comes as no news that Soviet montage films rely upon editing, but some comparative figures may spruce up the obvious. The Soviet films I am considering contain between 600 and 2,000 shots, whereas their Hollywood counterparts of the years 1917-1928 typically contain between 500 and 1,000. (1 am counting intertitlesas shots.) 1 lolly wood canonized the average shot length as five to six seconds, yielding a common figure of 500-800 shots per hour. The Soviet films, however, average two to four seconds per shot and contain between 900 and 1.500 shots per hour. This means that only the ver)' fastest cut Hollywood films of the teens (such as Wild and Woolly) approach the Soviet standard, while the fastest-cut Hollywood films of the 1920s fall at the slower end of the Soviet scale. And nowhere in Hollywood filmmaking of any period can one find editing as quickly paced as in
the most r under two and A Sim}
The relian the Hollyw few sequenc contain long coupage, th' level of rhe those narration; these films fleeted by films are si diegetic world ica.1 demands. Thus there I cueing of may be brok juxtaposes .; Soviets called long shot to! Jump cuts . operates on speeches into tage in these struing any fabula world) the profilmi' imaginary, would c h an something Montage other way nish an an speech." Th such as th" girds the argue by agents and bourgeoisie!
HISTORICAL-MATERIA LI ST  NARRATION
the most rapid montage films: an average shot length of under two seconds in Potemkin, Deserter, Goluboi Express, and A Simple Case.
The reliance on cutting has qualitative consequences. In the Hollywood film, especially after the coming of sound, a few sequences will be fairly heavily edited while others will contain longer takes. By rejecting such a "crossbred" de-coupage, the Soviet films provide a ubiquitous and constant level of rhetorical intervention. This cinema goes beyond those narrational asides which we found in the art cinema; these films do not offer a reality (objective, subjective) inflected by occasional interpolated "commentary"; these films are signed and addressed through and through, the diegetic world built from the ground up according to rhetor-.. ical demands.
Thus there are always more cuts than needed for lucid cueing of fabula construction. Even the simplest gesture may be broken into several shots. Crosscutting endlessly juxtaposes actions in different locales. By virtue of what the 1 Soviets called "concentration" cuts, a simple transition from long shot to medium shot gets splintered into several shots. Jump cuts break up a single camera position. Montage also operates on intertitles: in October, the narration chops speeches into brief phrases. The relentless presence of montage in these films aims to keep the spectator from construing any action as simply an unmediated piece of the "fabula world. Whereas Bazin worried that cutting changed the profilmic event from something real into something imaginary, the Soviet filmmakers believed that not cutting would change the syuzhet from a rhetorical construct into something (falsely) descriptive.
Montage makes the narration self-conscious in yet another way: through rhetorical tropes. The Soviet films furnish an anthology of both "tropes of thought" and "tropes of speech." The former are buried or eluded formal arguments, such as the schematic argument-from-example that under-girds the Soviet film and the tendency of the narration to argue by analogy (as when crosscutting links two social agents and makes us infer a shared motive or political view: bourgeoisie/police, proletarian/peasant). Tropes of speech.
or figures of adornment, can be mimicked by editing tooi .These films teem with rhetorical questions. metaphjjis-OÍl similes (the bull and the strikers in Strike), synecdoches'{§ general's medals substituting for the general in The End.i St. Petersburg), personifications.(the squirming concert in Arsenal), understatements, hyperbole, antitheses, inaiiy. other classical figures. Ottober uses paranomasia. punning, when the narration presents KerenskyVpöliuci rise as a climb up an apparently endless flight of stairs; play is based on the Russian word lest nit sa (stairs), as use in the phrase ierarkhicheskaia k'stnitsa, or"tableof milit ranks." In the same film, the intercutting of Kerensky withj Napoleon statue cites the simile Lenin used in a 191 Pravda article, "In Search of a Napoleon," while the tage of statues and artillery probably is meant to revi^ Lenin's synecdoche "With icons against cannons, prominence of stylistic organization in these films cannot] read as sheer artistic motivation; the didactic ends ofléi make film style operate as composition ally justified 01 mentation.
All these techniques invest the narration with a high consistent degree of overtness in all the respects we hav been considering since Chapter 4.
Degree and depth of knowledge. The nnrraiion of t Soviet films is omniscient, The conventional knowledge ability afforded by crosscutting is particularly visible in thesj works because the crosscutting is not only that oLz. minute rescue: crosscutting is constantly drawing.!»* comparisons..Firing cannons are likened to popping cha pagne corks (Goluboi Express). While a boy is borne to. grave, his lover is at home, in an ecstasy of despair (Eat] More unusually, the syuzhet will "flash back" without; motivation of character memory, as when at the close óTi and New the narration gives us glimpses of earlier scen^ Maria's struggle. The narration may also overUy.anÜcjffl what will happen later in the film. The most striking ex pie comes from the opening of Storm over Asia, where: of landscapes are interrupted by near-subliminal flashy the saber that the protagonist will wield in the last The narration likewise has no need to justify spatial mi
eti fa.
illations by character knowledge: we can cut lo any locale. In fotemkin, as the marines prepare to fire, the narration cuts Tray to the bugle, the imperial crest, and other objects 'hich yield ironic juxtapositions. In The End of St. Peters-hurg, the narrator can situate the political activity in relation to lyrical landscapes. In The Ghost That Never Returns, Mien the police agent fires his pistol, the narration prolongs suspense by holding on such details as drifts of sand and a hat rolling in the wind. In Lace, a quarrel is interrupted by cutaway shots of a poster on the wall. \. Communicativeness. The narration's authority rests in part on its refusal to withhold what the mode defines as crucial fabüla information. Such information includes the story's historical context, political arguments, and character läcÜgröund. The film's fabula action consists either of the struggle of a protagonist to achieve a goal or of the growth of a spontaneous protagonist to socialist discipline and awareness. It is this linearity that the narration respects. The syuzhet does not equivocate about characters' motives or behavior. The .exposition is concentrated and preliminary, famishing relevant and valid information about the characters* pasts: there will never be what Sternberg calls "antic-■toatofy "cadtiôn."'let alone a "rise and fall of first impressions." The narration, in fact, takes the opportunity to be ^overcommunicative" by using many devices that ensure [redundancy: conformity of character to type, of type to situa-'tion, or of situation to historical-political presuppositions. In [Ivan, a street loudspeaker will often reiterate the narrational information already supplied by other means. The celebrated overlapping editing of Soviet practice displays not only the narration's authority (ability to restage the profilmic event, to "remount" it in editing) but also the narration's; urge to insist on certain gestures. Scenes like that of the! woman running through the doors in Ivan and the cream) separator test in Old and New resemble traditional oratoricalj amplifications of set topics (grief, success). I Self-consciousness, We have already seen the extent to Which camera position and lens length, frontality of figures, static poses, to-camera address, and the constant use of montage all create the sense of a self-conscious address to
the audience. The expository title can focus this effect. The narration can interject maxims (a quotation from Lenin in Poteinkin), slogans ("All power to the Soviets!" in October), and rebuttals (in Goluboi Express, a reactionary cries. "Stop the train!" and an expository title shoots back: "But can you stop a revolution?"). The narration will also usurp the characters' own voices. In many Soviet films, information that could easily be given in dialogue titles will be supplied by expository titles, as in the beginning of The End of St. Petersburg, when the peasant family must send some members to work in the city. In one episode of Twenty-six Commissars, the narration becomes a witness's testimony to the action. And some titles could plausibly come from the fabula world but. because they are not signaled as quotations, instead suggest that the words are routed through the narration. Moscow in October intercalates an orator and expository titles, while in Arsenal, we cannot locate a speaker for such lines as "Where is father?" Nothing could be stronger evidence for this tendency than the insistence on retaining exhortatory expositor)' titles after the arrival of lip-synchronized sound. In the remarkable Mountains of Gold, expository titles repeat what we have already heard a character say, and they even argue with a speaking character! Unlike their contemporaries in Europe, who envisioned the titleless film as the goal of a "pure" experimental cinema, the Soviet filmmakers saw the linguistic resources of the expository title as an instrument for rhetorical narration.
Attitudinal properties. The very constitution of genres and the didacticism of the narration in this mode make the narration openly and unequivocally judgmental, often satirically and ironically so. Judgments can be carried by interti-tles, especially in the exposition: how many Soviet films begin by rendering an oppressive state of affairs in the images and then interjecting ironic titles ("All is calm..." etc.)? The narration throws its voice to cheer for the opposition or quotes characters to mocking effect (the figure known to classical rhetoric as "transplacement"). InGoluboi Express, decadent bourgeois proclaim, "Ah, Europe, culture, civilization"; later the narration intercuts the same phrases with statues, policemen, and troops. In October, the
H IS T OKI C AL-MATERIALIST NARRATION
íl.2. Mountains of Cold


Bolsheviks arrested during the July Days are called traitors and spies; later, when Kerensky releases them to defend Petrograd, the narration sarcastically recalls the epithets. The ne plus ultra of this process may be seen in the intercutting of battlefield and stock exchange in The End of St. Petersburg, in which the same phrases ("Forward!" 'The deal is over!" "Both parties are satisfied!") apply with brutal irony to both milieux. Once this "tone of voice" has been established, the images can reinforce it by typage (grotesque costumes and demeanor of the bourgeois types, valorization of protagonists), camera work (the low angle as connoting power or solitude), lens length (the wide-angle lens for distortion and caricature; see fig. 11.a), and music (e.g., comic music to parody the opposition). The specific rhetorical tropes already mentioned will often, of course, work to judgmental effect as well.
Predictable Fabula, Unpredictable Narration
By treating the syuzhet as an argument by example, and by gathering a powerful rhetorical thrust, the Soviet historical-
ly
k
materialist cinema created a distinct organization of n Lion, with effects on cinematic style already discusse Another result was an idiosyncratic approach to the speca tor, one that is neither as "totalitarian" as liberal-humanis, critics often assume nor as radical as some recent theorists textuality have claimed. The (Urns' mixture of didactic jwetic structures calls for viewing procedures which dev from classical norms yet remain unified by protocols spe to this mode.
Broadly speaking, the viewer brings to these films a highly probable schemata. Already-known stories, dra from history, myth, and contemporary life, furnish a fairj Limited range of options for the overall cause-effect ch Knowledge of the different genres, especially when the treats a historical subject, further limits what can plau happen. The viewer also possesses a sense of how the m creates character and signals salient conflicts. And the e ing is likely to be known, at least in general outline, syuzhet terms, the narration further strives to eliminate ambiguity at the level of causality (motives, goals, precon lions) or at the level of the rhetorical point made. H narrational difficulties presented by these films cannon explained under the rubrics of realism or subjectivity; problems are clearly marked as proceeding from the conscious narration. On the whole there is little room for gamelike equivocations and the interpretive subtlety y rized by art-cinema norms.
These films therefore sacrifice many resources of o narrational modes. There is relatively little curiosity how events came to be as they are; macrosocial his causes are often taken for granted. Suspense is limity questions of how the inevitable will occur or, in the cajj characters who are not "public" personages, whethej character will survive, move to correct consciousness, forth. The syuzhet may assume that because the hisic^ event or rhetorical point is already known, not all of the need to be shown. In Deserter, the process of conver German worker Renn from a traitor to a good prole completely skipped over; the narration simply assumed a stay in the Soviet Union suffices to bring him arouiuu
sei
end of Potemkw neglects to mention that the rebelling jailors were eventually captured, but the viewer is supposed
ounderstand that whatever the outcome of this episode, the entire 1905 revolution was a harbinger of 1917. Moreover, if there are political disputes within Soviet communism about tlje case considered, it is often wiser for the filmmaker to tjmjUXDlanatio.n than to risk being criticized. Vance Kepley h^sshown that manyMelÜpticaJ moments in Povzhenko> films resüTT from skirling sensitive issues." We shall later see hoiv TlifNeii' Babylon tries to avoid disputes about why the Paris Commune failed. Again, the omnipotent narration works as a reliable guide: any "permanent" breaks in the causal chain signal not a lack of communicativeness but a tacit appeal to the audience's referential schemata.
The historical-materialist film compensates for its limited narrative schemata by unusually innovative spatial and tem-: ppral construction. If the story outline is often predictable. Stylistic processes often are not. At the barest perceptual level, narration will jolt the spectator. Consider the opening of Twenty-six Commissars: f 1. Long shot: Oil field
2.  Title: "Baku"
3.  Explosion
;   4. Title: "1918"
5.  Explosion
6.  Explosion
This is our introduction to the revolutionary brigade. Strike begins with abstract shots of the factory, including silhouettes and an upside-down, reverse-motion reflection of the factory in a puddle. The narration of Deserter establishes the river docks in a lyrical tranquillity before startling us with shots of chains dropped from ships—shots that intersperse black frames with bursts of imagery and thus create an almost annoying flicker. The conventionality of the large-scale narrative articulations promotes a moment-by-moment "microattention" to the unfolding syuzhet. Like the orator embroidering a commonplace, the narration takes for granted that we understand that part of World War I was fought around Baku, that Strike will be about a workers' walkout, that Deserter is set in a dockyard. The task is to
i
make these givens vivid, or as the Soviet directors were fond of saying, perceptible.
What renders these stylistic processes more unpredictable f than the procedures of classical narration? Most obviously, the Soviet films 1 am considering define themselves against many spatial and temporal norms of classical Hollywood narrative. All the procedures of titling, cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scene I have already mentioned constitute an alternative stylistic paradigm. Evelines will not necessarily cut neatly together; characters will not necessarily ignore the audience; framing will not necessarily be symmetrical or centered. Similarly, principles of spatial and temporal continuity, of tight linkage of cause and effect, and so forth do not hold in this mode. As in the art cinema, style becomes more prominent here because of its deviation from the classical norm.
To the extent, however, that the Soviet devices function within a paradigm, the viewer can apply schemata based on this extrinsic nonn to make sense of the films. But this process is more difficult than in the classical mode because of the great emphasis the Soviets placed upon deviating from extrinsic norms. Again as in the art cinema, variations often proceed from authorial differences: Dovzhenko is more likely to use slow motion than Eisenstein is, Room is more apt to match shots "classically" than are his contemporaries. Still, nothing in Strike prepares us for the alternating of two successive scenes in Old and New, nothing in Mother anticipates the montage of black frames in Deserter. It is not just that the filmmakers developed; the search for ever more "perceptible" effects pushed them to try new devices in every film. In general, narration became more elliptical, images became briefer, gaps became greater, fabula events underwent more expansion and ampUfication. Virtually any i device—soft focus, slow or fast motion, upside-down camera | positions, single-source lighting, handheld camera movement—could create a film's distinctive intrinsic norm. It would be up to the viewer to make sense of the unpredictable procedure by slotting it into accustomed syuzhet functions and patterns. We have already seen this at work in our examples of spatial discontinuity in Earth and The End of St.
Petersb great 5
signincan viewer
guidelines each n!m'-
bycallin-construct I call y si
Faced can. at important disting task in cma, spatial
The Shklov ing  wo its au chance usually suppressed tiotem tenden spectat Soviet verse provide about when Holly hypothe." Pavel' sense placement.
From I directors need views
HISTORICAL-MATERI A LIST NARRATION
11.3.  Earth
wie t directors were fond
sses more unpredictable iTation? Most obviously, -fine themselves against of classical Hollywood g, cinematography, edit-
„dy mentioned constitute elines will not necessar-ill not necessarily ignore isarily be symmetrical or
jatial and temporal con-d effect, and so forth do
: cinema, style becomes deviation from the clas-
Soviet devices function .pply schemata based on í of the films. But this classical mode because .eed upon deviating from cinema, variations often -s: Dovzhenko is more ristein is. Room is more • are his contemporaries, r'or the alternating of two íothing in Mother antici-:n Deserter, It is not just e search for ever more 1 to try new devices in became more elliptical, íe greater, fabula events .plification. Virtually any in. upside-down camera handheld camera move-.ctive inrrinsic norm. It fnseof the unpredictable jrned syuzhet functions -en this at work in our Earth and The End of St.
1
I
\
1
■ ■ ■
■i

Petersburg in Chapter 7. Because each film strives to attain great stylistic prominence—the intrinsic norms marking . significant differences within the "Soviet style" itself—the viewer must use the extrinsically normalized principles as guidelines. The task, as in art-cinema narration, is to grasp each film's unique reworking of the paradigm. This is done bv calling on procedural schemata that urge: when in doubt, construct a fabula event as perceptually forceful and politically significant.
Faced with the.shocks of this jarring style, the spectator can, at least up to a point, deal with it cognitively. The important strategies are those of "filling in" and "linking and_ distinguishing." Such activities form a part of the viewer's r task in any narrational mode. but. with Soviet montage cinema, they play a major role at the level of temporal and spatial construction.
The very idea of montage demands that we fill in gaps. As Shklovsky put it in describing intellectual montage, the editing works "through its non-coincident components—., its aureoles."14 Every shot change offers the filmmaker a chance to create a break in time and space. Classical editing usually avoids perceptible gaps at this level; at most they are suppressed or temporary. Soviet montage flaunts its spa-üotemporäl gaps and will not ahvays plug them. The Soviet tendency to minimize or omit establishing shots asks the spectator to fill in the overall milieu. For similar reasons, the Soviet directors never canonized the over-the-shoulder reverse shot; instead of this extra cue that the classical style provides we are often presented with no clear information about characters' distances or angles of interaction. Thus when the cutting pattern violates the 180-degree rule of Hollywood practice, the viewer must construct a set of hypotheses about character position. Entire sequences (e.g.( Pavel's trial in Mother) or whole films (Earth) can make . sense on the basis of comparatively few cues for characters' placement.
From the elimination of the establishing shot the Soviet directors drew two conclusions, one quite radical. First, you need not find or create an entire profilmic event: partial views can create a locale that need never have existed in
-.-,.-
ľ* i
I
front of the lens. The spectator will infer a unified j] based on assumptions about real spacgsand abouUhf space that films usually present. The more radical' was that viewers could be asked to unify spaces in physics impossible ways. Supplied with strong spatial cues_,such \ character eyelines or earlines. the spectator will infer "abstract" space that could not exist empirically. In T six Commissars, the Bolshevik prisoners are massacred^ the desert. A wounded man staggers to the top of a hill-« shouts: "Be calm, comrades!" There is a cut to the oil fielt Baku, many miles away. Suddenly workers in tht . freeze in place, as if hearing his cry. There follows a sent shots in which a striker at Baku "watches" the executing the commissars. And after the massacre, the workers s ' in silent homage before a spectacle they could not pa see or hear. Comparably "abstract" spaces can be fou many Soviet films; as we shall see. The New Babylon
on them to a considerable degree. The spectator must fill in temporal gaps too. Here íä
passage from Earth;
I. Medium shot: In his house the father bellows
II-3)-
t 2. "Ivan!"
I,  3. Long shot: Against sky. he calls, righlward (fig. 11.4). j 4. "Stephen!"
5.   Medium shot: He calls, rightward (tig. 11.5).
6.   "Grigori!" J 7. Medium close-up: He calls, leftward (fig. 11.6).
8. "Have—" r  9. "you killed—" 1   jo. "my—"
11.   "Vassily?"
12.   Long shot, as (3): The father looks straight out (fig.
p-7).
13.  Extreme long shot: Empty landscape (fig. n.8). ,   14. Medium shot:  Over father's shoulders, two men together (fig. 11.9). Track back with father as he strides to the camera, revealing a third man in the background (fig. 11.10).
15. Medium shot: The father walks up to Khoma (fig.
II. 11). The narration has created a spatial gap—the abrupt transi-
. tion from the house lo the outdoors in shots 1-3—and some temporal ones. If the father shouted "Ivan!" in the house, we must assume that he consumed time in getting out to the hillside. Yet the rhythmic alternation of title and image suggests that perhaps "Ivan!" was shouted outside too. This yields an ambiguity about the frequency of the fabula event.
j Later, after the father has hollered and apparently gotten no response (shots 12-13)»another cut takes us immediately lo a group of three men (shot 14)—presumably those he summoned by name. Without warning, the cut has skipped over the fabula duration required for the group to assemble. But when the father turns and walks away, shot 15 reveals that a fourth man is present—Khoma, the youth who did kill Vassily. His arrival has been withheld for the sake of surprise. Dovzhenko's style is unusually oblique, but his reliance on
' ellipses is only an extension of a general Soviet tendency to ask the spectator to see any cut as embodying a possible break in fabula time. Because these Soviet films suggest that we fill in missing
'' pieces of space and lime, the spectator musl tolerate a degree
Mi   K.inh 1.7  Earth
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2.    Medu (fig. 11.13)
3.  Cloí
4.  Cloflj
5.   Closť again, si
6.   CH pince-nj
We cai
nil rill and .mil
historical-materialist narration
11.12. Poiemkii 11-13. Poienikin
.-",..                       ■       '

of cognitive strain. At the start of a sequence-, we may be uncertain about exactly what is happening; the narration has plunged us abruptly into a stream of details. We must patiently trust that the narration will eventually clarify or justify what seems unsettled. Early in Old and Neiv we see men sawing timbers while families look on; only gradually do we grasp (thanks chiefly to an intertitle) that brothers are dividing their property by sawing the family house in two. In Arsenal, the fight for possession of the locomotive is interrupted by a series of very close shots of a woman turning to the camera and leaping up; cut back to the locomotive; only-after this do we get a shot that establishes the woman at the telegraph key in a railroad office. It is as if the narration, rushing to give us the emotional core of the situation, later takes the opportunity to flesh out time, place, and causality. In Chapter 7, we have already seen how sequences in Earth and End of St. Petersburg create "open" spatial relations that only eventually get closed: father and son quarreling (back to back or not?), troops firing (on the Bolsheviks or on the general?). In sum, the stability of broad causal schemata in these films allows the narration to create a process of hypothesis testing in a film's moment-by-moment unfolding. Film style works to retard the likeliest meaning, and the spectator adopts a wait-and-see strategy.
Occasionally we wait and never see. Some spatiotemporal gaps we can never close at any denotative level. At the end of the Odessa Steps sequence in :Bf>temkin^ the baby carriage jitters down the steps, intercut with shots of the staring woman with the pince-nez. Then:
1.   Medium shot: The carriage begins to flip over (fig. 11.12).
2.   Medium shot: A swordsman starts to swing his saber (fig. J 1.13).
3.   Close-up: He slashes downward (fig. 11.14).
4.   Close-up jump cut: He slashes (fig. 11.15).
5.   Close-up jump cut: He draws back and starts to slash again, shouting (fig. 11.16).
6.   Close-up: Blood runs from a woman's eye, and her pince-nez is shattered (fig. 11.17).
We can, I think, construct the fabula action in several
ways. (A) The soldier has slashed at the woman wi pince-nez. Reasons: shots 2-6 can be construed as a making shot 6 a reaction shot; the frontality of the sol attack (perhaps a subjective point of view) is congruerilj that of the woman's orientation. (B) The soldier has si
tlie cossack slashing, and the wounding of the woman are unconnected events, crosscut. Reason: all the inadequate and incompatible cues present in (A) and (B). (D) The cossack slashes at both the carriage and the woman: an "impossible" prohlmic event. Rather than decide on a single
H I S T O RIC A L - M A T Ľ Hl A L I S T  N A Hit A TIO N                                                                 23
U  iti.   IVlCIliklM
tt.t$. Poienikin
construction, we should recognize that exactly this mixing of cues, this shaking of scenic components loose from a univocal fabula world, enables the narration to create an "open" space from which can be selected maximally forceful images of brutality—with five of the six addressed directly to the viewer. The spatial gaps become permanent ones, creating vivid rhetorical effects.
The act of filling in must then include our willingness to accept, in the name of perceptibility, very great violations of conventional or internally consistent space and time. What else can explain the spectator's assimilation of shots in which the film strip is flipped side-to-side or upside down? The fabula event may be presented not as ambiguous but as con tradic ton': an officer sits in inconsistent positions from shot to shot (Storm over Asia); a coolie is slapped once, but in a diiíereni way from shot to shot (Goluboi Express); a worker assaults his boss in two locales at once (The End of St. Petersburg); a priest raps his cross In one palm, then—or rather also—-in the other (Potemkin; see figs. 11.18-n.19). The Soviet directors assumed that if syuzhet material cannot be unified at the denotative level, the spectator will look for ways to unify it connotatively. Thus ideologically defined
argumentative schemata and the explicit and constant ence of a narrator allow the viewer to place incomp' presentations within a larger affective dynamic.
Besides filling in gaps, the spectator must link and < guish elements. One consequence of Soviet film's s, upon "perceptibility" is that we are expected to fine tun' sensitivity to the representation of space and time. S' ities and dissimilarities among images weigh more in, mode than in the classical narrative. Soviet directors are of calling^n short-term memory in order to permute " in tfálj&jjle ways, as Dovzhenko does in the Earth seg. (figs, ix.3-11.11) or as Boris Barnet does in Mosi October by varying the same shot (figs- 11.20-11.aa1 Potemkin, the narration frequently cuts from one chi to another as each executes a similar gesture (making running a machine); denotatively we must pick di individuals out of a smooth passage of movement while connotatively we must see them a» linked in thes formance of similar actions). By using editing to ac temporal dilation, these films rely on the viewer's abili construct one movement out of several overlapping^ sentalions onscreen. And some films, in particular ft
kin's, utilize devices which lie on the very threshold of 'perceptual discrimination, such as sporadic black frames, 'single-frame montage, and barely discernible jump cuts. The spectator's ability to draw likenesses and contrasts
can work closely with the rhetorical aims of the mode. Storm






over Asia features a celebrated sequence in which the British commander and his wife prepare to visit the Buddhist temple. The narration crosscuts the couple's preparation— shaving, washing, dressing—with functionaries scurrying around cleaning the temple. More than temporal simultaneity is evoked here. The narration draws analogies between objects in each line of action: the temple feather duster is likened to the wife's powder puff, the priest's collar to her necklace- Expository titles remark ironically, "There are ceremonies / and rites / among all races." Since the immediate causal function of the scene is minimal, the fact that it is given extensive treatment invites the viewer to dwell on its rhetorical implications. The spectator must take the visual similarities between the British and the Buddhists as cues to a conceptual likeness; the interfiles reinforce the link. The rhetorical effect is double: to satirize fastidious upper-class hygiene, as solemn and self-righteous as a rebgious ritual; and to mock the church as a thing of this world, as vain as the decadent imperialists. Like many crosscutting episodes in Soviet film, this sequence asks the viewer to liken "unlike" things. Conceptual parallebsm replaces causal logic as the basis of the syuzhet. Ultimately, however, these argumenta-


tive cormotaiioij the similarity m anticipates the j colonialists' vis» The locus clai nous "iMiellcctiä Storm over AsiS note that the J tual"—that is, rl sibility that entr the nondiegeoq denotative ream bull intercut wij pure case, as are "God and Coun Soviet practiced images taken fr Storm over Aa household and j "reality." In fa{ richer one, sinj initially desi recall them for penchant for rep tions across the: ary revolution—1 repeated during kin's crew has; inserts an imag the mutiny. Su time calls a "re showninaveryf him, as urging' same worker suL plies the poten making me fito] a mosaic, a tom
It may seei^ most viewers., of the cutting

1
I
I [
[
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST NARRATION
ence in which the Brit--re to visit the Buddhist - couple's preparation— functionaries scurrying :an temporal simultane-aws analogies between ! emple feather duster is he priest's collar to her ironically. "There are ; .ces." Since the immedi-inimal, thefactthatitis ie viewer to dwell on its or must take the visual j :he Buddhists as cues to I s reinforce the link. The I e fastidious upper-class us as a religious ritual; this world, as vain as the rosscutting episodes in viewer to liken "unlike" aces causal logic as the ■-ever, these argumenta-
tive connotations "feed back" into the causal nexus, since the similarity between imperial and Buddhist authorities anticipates the complicity of rulers to be exhibited during the colonialists' visit to the temple.
The locus classicus of this abstract tendency is the notorious "intellectual montage" of Soviet cinema, of which the Storm over Asia sequence could count as a fair example. But note that the narration can achieve high-level "intellectual"—that is, rhetorical—judgments in two ways. The possibility thatentranced Eisenstein was what Metz has called the nondiegetic inserts—one oť more imägeslHat possess no denotative reality in the fabula world. The slaughter of the bull intercut with the massacre of the workers (Strike) is a pure case, as are the Kerensky/peacock comparisons and the "God and Country" sequence in October. More common Soviet practice, however, was the rhetorical combination of images taken from the diegetic world. The sequence from Storm over Asia is an instance: both the commander's household and the temple exist on the same level of fabula "reality." In fact, this second possibility proves to be the richer one, since it allows the narration to present images initially designed to denote fabula information and then to .recall them for more connotalive purposes. Eisenstein had a penchant for repeating identical shots in very different situations across the film. In October, images hailing the February revolution—for instance, troops with upraised rifles—are repeated during the October Revolution. After the Potem-kin's crew has pitched Smirnov overboard, the narration inserts an image of the maggoty meat that had precipitated the mutiny. Such a shot,becomes what one theorist of the lime calls a "refrain."16 At the start of Arsenal, a worker is shown in a very disjointed series of images: much later in the film, as urgings to strike sweep through the arsenal, ihe same worker suddenly looks up. The use of the refrain multiplies the potential functions of each montage fragment, making the film a collection of intrareferential bits frozen in a mosaic, a total "spatial" order.
It may seem odd that I have said so little about what is for most viewers the salient quality of Soviet montage: the speed of the cutting. All of the films 1 have picked out contain
passages of rapid editing, and some present shots ord: frame long. Often this technique is motivated by j action or by tense emotional confrontations; the rapidy battle scene or police attack is a convention of these Just as often, though, accelerated rhythmic editing.' tions as the narration's instrument. Fast cutting nc embodies causal climaxes but creates rhetorical onesj rapidly cut sequence becomes ipso facto significant? least because fast cutting tends, paradoxically, to stret the syuzhet duration devoted to an episode). For the s( tor, rapid editing is the most self-conscious effort of-' rhetorical narration to control the pace of hypothesis fd lion. We have repeatedly seen that any rapid flow of fi information, via editing or other means, compels the tor to make simple, all-or-nothing choices about storra struction. Under the pressure of time—certainly long I half a second—we must give up trying to predict the] image and simply accept what we are given. Sovleffl cutting takes care to combine and repeat shots or acw that we have already seen, so that we can gather áQ impression from repeated bursts. Far from beinj subjects inundated by the film's spray of imagery, we t tinue to apply rhetorical and narrative schemata; we$ tinue to fill in, to liken, to discriminate; but we do suprashot level, unifying the sequence from the topdt using prototypes like "battle." "strike ralIy.'u('pQliceal^ or whatever—all the while registering the sheer percfi force of the style.17
The New Babylon
The film work of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trait grew out of their experimental theater group, Factory! Eccentric Actor ("Feks" for short). These young men initially interested in achieving grotesque effects by mäiS! lating the profilmic event. Feks's The Cloak (1926) poses verbal grotesquerie (Gogol's skaz style) into terms through setting, costume, and acting. The stylizj of the profilmic event serves to emphasize narratiori
tervention and thus links Feks to more montage-oriented directors. The Devil's Wheel (1926) was an attempt to integrate such staging with Soviet editing techniques. By the time of The New Babylon (1929), Kozintsev and Trauberg were able to achieve original effects within the norms of the Soviet historical-materialist mode.
; That one of the two books which Lenin carried into hiding in Finland was Marx's Civil War in France suggests the importance he attached to the lessons of the 1871 Paris jCommune, After 1917. the Commune passed into official (mythology as a principal antecedent of the Bolshevik Revolution. The subject was thus eminently suited for a Soviet film. The New Babylon portrays highlights of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Commune which sprang up the following year. The film's opening presents the war hysteria manifesting itself in emotional farewells to the troops, buying sprees in a department store, and frenzied celebration in a cabaret. In the first two sequences the narration introduces Louise, a salesgirl at the New Babylon store; her boss; various workers; a cabaret singer; a member of the Chamber of Deputies; and a journalist who bursts into the restaurant with news of French defeat. Eventually the French capitulate to the Prussians, but proletarian women prevent the French soldiers from taking the cannons to Versailles. Later, after the Commune occupies Paris, the boss, the deputy, and the singer encourage the Versailles troops to fire on the city. Soon the Commune takes to the barricades, and after a fierce battle the French forces capture Paris. Communard prisoners are assaulted by the bourgeoisie, with the boss leading the charge. At the film's close, Louise and her comrades are executed.
The film shares with others in its mode a use of historical referentiality and slock types. Louise the salesclerk resembles Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin" of the Commune. The emphasis on women as active fighters is faithful to most accounts of the civil war. The film's very title plays on a historical reference: there apparently was a New Babylon department store, but al the time Paris itself was known as the "Modern Babylon," celebrated for decadence and frivolity. More generally, the film expects the viewer to supply
historical background and to identify emblematic moments. When the boss catches the deputy wooing the singer backstage, his pledge of silence in exchange for a state subsidy can be taken to symbolize what Marx denounced as the Second Empire's "joint-stock government . . . the undisguised subservience of government to the propertied classes."1* Nonetheless, the conventional roles of bourgeois, politician, and worker are given more vividness by the film's referential exactitude, Kozintsev and Trauberg drew ideas for costume and typage from caricatures of the period. The tableau of Victorious France in the cabaret is especially evocative of the spirit of Commune and anti-Commune broadsides of 1870-1871.19
The New Babylon is notable for the episodic quality of its organization. The syuzheťs eight parts correspond to the film's projection reels (common enough in a country whose theaters often had only one projector), but most Soviet films which divide themselves into distinct acts remain somewhat tighter-knit than this. Sequences skip from the autumn of 1870 to January of 1871 (the moment of surrender) to 18 March, when crowds swarm over the Montmartre troops, and the film concludes in late May. with the battle for Paris and the execution of the Communards. The first two parts concentrate on depicting the decadence of the Second Empire, while the later portions show the Commune as doing little more than meeting, fighting, and suffering. These gaps in referential time can be explained by the fact that Soviet thinkers were not agreed upon the Commune's political significance. By 1929, historians had begun to quarrel about whether the Commune overrated purely democratic reforms, whether it paid too little attention to military strategy, and whether it failed for want of a central state machinery (this last being a favorite Stalinist view). On these points of controversy the film remains silent, choosing simply to condemn the bourgeoisie and eulogize the revolutionaries according to generic convention. (The film is more direct in drawing on already-canonized interpretations. In one very brief scene, a worker suggests to the leaders that the Commune seize the factories and banks, but the proposal is rejected in favor of a peaceful solution. This inter-
change puuB
criticism mad
There is, hd
makes   the  nJ
Another coniej
failure to ford
as a result, tty
.Wie Babylon
major charact]
Louise and h
fearful in
Louise
Louise anj
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always waverm
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Jean refuses t<
haunted by mei
begins he pard
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H ISTORICA L-MATE
change puts into the mouth oť tlie proletariat exactly the criticism made by Engels in 1891 and Lenin in 1917.)
There is, however, one occasion where realistic motivation makes the narrative swerve from conventional lines. Another contemporary debate centered on the Commune's failure to forge links with the peasants in the French army; as a result, the peasants took the side of the bourgeoisie. The Nmv Babylon makes reference to this issue by including as a major character Jean, a country lad who comes to know Louise and her family. Jean is characterized as tense and fearful in his soldier's role. When he meets the workers, Louise gives him bread and her father mends his boots. Louise and other Communards extend offers of solidarity throughout the film; she even follows him in a drenching rain to beg him to desert the army. Nonetheless, Jean is always wavering. Again and again he halts, as if on the brink of understanding his class allegiance, but then—motivated by a desire to end the war and go home—he sides with the oppressor. Once the Communards have seized the cannons. Jean refuses to join them. Encamped at Versailles, he is haunted by memories of Louise, but once the battle for Paris begins he participates frenziedly. Jean searches for Louise among the prisoners and is thrown out of the cafe of the class for whom he has fought. In a cemetery. Jean stares frozen as Louise defies the officer; then he joins other soldiers in digging graves for the victims. The usual pattern would be for Jean to shift from spontaneous feeling to political consciousness, as Louise does; but instead Jean remains impotent and terrified, more romantically interested in Louise than politically aware of the situation. Jean's progress conforms to the "negative" apprenticeship Suleiman finds in the román á these generally, the pattern whereby a character moves from naive ignorance and passivity to an obstinate blindness and a refusal of action.w More specifically. Jean poses an ideological difficulty for the film. To portray him as utterly villainous would be risky at a moment when Stalin was at pains to celebrate the peasantry; to portray him as joining the Commune would gainsay a historical interpretation going back to Marx. The solution is to make Jean an unstable element whose presence conforms to ideological
I A L I S T NARRATION
necessity but wrhose exact function lacks some narrative« rhetorical clarity.
In The New Babylon, the narration foregoes many 3 vices—overlapping editing, static poses—that are con™ in other Soviet historical-materialist films. Instead. :!ic lil amplifies the sort of abstract, empirically false scenogupli space I have mentioned in connection with Titentfl Commissars and the Odessa Steps. The New Babylon rail one tendency of the extrinsic norm to the level of anintrij] one. The film uses crosscutting, "Kuleshov effect" edifi? (that is, the omission of the establishing shot), the > In match, double-voiced intertitles, and figure fron tali tvtóď duce a loose, "open" space that can forge rhetorical confl [ions. Some fairly static fabula situations are thus dynam by the narration's constant manipulation, and the spectatfl task is not only to fill in the missing spatial connections bra liken and distinguish the fabula elements shown.
The expository norm gels locked into place during the in segment, which depicts war fever gripping Paris. The fill first block of shots ranges over four locales, all of whicflH be intercut throughout the scene: the railroad station, asfl troops depart; a cabaret; the New Babylon department sfl and an unspecified group of settings I shall call the workffl spaces. The chart shows the film's first thirty-one SJB grouped by locale. The shifts from place to place procl overtly and unambiguously from the narration. (Contfl the way that the opening of La guerre est finie motivate« imagery by the play of Diego's consciousness.) Crosscuffl conventionally signifies simultaneity, but the seqtiea makes the viewer downplay temporal considerations« connect fabula events by purely connotative siinilarittesjffl differences. The cabaret repeats the railroad scene by uSH what will become a central motif: spectacle. As crowds cHl the troop train, so the couples in the cabaret applaud theffl enacting France's crushing of Prussia (figs. 11.23-1™ and one slogan—"Death to the Prussians!"—appear« both. The train and the cabaret are linked to the departtw store by the stress on buying (titles 10. 20); later, chanj "Bargain!" and "Buy!" will echo through the NewBabylH aisles. At the same time, the store's display of parasolsO
The New Babyhit: Opening
I. "War!" fy 2. "Death 10 the Prussians!"
tRailroad Station
3. Locomotive 14. Four women applaud .. 5. One woman cheers
6.  "Scatter their blood to Berlin!"
7.  Cheering women ' 8. "Scatter their blood!"
9. Long shot: Train and
crowd 10. "War! All the places are sold!"

Cabaret
11.  Couple applaud
12.  Stage: France victorious
13.  Stage: Prussia crushed
14.  "Death to the Prussians!"
15.  Stage: Three singers
16.  Stage: France
17.  Long shot: Stage and crowd
18.   Stage: Woman and crown
19.  Couple applauds
25.   "The boss"
26.   Drumroll
27.   Medium close-up: The boss, seated
Department Store
20.  "War! Prices have risen!"
21.  Displays of umbrellas
22.  Fans on display
23.  "The Department Store 'New Babylon'"
24.  Stairs and goods Tor sale
Workers' quarters
28.  Young women at sewing machines
29.  Cobbler
30.   Washerwomen
31.   Woman at suds
fans (fig. 11.25) ar|d lne frantic women customers (fig. 11.26) recall the cheering women at the station.
From the New Babylon we cut back to the cabaret; the shift is motivated by the fact thai the store's owner is there, finishing his meal. Finally, the shots of workers—seamstresses, cobbler, and washerwomen—are justified not only as an expected antithesis in this mode but also by the fact that these workers make and maintain the clothes sold at such stores and worn at the cabaret and the station: they form the infrastructure of the fashion-conscious Second Empire. Although the workers we see will become causally significant (the cobbler is Louise's lather, one washer-
woman her mother), they are introduced as prototypes of exploited labor; their class identity overshadows their personal individuality, as is suggested by lining up the figures in ranks into the depths of the shot (figs. 11.27-11.28). In general, the effect of the crosscutting is to create an omniscient survey of a society that treats war as spectacle and commodity consumption. The tone of the exposé is of course accusatory: shots21 and22(figs. 11.29-11.30)compare the objects on display with those wielded by the customers, a drumroll announces the entry of the boss (fig. 11.31), and the first two expository titles make the narration participate, by ironic ventriloquism, in the war whoops.
HIS T O B I C A L - M A TÉRI A LIST  NARRATION
*W
II.23 11.34
11.25 II.26
rs' quarters
"oung women at ■ewing machines .'obbler Vasherwomen Vornan at suds
oduced as prototypes of
' overshadows their per-
5v lining up the figures in
(figs. 11.27-11.28). In
:ing is to create an omni-
its war as spectacle and
of the exposé is of course
i. 29-11.30) compare the
ded by the customers, a
he boss (fig. 11.31), and
the narration participate,
.r whoops.

.

The rest of the first reel builds upon the intercutting of elements defined in the initial portion. Two locales become principal stockpiles of imagery—the department store and the cabaret. We shift between Louise hawking lace ("It's a good buy") and her boss idly studying the menu, between
Louise furtively gnawing a piece of bread and the boss ordering dessert. Louise works before an immense mannequin, _ who in stance and drapery recalls the cabaret tableau ofU" Victorious France (fig. 11.32). (The shallow focus makes th&j dummv in fact a backdrop for Louise.) Then the manager/
spiel, which becomes the occasion for ihe mosl rapid shifts so far. From one salesman's "Buy!" we cut to the railroad station, repeating the analog)' between commerce and war. Then back to another salesman shouting. "For sale!"; hack to the cabaret skit personifying France—now also an object
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST NARRATION
11.31 11.32
of commerce. Customers ai the New Babylon fight for the goods on sale; cut from the daemonic salesman to men in the cabaret; "Buy!" Cut to the laundress, exhausted over her steaming tub; her image reiterates the contrast between rich and poor, and the following shot of the boss reinforces it.
Then a couple in the cabaret applaud. Cut lo the crowd aj! station applauding the soldiers with the old cry. "Sea their blood!" The sequence closes with a shot of thejfl identical to the opening image (shot 3).
My description makes crosscutting the most obviou." vice here, but the abstraction of the fabula space is ať plished by other means as well. Within locales, charafl are never defined in an establishing shot, so thai eve"' long shots of the cabaret or the station do not unequivo "place" the characters. Louise and the sales staff are n situated with respect to the customers, and the worker« never shown in any single locale. What links charag within most settings is one component of the Kul;' effect: the eyeline match. On the basis of glances assume that the train (shot 3) is the object of the worn applause (shot 4). that Crowned France (shot 18) i object of the couple's delight (shot 19), and that Lou addressing the customers in her harangue. This cue is $[ what helped by a frontality of figure position even in self-conscious than in most Soviet shots. Characters'b and faces are turned almost completely to us; only their, "just miss" addressing the camera. Consequently, wheri see Lady France very frontally and then see a shoti couple, also frontal, we will construct an eyeline run "between" them, on which we sit. But since the space 1$ locales is defined only by eyelines and figure pošití becomes possible for crosscutting to exploit these c* create an abstract space of spectacle. Hinted al in the effect emerges most clearly near the close of quence. The narration cuts from the department store a man to cabaret customers, looking off slightly lef laughing and rocking as if watching the sale that occu wholly different place. The narration cuts from an appl ing couple at the cabaret to applauding women at the stiL creating a metaphoric sign of equality—as if the couplet cheering the train, as if the women were egging qrľ performance (figs. 11.33-11.34)-
In this respect, Feks was carrying on approved pi dent. The Civil War in France portrays the Second Enj bourgeoisie as entranced by spectacle. Marx describes
ladies watching mob atrocities from a balcony. He cites an 'English reporter on the bourgeoisie's addiction to cabaret, £even under shellfire. And Kozintsev lias quoted one scathing ipassage as the source of Feks's approach:
The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the "vile multitude," hut a phantom Paris, the Paris of the francs-fileurs, the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female—the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bohéme, and its cocottes at Versailles, St.-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing by their own honor and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far belter got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; the cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical."1
By creating "eyeline matches" across impossible spaces, the opening sequence of The New Babylon depicts the bourgeoisie as Marx did: as feckless spectators.
The film's second segment reinforces the intrinsic norm while presenting some amplifications. The setting remains, almost to the end, the cabaret. The viewer must now construct a more concrete sense of place out of the fragments supplied by montage: men and women toasting "Gay Paris," dancers on and offstage, the singer's act, the boss's table, couples sitting at various tables, and the boss and the deputy striking their bargain backstage. Thus when the chanteuse sings, "We all need love," and the narration cuts to a series of couples—old rake and young woman, young man and old woman, a girl ravenously eating while an old man slobbers over her neck (fig. i i .35)—we are to understand these commentaries on the cash nexus of romance as arising from the depiction of a fairly stable narrative space. These couples are all in the cabaret. Moreover, Louise's presence helps anchor the scene: the shots of her and the boss approach conventional long shots and over-the-shoulder reverse angles (figs. 11.36-11.37). Against the quite conceptual space of the opening sequence, the relative contiguity of these elements becomes apparent. But the narration still opens up this space to a considerable extent by exploiting devices which were subordinate during the first episode.
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST NARRATION
11-35 U 36
11-37

I t
I I
real Paris of the	í
.us, the Pans of the	
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gilded, the idle	
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battle going on	j
uinds of cannon,	
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Martin. The men	.-».
of the wounded	|
sides, the whole	1;
impossible spaces, the Inn depicts the bour-s.itors.
«'s the intrinsic norm
Phe setting remains,
lower must now con-
■ out of the fragments
• toasting "Gay Paris,"
act, the boss's table,
io boss and the deputy
k when the chanteuse
•uion cuts to a series of
young man and old
v an old man slobbers
nderstand these com-
ve as arising from the
>ve. These couples are
•lesence helps anchor
;*ss approach conven-
' reverse angles (figs.
■> eptuul space of the
Uty of these elements
'U opens up this space
*. devices which were


■
For one thing, the sharp disparity of foreground and background is given new emphasis. No matter what character we see, she or he is in the foreground and the rest of the cabaret forms a vague flat. (There is never anything between the camera and the figure.) So absolute is the split between the
plane of action and the rearward space that we cannjjj! any sense of where couples sit or stand in the set. (Inf respect, the uniformly blurred backgrounds constitute] functional equivalent of the neutral sky in other Soviets or the bleached walls of Dreyer s La Passion de JeM ď Arc.) The narration strives to keep all action playettH so that when the journalist is informed of the French icfi (lie. 11.38), he rises from his table to address the crojffl the background, turning from the camera (fig. 11.3^ then we cut to a frontal shot, with as great an extent befil him now as theve was in the previous shot (fig. 11.40). w absence of an establishing shot, the cabaret becomes ijs nitely large, elastic, always stretching out to infinity beh whatever we see; and yet a paucity of depth cues maká cabaret hang as flatly behind the characters as doea sunbeam backdrop setting off Crowned France.
The cabaret sequence goes beyond froniality ofbodw face by making characters look more or less directly iq camera. The very first shot (fig. 11.41) announces saliency of the device, which recurs almost every tii customer toasts Paris (fig. 11.42). By combining relaj flat backgrounds with self-conscious eye contact, the
136.   As (133): Women dance (0 the camera.
137.   Louise turns to look off right.
138.   Men and women dance the cancan diagonally left.
139.  An old man and some women dance diagonally left.
140.  Medium close-up: Louise turns to look left.
H I S T O R I C A L - M A T E R I A L I S T N A R R A T 10 N
II.43
"43
1
I
i
■
i I
■
141.   Medium shot: A diner raises his glass to the camera.
142.   "To well-fed Paris!"
143.   Medium shot: An old man nibbles a woman's neck while she eats.
144.   Medium shot: An old man raises his glass.
145.   "To carefree Paris!"
146.   A man dances with a bottle in his arms.
147.  Medium shot: Louise, still looking left, shrinks back.
148.   As (134): Men dance to the camera.
149.   As (133): Women dance to the camera.
By classical principles of point of view, the to-camera movements in this passage cannot be justified. Louise cannot be watching behind her (shot 136) what she will see in front of her and to the left in shot 149. Rather than take this as a transcription of her subjective experience interrupted by overt narrational commentary (e.g.. from "Well-fed Paris" to a man's lecherous appetites in shot 143). the best hypothesis is that Louise is simply the approximate center of a fluid, circular space. Her eyelines do not furnish cues for the precise location of each element but rather heighten the vividness of the swirling dance: the revelry is taking place

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■:■■
*   1
7»«
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■

As the second sequence develops, its space is fui opened up by a return to crosscutiing. The journalists announcement that the French army has been beateiffl interspersed with shots of the crowds at the train (with wnffl pans linking this locale to the cabaret), and then shots oi'tha Prussian horsemen charging. The narration now asks usfl distinguish among several lines of action: the smiling danS ers juxtaposed with the shocked bourgeois customers, ^H ironic refrain "To Paris!" no longer a toast but a battle c^fl After treating the cabaret as the bourgeoisie's dream of ParfsT Marx's phantom Babylon ("the misery of the masses was33 off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious, debased luxury"), the narration opens that phantasmagt space onto a wider political context: a class dancing on tl)9 edge of a precipice. The cabaret empties out, and our establishing shot comes too late 10 reveal anything but solitary drunkard (fig. 11.43). Cut to the tableau of victc France, woefully clinging to the set as the curtain falls 11.44). Since we have seen other acts occupy the stager this one. we are entitled to doubt that this image has: unequivocal story "reality" here. It functions as a spalls and temporally abstract reprise of the jingoist spectacl
the first reel and as a self-conscious narrationaJ aside. (The
[Comedy is over.) The device of plucking an image from an
'earlier moment in the film, creating a flashback without
'.benefit of character memory, will become emphasized in
laier segments.
"Paris is under siege." The film's third sequence displays a ;;elear obedience lo Soviet montage norms. The fabula action
^consists of an account of life under the siege and a lengthy
Tscene in which the peasant Jean, as a member of the National Guard, meets Louise and her family. The narration is constantly overt, employing many extrinsically conventionalized   processes.   Crosscutting juxtaposes  the   bat-
#tlefield, life in the streets, the sufferings of a washerwoman Und her daughter, and a meeting of the journalists and ;;Louise's family. The narration ironically recalls phrases from
Vthe previous scene: "Gay Paris"/ A woman washing clothes/ "Carefree Paris" / A sick girl lies in bed. The narration also
■ permutes the cutaway image of the battlefield landscape.
c adjusting the composition each time (e.g., fig. 11.45). A°d the narration routes its own commentary through character speech. When the French surrender is announced, warnings issue first from the journalist. Then subsequent dialogue titles link characters in different spaces, so that we have to assume a collective reaction manifested by the narration. In general, however, the space of proletarian life is more unified than that of the bourgeoisie in earlier scenes. Now. contrary to the most probable expectations in this mode and this film, a medium shot is placed within a total space (figs, 11.46-11.47). Later. Jean's troubled acceptance of the workers' comradeship is rendered in a coherent 180-degree space with homogeneous eyeline matches (figs. 11.48-11.49), even though, á la Kuleshov, there is no establishing shot. Segment 4, "18 March," initiates a return to the more conceptual space and time of segment 1. On a hillside, proletarian women confront the army and strive to keep the Montmartre artillery in Paris. Meanwhile, in the cabaret the boss and the deputy watch the chanteuse rehearse a new operetta. The narration is able to exploit all the double mean-
1 ings latent in the parallel situations, asking us to draw out rhetorical analogies and differences. Moment-by-moment
"v _.
uncertainties in the syuzhet issue from our realization that any piece of information may reinforce or undercut what went before, or may operate in different rhetorical senses. For instance, after three shots of the rehearsal, the title "Preparations" refers back to the show and forward to the
JI.JÖ
11-47
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST NARRATION
II.48 11-49
next image, the beginning of the army's attack on the cannon guards. Again, exploits in the political sphe.e are likened to spectacle and associated with bourgeois manipulate As the singer croons, "We all need love," the cannon sentry- fails dead. The spectacle motif will come to a climax
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when, as the workers' militia succeeds in seizing theaS nons, the boss will shout that the show is done for. 1 This  sequence  also prolongs  the  "false vision"; glimpsed in the first sequence when cafe clients seem be applauding the troop train. Now a sustained "dialM
	
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[arises between disparate spaces. When the officer says. |"More horses and we're ready." the narration cuts to the boss land the deputy applauding, as if congratulating him on the
["capture. Soon Louise's mother asks the officer, "Whom do (you serve?" He turns abruptly, and the narration again cms
to the boss and the politician. When an old soldier flings down his rifle to join the workers' militia, there is a cut to the boss, furiously rising from his seal. Later the journalist looks right and shouts. 'To the Hotel de Ville!" (fig. 11.50), and ihe deputy answers (in a perfect if impossible eyeline match) by shouting. "To Versailles! We have to start over!" (fig. 11.51). Denotatively, the deputy means that ihey must retire to Versailles for more rehearsal, but the narration asks us to construe this as an emblem of the bourgeoisie's emigration from Paris. Overall, we must be prepared to accept physical impossibilities—such as the causal interplay of independent locales—for the sake of intensified narrational comment.
In the art cinema, overt narration emerges intermittently to play a game of ambiguity with the spectator. In the Soviet historical-materialist cinema, thanks to the pervasiveness and the discontinuity of the montage, the narration tends to be constantly overt; but it seldom creates connotative ambiguity. In general, the Soviet films choose simply to vary their narrational tactics within well-defined bounds, recombining them in different portions of the film. The New Babylon is a good example. We have already seen how sequence 1 relies upon crosscutting to establish the possibility of an abstract conceptual space, while sequence 2 uses frontality and foreground/background interactions to create an "open" space within the cabaret. The third sequence develops a more intimate and less disjunctive space, associated with the workers and the future Communards. And we have seen how sequence 4 goes further than any earlier episode by building character interactions across impossibly great distances. Because each narrational option was latent in the first scene, we cannot say that later foregroundings startle or puzzle the viewer (in the way that, say, Diego's ambivalent conversation with Nadine in La guerre est finie is foregrounded as a deviation from the film's norm). In the same way, the last half of the film develops and recombines devices that we have already encountered.
The fifth segment, that of the Commune's occupation of Paris, is structurally and substantially similar to the first episode. Seven distinct locales are crosscut: Paris exteriors, the workers' space, the Communards' meeting room, a bar at
~
Versailles, 1 department Soviet histoi After a title tourist view on Notre D Ienges the « up a hamm series of shi the first seg the columr narration's monument power. Woi with such j The Comm characters' nally, by q bates in thi the official sequence í had initiate The seer and the ca The boss ai fervor, wh revives hl( poses the I hack to a r journalist boss lash ť bourgeois leads the becomes d
cut with tl had intra? verts to W "dialogue' velops, tl" epis<
,
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST  NARRATION
Versailles, the army's hillside camp, the cabaret, and the department store. The characteristic narrational tone of Soviet historical-materialist cinema is present from the start. After a title. "Paris survived for centuries," we get several tourist views of the city, ending with close-ups of gargoyles on Notre Dame. Immediately another expository title challenges the earlier one. "Paris is no more!" In extreme close-up a hammer strikes. The Vendôme column topples. After a series of shots of the washerwomen and seamstresses (as in the first segment), we discover that the hammer that "felled" the column is that of the cobbler (Louise's father). The narration's rhetoric has shown the Paris of boulevards and monuments transformed by the proletariat's seizure of power. Workers raise their heads in praise: "Why do we work with such gaiety? ... We work for ourselves, not for a boss! The Commune has decided so!" As in the first segment, the characters' direct address is presented very frontally. Finally, by quickly crosscutting the workers' labor with debates in the Commune, the narration makes the Commune the official leadership of the struggle. This portion of the sequence concludes with more shots of the gargoyles that had initiated the crosscutting.
The scene shifts to Versailles, where the boss, the deputy, and the cabaret singer join some French soldiers in a bar. The boss and the deputy address the men in tones of patriotic fervor, while the singer approaches the moping Jean and revives his memories of Louise. Now the narration juxtaposes the boss and deputy with the gargoyles before cutting back to a rapid montage of the men's harangues. While the journalist advocates peaceful methods, the deputy and the boss lash the soldiers into a violent mood. And once more the bourgeoisie represents war hysteria as spectacle. The singer leads the men in the "Marseillaise" while a dazed Jean becomes dimly aware of the band's frenzy. The boss is intercut with the band's side drum, a refrain of the drumroll that had introduced him in tiie cabaret. The narration now reverts to two devices: the spatialized, mosaic form and the "dialogue" between disparate spaces. As the sequence develops, the cutting begins to integrate material from earlier episodes, treating the first portion of the film as a repository
of images. The narration crosscuts the trumpeis wit stage tableau of Victorious France in the cabaret (sceni and 2); it intercuts the singer in this bar with the bourgľ women fighting for lace at the New Babylon; it then ju poses her with the flashing cancan legs of scene 2. Tnu«
['Chauvinist spectacle is firmly classified with the earlier ones. The singer then kisses the bayonet and caUs for blood (fig. 11.52). The officer on the hillside, as if hearing her call (fig. 11.53). turns abruptly from the camera and orders his troops "on to Paris" (fig. 11.54)» an echo of the Prussians' cry in
I

scene 2. The narration gives us three shots of the target—the women workers—before a quick montage of firing cannons, blaring trumpets, roaring drums, and the boss's expression concludes the sequence. The sixth principal episode brings to a climax the specta-
HISTORICAL-MATERIA LIST NARRATION
"59
\l.6o
cle motif that has run through the film. The Communards, realizing that all is lost, take to the streets. The Battle of Paris is rendered through another recombining of intrinsically normalized devices—crosscutting and the "impossible" eveline match. The result at first seems only another nana-
...
iUÄO-Ü
tional analogy. Louise is ransacking the New Babylojy material for the barricades.
798.   Long shot: Louise looks for goods (fig. 11.55).-!
799.  Medium close-up: The mannequin is lifted outoftf store (fig. í 1.56).
800.   Louise grabs lace and begins to unwind it (|
»57)-
801.   Plan américain, low angle: A young woman wejjl
lace and twirling a parasol looks left (fig. 11.58).
802.  "On the hill of Versailles, the bourgeoisie watchj
803.   Medium shot: The boss looks down to the left,, ing a parasol (fig. 11.59).
804.   Medium shot: The singer, seated, watches thro| binoculars (fig. 11.60).
Shots 798-801 build toward an equation of the dumnfl| white and the bourgeois woman (shot 801)- w'íth !aGJy connecting factor. But the intertitle and subsequent sH emphasize that the bourgeoisie are literally watching—iff Louise's pillaging of the store, then at least the CommjjB activities. (Again, the citation is to Marx, who describedg bourgeoisie as "considering the civil war but an a&
diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes. ..") No small-scaie spectacles now; the civil war becomes the ultimate cabaret show, to be enjoyed from a distance. Correspondingly, the narration produces the most grandiose conceptual space in the film—at once concrete
(the locales are for once proximate) and abstract (the bourgeoisie could not, on empirical grounds, see all the incidents that we see).
And the battle indeed becomes both spectacle and dialogue. The bourgeoisie call across the chasm for blood, and
HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST  NARRATION
/1.65
the soldiers obey, attacking the barricades. Motifs from the first two parts recur, in parodie form: the lace wraps wounds, Louise rolling it out as if for sale (fig. 11.61) before taking up a rifle; a pianist entertains the Communards during a break in the fighting. As the Commune dies, it creates its own participatory spectacle: the pianist plays, the women sing. An old man shouts: "You want Paris? ... The old Paris?... For the bosses?" and we cut to the boss raging, as if he heard the dying Communard. Once the ramparts are overrun, Jean is on the scene and the sequence concludes with him in the foreground, turning slowly to look out at the camera (fig. 11.62) and to "see" and "hear" the boss and his friends applauding his performance (fig. 11.63).
The last two segments develop the film's narrational norm in more modest and conventional ways, probably because these scenes aim to evoke the most sympathy and the smallest amount of conceptual "distance." The Communard prisoners are marched past a cafe, where the boss recognizes Louise and begins to beat her. This precipitates a riot in which the bourgeoisie attack the prisoners. There are echoes of earlier narratioiial procedures: the ironic title ("Peace and nrdpr rule Paris"), the interjected shots of "Vive la Com-
mune" scrawled on a wall, intercutting within a locale, frontality  with  foreground/background  stylization during a massacre; see fig. 11.64). On the whole, how this is the most concrete space yet depicted in the defined by an establishing shot (fig. 11.65) ano" P'auS
eyeline matching (fig. 11.66). The geographical exactitude is appropriate, for this is the first time that the narration has shown workers and bourgeoisie concretely inhabiting the same locale.
I The last segment, "The Judgment." again swerves from its immediate predecessor in creating a fluid and "open" space within a circumscribed setting, as sequence 2 had done with the cabaret. In Pěre-Lachaise cemetery, as Communards are questioned and executed in the savage rain, the narration return to almost total frontality and foreground/ background planification (fig. 11.67), while connecting portions of the space by Kuleshovian eyeline matching. As Jean watches tensely, Louise refuses to betray the Commune. Sentenced to death, she cries out in agony, but then turns and looks off, laughing. "We will return, Jean!" As the group is executed, a man cries, "Vive la Commune!" and the film ends with three quick shots, one per word, of the same phrase scrawled on a wall. The narration has fused character ľoice and narrational commentary into a simple rhetorical flourish.
Tlie Neiľ Babylon asks the viewer to undertake activities I have argued to be characteristic of its mode: filling in spatial constructs of various degrees of abstraction, likening and differentiating juxtaposed elements, submitting to a texture of abrupt disjunctions, and wrestling with cognitive incompatibilities (e.g., characters watching what they cannot see) for the sake of perceptual and didactic vividness. The film's syuzhet and style create a constantly overt narration, knowledgeable to the point of omniscience, highly communicative, self-conscious in its address to the viewer, and unambiguous in its attitudes and conclusions. At the same time. The New Babylon innovates within its mode not only by introducing new subjects (the Paris Commune) and motifs (the spectacle-centered bourgeois life) but also by varying its exploitations of narrational conventions. In particular, the film's intrinsic norm—the abstract, empirically impossible space—gets developed in unique ways to fulfill rhetorical ends.
Toward an Interrogative Cinema
It would uke a volume to explore the various aspects of Soviet culture and politics that shaped the development of the historical-materialist mode. We would have to survey two decades of debate about the role of agitprop art; a range of experiments in painting, literature, sculpture, theater, and architecture; the growing Party control of the Soviet film industry; the experience of studying and recutting American films of the teens and early twenties; developments in literary theory, such as Formalism (Kozintsev has claimed that the critic Yuri Tynianov was the major influence on Feks at the time of The Neiv Babylon),22 and the influx of European experimental films of the 1920s, especially from France. We would also need to consider the seminal importance of Lev Kuleshov's writings and teachings, especially in their "Sovietization" of principles of Hollywood découpage. We would have to spread our net to include those films in other genres—comedy, adventure, and literary adaptation— that exploited some aspects of historical-materialist narration (chiefly, of course, montage). A chapter alone could be devoted to the emergence of models and prototypes of the mode. (Pravda called Strike "the first revolutionary creation of our cinema.")21 It would also be necessary to stress both authorial differences and the uniqueness of each of these extraoidinar)' films. Finally, a complete survey should consider the extent to which many films, while aiming at ideological clarity, became subject to debate; the didactic schemata for construing the films were never as neat or unqualified as an overview tends to make them.
Here I want only to suggest the extent to which the historical-materialist mode of narration has gained some purchase beyond its use in the USSR between 1925 and 1933. These Soviet filmmakers permanently affected film history—not only by making influential films but by forging an approach to storytelling that has remained a strong, if minority, alternative to classical narration.
Hollywood's fast cutting and analytical approach to the scene had prompted Soviet filmmakers to explore montage; soon, however, classical Hollywood filmmaking drew upon
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HISTORIC AL-MATERIALIST  NARRATION
some slylistic resources of the Soviet mode. American films had already borrowed superimpositions and prismatic optical effects from the German cinema in order to create special transitional sequences, and it was through these devices that montage was assimilated. One could present a violent spectacle, such as the earthquake in San Francisco (1936), with a Soviet-style montage technique. More usually, one could present a significant lapse of time by means of a rapid series of symbolic images linked by dissolves, wipes, or superimpositions. We have seen that Say It with Songs (1929) offers many instances. (Hollywood's use of canted setups. low angles, and rapid rhythm seems clearly influenced by such films as The End of St. Petersburg.) By the mid-1930s. "montage" had passed into Holly wood jargon, but the force and deeper implications of the Soviet conception were lost. Shots were never very short, the perceptual impact of cutting was softened by the ever-present dissolves, and the whole procedure was relegated to a transitional role, becoming an isolated and stereotyped gesture."
If the Hollywood cinema drew the argumentative and perceptual sting from montage, Soviet socialist realism after 1933 abandoned the technical basis. In general, the historical-materialist films paved the way for Socialist Realism in their use of referentiality, exemplary heroes, and the apprenticeship pattern. What was lost was the constant narrational presence and overt rhetorical address of the historical-materialist style. At the level of fabula structure. Socialist Realism is significantly different from the classical Hollywood cinema; but its narrational principles and procedures do not vary drastically. Chapayev (1934) is the conventional example here, but a more technically proficient work like Vera Stroyeva's Generation of Conquerors (1936) shows just as clearly how the rhetorical impulses of the narration pass wholly over to the characters (here, a band of student revolutionaries from czarist days) and howr classical technique is at the center of the style. (Only one scene, in which a police chief addresses his staff but is presented as addressing the spectator, faintly echoes the self-consciousness of earlier works.) What remains is a story of typical individuals, each given one humanizing idiosyncrasy and each exemplifying
some aspect of the prerevolutionary situation in Rus$| Outside the Soviet Union, the historical-materialist had an influence on political filmmaking. Charles Del leire's La flamme blanche (1930) owes a good deal« dovkin (and Vertov). It intercuts documentary foota demonstrations by the Flemish People's Party with $g footage of battles Iwtween demonstrators and police, against white backgrounds and edited in rapid montagd most famous example of Soviet influence in, of course; Wampe (1932), a ftlmwhich shows a fascinating niinj conventions drawn from the more radical silent from the emerging canons of Socialist Realism, The' left had strong ties with the Soviet Union between 1929? 1933, and Brecht visited Moscow for the world preml| Kuhle Wampe. In many respects the film is quite' but its first part, "One Unemployed Less," displays area* able synthesis of Soviet devices. Unable to find ajobj young Bonicke son has come home for lunch, ant mother remarks: "If you don't try at all. you're bound toj Cut to a shot of men on bikes pedaling down the looking for work. Later, after the boy has committed, and the neighbors are gathered around, there is a she woman speaking to the camera: "One unemployed; And at the end of the chapter, an old woman remark had his loveliest years before him"; cut to the next entitled "The Loveliest Years." which portrays the eviction. Such uses of intellectual montage, direct and ironic interplay of character dialogue and tional intervention all demonstrate that the lessons historical-materialist narration were not lost on Bret Slatan Dudow.
Just as influenced by this mode was La vie est (1936). supervised by Jean Renoir for distribution-French Communist  Party.   Like Kuhle Wampe, flamme blanche, this is a melange of newsreel fc staged scenes, but the constant direct address interti. asynchronous sound, and the abstract and figurative' reveal a direct borrowing from the Soviets. Rich id pistols at cardboard cutouts with workers' caps; cut of French fascists on the firing range. When Hitlerr
hear a dog bark; Mussolini looks around him and "sees" his bombing of Ethiopia. One of the film's three episodes sketches the familiar movement from spontaneity to con-"iousness: with the backing of a PCF cell, exploited factory ivorkers confront the boss and win concessions. The film concludes with a series of speeches by party leaders, ad-ilressed both to us and to a fictional audience composed. Impossibly, of characters from the various episodes we have seen. At the close, several groups of workers march toward liš singing, while "refrain" shots from the film's start create a 'uleshovian space that is nothing less than the entire land-"ipe of France. ^Afthe level of theory, the Soviet hi storicaJ-materialist films had strong appeal to a European intelligentsia already interested in montage in a broad sense. Novels like Johannes R.Becher's Levisite (1926) and Alexander Dublin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1930) and dramatic productions like Pisca-íôFsln Spite of Everything (1925) and Brecht's Mahagonny (1930) also laid claim to montage as a modernist and socially critical practice.15 By 1935, Ernst Bloch was identifying montage as the formal means for attacking petit bourgeois normality.* As is now well known, Georg Lukács objected to such elevations of montage, criticizing the technique as a principle of subjectivist self-expression and calling for a holistic art that manifests true essences "as immediacy, as 'life as it actually appears."i7 Lukács charged naturalistic ^techniques of description with fragmenting point of view and thus whittling reality down to atomic data and isolated episodes.M From this angle, montage becomes the culmination of naturalistic description, assembling scraps of fact and judgment and exposing disparities. Lukács rejects the overt narrational presence implied by the artist as monteur: "The slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearances and essence without the need for any external commentary."'" Lukács advocates a return to the technique of classical realism, in which an omniscient author establishes the correct proportions of an event and integrates all aspects into a larger whole.
On the particular issue of montage, it is of course Brecht who stands most clearly opposed to Lukács. He cites Dub-
lin's definition of the "epic" Berlin Alexanderplatz: a work which "lets itself be cut up. as if with scissors, into parts capable of continuing to lead their own life."'" Kuhle Wampe, he claimed, constitutes "a montage of quite autonomous little plays."11 As if in retort to Lukács, Brecht writes in 1939 that didactic elements must be introduced into a play by means of montage. "They would have no organic link with the totality but would find themselves in contradiction with it; they would break the course of performance and actions; cold showers for sensitive souls, they would block all identification."'2 More generally, we can see Brecht's early theory of drama as quite congruent with the narrational model established by Soviet historical-materiahst film.
By í 93°- Brecht had clearly formulated a conception of "dialectical" theater. One source was Piscator's "epic" theater; another was Dublin's conception of the "epic" novel, which was indebted to Joyce and Dos Passos. Yet another source was the Soviet cinema. Brecht's epic theater was to be overtly pedagogic and didactic. As in Soviet cinema, the epic theater's syuzheí was to exhibit a "non-Aristotelian" causality by breaking with the depiction of isolated individuals. "The spectator must perceive the masses behind the individual, consider the individuals as particles which manifest themselves as a reaction, a way of behaving, a development of the mass."13 Most significantly, the Aristotelian "mimetic" theater was to be. in our terms, "diegeticized." In epic theater, "the stage begins to narrate. The fourth wall no longer makes the narrator disappear. "M Projections, films, titles, and captions create abstract discussions confirming or contradicting what the characters say and do. The "literariza-tion" of the theater consists in a narration that is constantly "punctuating 'representation' with 'formulation'"—a good description of what happens with many Soviet intertitles.*' In a move recalling the Soviet film's use of "refrain images," Brecht proposes that "footnotes, and the habit of turning back in order to check a point, need to be introduced into play-writing too.""1 Performance can be "diegeticized" by processes that make the actor appear to be quoting the words and deeds of an absent character. Just as Soviet films had created an all-powerful narration governing the very constitution of the filmed event. Brecht seeks to install an overt
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HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST  NARRATION
narration at the center of the theatrical experience, mediating between the imaginary fabula world and its presentation on stage. And as the film required constant montage to keep the spectator from taking the image as a simple record of a preexistent event, so epic theater requites montage to interrupt the performance, to break up scenes, to proceed "by fits and starts."" In 1947 Brecht followed Lukács in contrasting naturalism to realism, but the terms were almost exactly reversed: the naturalist lets events "speak for themselves," but in true realism, the author interrupts to make them intelligible."
It was chiefly through the theory, practice, and example of Brecht that norms of the historical-materialist mode were perpetuated. Brecht's Berliner Ensemble productions remained influential models of modernist political theater: one French critic wrote in 1955 that "for Brecht, the stage narrates, the audience judges."19 Brecht indeed constitutes the link to the historical-materialist cinema of the late 1960s. In Germany, around i960, the "documentary theater" movement emerged under the auspices of Fiscator (especially his Berlin production of The Deputy in i962)and of Peter Weiss, both influenced by Brecht.1" This movement was gready to affect the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet. In 1962. Godard made Vivre $a vie in conscious imitation of Brechtian methods. Not until somewhat later, however, did filmmakers and theorists turn to a scrutiny of the Soviet cinema of the 1920s. In France. Althusser'sreinterpretation of Leninism, the impact of structuralism and Russian Formalism on intellectual circles, the new availability of films by Vertov and Feks, the efforts of journals like Tel Quel and Change to link Marxism to a literary avant-garde, and crucially the revolutionary activities of May 1968 all intensified interest in Soviet silent cinema. Writing of the Etats génér-aux du cinéma. René Micha predicted in the summer of 1968 that the Soviet directors would become the model fora revolutionary cinema." In January of 1969. Eisens tern's essays and memoirs began to appear in Cuhiers du cinema, the series would run for over two years. In a special 1970 number on Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Jean Narboni wrote: "This is the only cinema capable of comprehending itself as a signifying practice, aware of its materiality, detaching itself
at last from the ideology of'lived experience-'... A which belongs not to the prestigious silence of the but is active today, before us and with us.""
One theoretical consequence of the rediscovery historical-materialist cinema was a broadening of cept of montage. Thanks partly to Bazin, "mode cinema had come to imply long takes and inirashot but New Wave films forced theorists to reconsider 1 a significant technique. Moreover, films like Not fi (1965) and Méditerranée (1963), not to mention Gog work, made thequestion of montage quite pressing. Cahiers panel defined montage as "all notions of juxtaposition, combination (and their corollaries: diff rupture, analysis)."" The political efficacy of m emerged in its ability to shatter the homogeneity spectacle. J.-L. Cornell] put it emphatically, if circa
All montage, even formalist montage, produces at some effects of work: it multiplies traces, cuts, ga fractures, in short the signs of writing [écňture] affirm it as being an operation by which, again at very least, it shows that there is a work of sigi production: it watches itself. . .. Reworking the s of the images in the signifying network, redistributjj their positions, reorganizing their relations accor systems of opposition or recurrence, dividing and naturalizing their mechanical linkup, montage su imposes upon that flowing emergence of an imp' of reality, which every series of images (edited or necessarily produces, another movement, that of ing, of reading."
Montage thus became absorbed into the general what I have been calling self-conscious narration. Such theoretical developments were preceded an leled by filmmaking practice. The Soviet direct forged a tendentious "Socialist Formalism." The 1 1970s saw a movement, within the conventions of lorical-material is t mode, toward an interrogative c Films such as those of Straub and Huillet, Jan Dziga-Venov Group, and more recent British ind filmmakers preserve basic tenets of the Soviet mod
refusal of a psychologically defined, individual-centered syuzhet; the emphasis upon typicality and historical refercn-tjality; the insistence upon continuous transformation of the fabula by an overt and politically conscious narration. But these films also refuse the fixed doctrine and clearly didactic purpose that had informed the Soviet approach. Here the narration stages an inquiry into political issues. The characters and/or the narration pose questions about political "theory and practice—including the practice of cinematic . representation. In these works, the need for revolutionary é change is often posited, but a film's own capacity for social jj analysis and change is subjected to a scrutiny that was never undertaken in the Soviet films we have considered.
That political issues tend to be questioned, and not solved by fiat, is explicable by the fact that no fixed doctrine serves as a point of departure. After 1956. with the Soviet Communist Party's denunciation of Stalin and the USSR's suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the European left was in disarray. In no country was there an official "line" that these filmmakers could promote without falling into some version of realism. "The cinema." remarked Godard in 1970, "is a party instrument and we find ourselves in countries where I the revolutionär}- party is far from existing."45 The Dziga-Vertov Group, sometimes believed to be the most tendentious element of "left-wing modernism." had no fixed ties to a Maoist organization (Althusser comes in for criticism in Vent d'est)*" while Jancsó's work constitutes a steady critique of centralized power within actually existing socialism. Thus the films raise political problems: the return of fascism [ (Not Reconciled), Soviet revisionism (Pravda), spontaneous revolutionary outbursts (The Confrontation. Vent d'est), the relations of ideology to the economic infrastructure (British Sounds). This is not to say that these films can be seen as utterly open-ended; as one critic remarks of The Confrontation: "it certainly does not accept any alternative to socialism. "*'
Given an interrogative political stance, some films use a "collage" principle to create forms incorporating debate and jt dialogue. Entire films will be staged as debates or discussions.  The  Confrontation  lays out  various  positions-
anarchist, humanist, sectarian, democratic centrist, and party centered." Similarly. Godard's Un film comme les autres frames its footage of May 1968 within a conversation among unseen students and workers who argue about the failures of May. Besides such moot forms there are more pedagogical attempts to analyze a problem or period. Straub and Huillet treat History Lessons (1972) as an assemblage of representations of Caesar's reign; Le gai savoir (1969) proposes a three-year curriculum concentrating on decomposing images and sounds from a Marxist perspective. At a local level, the narration can juxtapose texts or voices to map out arguments surrounding an issue, as when, in Jonathan Curling and Susan Clayton's Song of the Shirt (1979), a Parliamentary debate is recreated on two video monitors. Or the sound track can interrogate the image, as in Godard's Dziga-Vertov Group films. Rethinking Soviet montage as a collage of documents created a looser, still more conceptual texture, seen perhaps at the limit in Godard's work, as Serge Daney describes it:
It consists of taking note of what is said (to which one can add nothing) and then looking immediately for the other statement, the other sound, the other image which would counterbalance this statement, this sound, this image. . . . More than "Who is right? Who is wrong?" the real question is. "What can we oppose to this?"49
This cinema also interrogates cinematic representations. Here is its "Brechtian" heritage. The work of Straub and Huillet constitutes a running violation of dominant figures of style: shot/reverse shot, eyeline matching, the framing of figures, the use of landscape, sound/image relations.10 Similarly, what Ferenc Feher has called Jancsó's synthesis of parable and pantomime (which owes something to Brecht's theatrical parables) also serves to question socialist-realist demands for a plausible and homogeneous diegetic world.*' The Dziga-Vertov Group emphasizes crude, obviously constructed images and overloaded sound tracks, thus challenging the supremacy of the visual in cinema. Noel Burch's In the Year of the Bodyguard (1982) juxtaposes primitive ein-
H I S T O R I Ľ A L - M A T h R 1 A L 1 S  1    NARRATION
ema's staging and shooting practices with more modern alternatives (e.g.. to-camera interviews, volumetric space, cinéma-věrilé) in order to suggest comparisons between suffragist struggles and contemporary feminist acitivity.
Central to the interrogation of cinematic representation is another link to Soviet cinema: the overtness of the narra-tional operations. The marked angles and empty frames in Straub and Huillet's films and our pervasive awareness of manipulation in Jancsó's camera movements encourage the viewer to construct a constantly present narration. The film's own operations will not necessarily escape observation, as in the recording sessions in Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment for a Film Scene (1972), the black frames which create spaces for reflecting on the pre-
ceding shots in Luttes en Itálie (1970). and the critiq; one part of the film by another in Pravda (1969).
It seems likely that the interrogative tendency h ambivalent relation to another set of extrinsic nornis-r' of art-cinema narration. Certainly the psychologically co plex protagonist and the crisis of individual values have b effectively countered by such films as Chronicle of Magdalena Bach (1967), Not Reconciled (1965), Ttm.t" bien (1972), and Jancsó's Allegro Barbaro (1978.1. Noiiethö less, the ability of art-cinema narration to maximize n j guity for symbolic effect has suggested avenues for an opena ended political cinema. Thus the recent interrogative strajl in the historical-materialist mode of narration has selectively absorbed some norms of its rival.