Pudovkin, V. I.

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V. I. Pudovkin

Russian director V. I. Pudovkin (1893-1953) was one of the Soviet Union's leading filmmakers of the 1920s. A master of the montage, or rapid intercutting of images, Pudovkin worked during an era widely considered the golden age of Soviet cinema, when generous government support allowed him and fellow directors like Sergei Eisenstein to make daring cinematic epics that took the fledgling art form to a new level. "Pudovkin made some of the liveliest and most perversely moving films of all," asserted Guardian journalist Jonathan Jones, and also termed him "the true ancestor of the modern Hollywood film."

Prisoner of War

The director was born Vsevolod Illiarionovich Pudovkin in Tsarist Russia on February 16, 1893. He was from a manufacturing city in southeast Russia called Penza, and studied physics and chemistry at Moscow University. In 1914, when World War I erupted, he was drafted into an artillery unit of the Russian Army. A year later, he was wounded and taken prisoner, but escaped and was back in Moscow by 1918. By then, a provisional government that ousted the tsar from power was subsequently overthrown by the Bolshevik Party, and Pudovkin's homeland became the world's first Communist state.

Initially, Pudovkin found a job in the new Soviet economy as a chemist in a laboratory, but by chance became acquainted with Lev Kuleshov, a young filmmaker six years his junior. Kuleshov had founded a studio in which he was conducting experiments in film technique and editing.

Pudovkin began taking courses at the State Cinema School around 1920, and was soon working on the government propaganda films that came to be known as "agitprop," part of an effort to further the political goals of the Revolution via works of art and literature. The first film in which he was involved was Golod … golod … golod ("Hunger … Hunger … Hunger"), a work from 1921 for which he served as co-director and co-scenarist; he also appeared in it. He would also take one of the lead roles in Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, a 1924 tale of a foreign capitalist who comes to the Soviet Union.

Made Chess Comedy

It was a rewarding time to work in the Russian film industry, for Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin had asserted that the cinema was most important of all the arts for the young Soviet state. Still, filmmakers worked with tight budgets in the early years of Soviet cinema, and were forced to be creative, and from this came ingenious advances in post-production technique. Pudovkin and other filmmakers at Kuleshov's studio, for example, watched a copy of a well-known 1916 American film by D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, and were awed by Griffith's filmmaking talents. They took apart the reel and re-edited it themselves, experimenting with the widely differing effects caused by juxtaposing the various shots against one another. Kuleshov's most famous experiment, however, involved an image of an actor's expressionless face. This was intercut with other images, including a bowl of borscht and a woman in a coffin, and though it was the same footage of the performer in every shot, audiences claimed the acting was superb. What became known in contemporary filmmaking as the "Kuleshov effect" asserted that a frame has two elements: the visual reality it presents, and the context it takes when it becomes part of an edited whole.

Though the Soviet Union's greatest filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, was also at Kuleshov's experimental laboratory for a time, Pudovkin would become Kuleshov's best protégé, expanding his mentor's ideas in his own extensive writings on film theory, and incorporating them into his own films. The 1925 short Shakhmatnaya goryachka ("Chess Fever") is considered Pudovkin's first real work, a comic story of a couple's wedding thwarted because of the groom's passion for the game. The frustrated bride was played by Pudovkin's wife, actress and journalist Anna Zemtsova. Writing in the Guardian, Jones called it "a fascinating glimpse of everyday life in Lenin's Moscow."

First of Three Epic Films

In 1926, Pudovkin made a documentary work, Mekhanikha golovnovo mozga ("Mechanics of the Brain") with famed Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov. The film depicted Pavlov's important discovery of the principle of conditioned reflexes in humans and animals. Pudovkin's first full-length narrative film, however, was also produced that year: Mat ("Mother"), based on a story by Russian writer Maxim Gorky. The tragedy is set during Russia's turbulent 1905 Revolution, and the title character is a simple country woman who despairs over her son's involvement in a trade-union group. She accidentally betrays him to the authorities, and is grief-stricken when he is sentenced to prison in a sham trial. Finally politicized herself, she helps him escape and they take part in a workers' demonstration. At the climax, the son runs from the police and jumps onto an ice floe in a river, whose surface is finally thawing, which the Guardian's Jones called "a piece of pure Marxist poetry."

In Pudovkin's writings, he asserted that it required less emoting from an actor than a work performed on the stage before a live audience. It was the filmmaker, he argued, who gave the finished work its character through editing, which therefore freed the actor to deliver a more subtle performance. Perhaps for this reason, Pudovkin often liked to cast non-actors in his films, which he did in his 1927 epic Konyets Sankt-Peterburga ("The End of St. Petersburg"). The film commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, and followed the story of a young, naïve peasant who arrives in the city and becomes caught up in the historic events of the time. Pudovkin cast the lead, Ivan Chuvelyov, from the extras that had assembled to play in crowd scenes for reasons that he explained to New York Times writer P. Beaumont Wadsworth. "The special qualities that were required for this role were not 'expressed' by this player," Pudovkin said. "He was the part. I doubt now, after having had film experience, whether that young man could give as marvelous a performance in the same role. He is too 'experienced' now."

A Classic of Soviet Cinema

The End of St. Petersburg was first Soviet film ever shown at New York City's largest theater at the time, the Roxy on Broadway. It later became standard viewing in film schools, particularly for the montage sequence that depicts St. Petersburg's gleeful stock-market speculators with images of World War I's carnage. An essay in the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers termed it "significant in that it is one of the first to satisfactorily blend a fictional scenario into a factual setting. Typically, Pudovkin cast real pre-Revolution stockbrokers and executives as stockbrokers and executives." Decades after it was made, The End of St. Petersburg was still occasionally shown at art houses and in retrospectives of Soviet cinema. A 1992 Nation review from critic Ben Sonnenberg described its effect as "Homericviolent and rapid" and a work "ennobled by detestation of privilege, faith in progress, trust in the working class and love for the city of Bely, Dostoyevsky and Pushkin."

Pudovkin made a trio of epic Soviet films during this golden age, and a 1928 work, Potomok Chingis-khan, was the last of these three. Titled in English Storm Over Asia, it is also called The Heir to Genghis-Khan. Pudovkin filmed it in Mongolia, the vast Central Asian land that was once home to a mighty thirteenth-century warrior nation led by Jenghiz Khan. The film's story is set in 1918, during the Russian Civil War, when ousted Russian nobles teamed with Western mercenaries and battled Bolshevik troops for control in the provinces. Pudovkin's plot centers around a Mongol trapper who is cheated out of the price of a precious silver fox fur by foreigners, and his anger leads him into involvement with a Mongol rebel group. Pudovkin trekked to the region for the first time in his life to make the film, and cast Mongolians in it—many of whom had never before seen a film. "I hope that I have succeeded in revealing Mongolia and the Mongolians to the outer world," he told the New York Times in the interview with Wadsworth a year later, "for that, and that alone, was my aim."

Experimented with Sound

In that same article, Pudovkin declared, "I shall not make any more epic pictures," and termed his next project "a simple … story of a crisis in the life of a married couple. There will be no great catastrophe, nothing terrible will happen. Only that their happiness is threatened by a sudden, senseless incident. It is like a dream." That movie, Otchen kharacho dziviosta ("Life's Very Good"), was revised with new sound technology and re-released two years later in 1932. Pudovkin's first genuine sound picture, Dezertir ("Deserter"), came a year later. This work is considered another classic of Soviet cinema, primarily for Pudovkin's use of the new element. The plot centers around labor troubles in a German shipyard that turn violent, and its main character becomes disillusioned with his homeland and moves to the Soviet Union. Its propagandistic message was tempered by several techniques that Pudovkin utilized. "By editing in sound, he contrasted the conversational dialogue of different characters with crowd noises, traffic sounds, sirens, music, and even silence," noted an essay in International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers.

Soviet cinema was becoming a more cautious enterprise during the 1930s, after Josef Stalin succeeded Lenin and became wary of any potential criticism from within. Even Pudovkin joined the Communist Party, but after Deserter he was involved in a car accident, and from then on served only as co-director on a number of films from Mosfilm Studios. They include Pobeda ("Victory"), Kino za XX liet ("Twenty Years of Cinema"), Pir v Girmunka ("Feast at Zhirmunka"), and Amiral Nakhimov. During this time he also appeared in Eisenstein's 1944 epic, Ivan Grozny, a historical drama about Ivan the Terrible that was considered a thinly veiled portrait of Stalin.

Enduring Visionary

After 1935 Pudovkin also taught theoretic studies at the State Institute for Cinematography for a number of years. His last film, for which he received sole director credit, was 1953's Vozvrachenia Vassilya Bortnikov ("The Return of Vasili Bortnikov"), a color picture that glorified the mechanization of Soviet agriculture. He died on June 30, 1953, in Riga, Latvia. His writings, among them the essays "The Film Scenario" and "Film Director and Film Material," are standard reading for graduate students in film. His idea that movies are not necessarily created in a scene-by-scene sequence, but rather built in the editing room by the filmmaker, was a pioneering one and taken to new levels by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola in the opening scenes of his 1972 classic The Godfather. Though Pudovkin's films are sometimes crude stories carrying a blatant political message, "it's naive to completely separate the cinema of the avant-garde in 1920s Russia from what came afterwards," asserted Jones in the Guardian. "They were propagandists, and Pudovkin's emotive editing gets inside you to produce gut responses at odds with any skepticism you might feel about his melodramas of revolution. At the same time, there's a scope and richness that elevates them beyond propaganda and will help them survive as long as cinema itself."