(Transcript)
Originally broadcast January 26, 2007

	Milos Stehlik

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The most interesting film showing in Chicago this weekend is being presented by the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. New Babylon, the last truly silent film directed by the team of Soviet filmmakers Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, had an original musical score written for it by Dimitri Shostakovich. It will be shown with music performed by a live orchestra.

New Babylon is both a historical and a revolutionary epic. It is set during the Paris Commune of 1871. Through a series of incidents, it portrays the clash between the Paris workers and the bourgeoisie. The film’s heroine is Louise. She works as a clerk in a luxury store in Paris—the New Babylon of the film’s title. As Louise becomes politicized, she joins the Communards, and ends up dying for her principles and the cause. The script was co-authored by Kozintsev and Trauberg, who then shot the film in Leningrad and Paris.

Jay Leyda, the great historian of Soviet cinema, wrote that New Babylon provides “a consistently magnificent climax to the silent films of Kozintsev and Trauberg. The performances have just the right mixture of warmth and caricature, and the chiefly studio photography is irreproachable. It is a glittering film in which the glitter plays a calculated dramatic role.”

Despite being considered today the culminating achievement of the Soviet silent film era, New Babylon was received with mixed reviews when it was first released. Some critics thought its expressionistic style was too intellectual. Shostakovich wrote a score that made use of French music popular at the time of the Commune. Some of this harks to the popular operetta-style of Jacques Offenbach, but the score also features a highly original arrangement of La Marseillaise. The music did not go over too well at the film’s premiere. Shostakovich’s orchestration was too sophisticated for the orchestra which performed it. Those who attended the premiere simply thought that the conductor was drunk.

Kozintsev and Trauberg are the under-appreciated geniuses of Soviet cinema. Shortly after they arrived and met in St. Petersburg, the 17-year-old Kozintsev and the 21-year-old Trauberg formed what they named the FEKS Studio—the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. This “factory” was to integrate pantomime, circus and commedia dell’arte into a new revolutionary art form. The films made by the FEKS team included The Adventures of Oktyabrina in 1924, The Devil’s Wheel in 1926, and the great adaptation of Gogol’s short story, The Overcoat in 1926. The films brought to the screen unforgettable character-types which Kozintsev and Trauberg found on the city streets, in what they called “bottom of the city barrel.” This expressionist realism in brilliant casting is evident in New Babylon and continued throughout Kozintsev’s career up to his last film, the greatest Shakespeare adapted for film, King Lear.

In New Babylon, the landmarks of Paris form a brilliant city-scape against which Kozintsev and Trauberg capture the intimate life of the people and textures of Paris, its cobblestones, the expressive faces of its people. These characters are memorable—the  young saleswoman, played by Elena Kuzmina, a jaded, sometimes tipsy boss of the store, played by David Guffman, a young journalist played by Sergei Gerasimov, later to become a major Soviet director, and a young soldier who becomes the victim of a bourgeois conspiracy against the French people. The cinematographer for New Babylon was the great Andrei Moskvin, who would later shoot Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

This is early Soviet cinema which we don’t expect—used as we are to the largely humor-less films of Eisenstein, the psychological dramas of Pudovkin or the lyrical features of Dovzhenko. New Babylon is laced with satire and wit, it revels in its own invention, it celebrates the imagination, even as it focuses on the revolutionary struggle of the working class. The uniqueness of Kozintsev and Trauberg and of the FEKS group was that they celebrated individuals rather than massive movements.  It was inevitable that eventually both Kozintsev and Trauberg would run up against the humorless tyranny of Stalinism. Like Shostakovich and other great artists, Kozintsev and Trauberg both had a difficult life in which they were unable to create for long periods of time. Kozintsev eventually emerged from this only in the late 1950s with three brilliant, theoretically apolitical and therefore “safe” films—his adaptations of Don Quixote, Hamlet and King Lear.

Much has been made in academic circles over the version of New Babylon used by Marek Pytel for the reconstruction of the Shostakovich score. It is the shortest extant version of the film, cut by about ten minutes largely for the export to foreign countries. Images of female cleavage, prostitutes and other images considered too erotic were cut to satisfy censors in France, Britain and America.

New Babylon is today a powerful reminder of the incredible explosion of artistic energy in 1920s Russia—an explosion which reverberates even today. These artists truly believed that film could and would change the world.

 

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.