Preserving the history of cinema in Russia
Second part: The Eisenstein's Cabinet, preserving the heritage of a precursor
The archives of Eisenstein can be described as a bottomless ocean. For example, they hold matter for a searcher to dedicate his life to explore the relation between the works of Eisenstein and his mentor Vsevolod Meyerhold, which is to say between theater and cinema at a turning point. When Meyerhold got executed in 1940 and his memory condemned by Stalin, his archives were saved and hidden by Eisenstein.
"In the jungle of film", Sergei Eisenstein, 1924 (source: Eisenstein-Center, Moscow).
Until 2018 and the dismantling of the Museum of Cinema, to which the cabinet pertained, these archives were preserved in a small apartment on the Smolenskaya street, in Moscow. After the death of Eisenstein, in 1948, his widow, Pera Atasheva (her real name being Perl Moïsseevna Vogelman) moved from their flat in Potylikha Street to one located Boulevard Gogol, then, in 1962, in this last flat of the Smolenskaya Street, transporting each time the huge amount of documents collected or produced by her husband and covering the walls with library shelves. Of course, losses occurred during these house movings: at the time of his death, Eisenstein, an inveterate bibliophile, had accumulated more than 8 000 books, in four languages, full of his marginalia. Pera Atasheva gave a lot of it to the State in order to create an Eisenstein Museum. A lot disappeared too, years passing. But a heart of 4 000 remained along with drawings, portraits, notes and souvenirs from around the world, arranged on the furniture — original too. Moreover, Pera Atasheva recognised the importance of preserving these archives' internal logic and managed to keep a little part of it through the shifts.
Inside view of the Eisenstein Cabinet, Smolenskaya Ulitsa, Moscow (photography by Ada Ackerman, before March 2018).
Such was the trove that the young Naum Kleiman, VGIK student, discovered in 1958 in an inconspicuous flat, determined to find the truth about Eisenstein's work after he caught a glimpse of it by viewing the second part of Ivan the Terrible, forbidden since 1948 and finally allowed to be screened. This treasure was endangered, whether by thefts or water leakages. With a small group of VGIK students, he began to help the widow to edit still unpublished major theoretical writings, as Non-indifferent Nature, Montage or The Method.
As said, most of the original classification by Eisenstein was already lost, but a little part of it subsisted and suffices to show its richness for research: the tiny shelf of books about theater. On it was placed an opus of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski about the actor's work on himself. Beside it, Eisenstein had chosen to put a bible in Old Slavic. Kleiman guesses that it was a derisive way to significate that Stanislavski isn't the only god. The next book was a French one, Les Grâces d'oraison, by the Reverend Father Poulain, found in Mexico and consisting in a commentary upon the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola and the Ecstactics' lives, like Saint Therese. Its margins were full of commentaries themselves, through which we followed Eisenstein in his discovery that the Stanislavski's psychotechnical method is very similar to the Loyola's one, although for different purposes.
This, already, told us three things about Eisenstein: his mental capacity to establish links, a piece of his theoretical thinking and how much it is bound with his practice of montage. It is ultimately a true illustration of the importance of preserving the sorting of archived documents, full of meaning in itself.
The last book on this shelf discoursed on... bird migration, their routes, stops, rest areas, all exposed in their variations. Inside, a letter from Eisenstein explained why this title was there: he was studying the “instinctive staging” of birds as part of his staging research. He wrote a lot about reasoned staging, a means for the director to share his thoughts with the viewer, not neglecting the instinctive and emotional level, the real basis. He therefore studied how birds arrange themselves in flocks, move, how they know how to combine their flight with terrain variations, resting areas and the presence of water sources: a construction in time and space that the bird flock creates and which is not the shortest path.
Eisenstein used to say that, at night, books whisper to each other and that one must listen to these conversations. His cabinet was the core where the chain reaction of analogies and a physical evidence of his conception of total art, ranging from Baudelaire to surrealism occurred.
Pera Atasheva died in 1965, bequeathing the place and its content to the State, and the authorities attributed it with all the archives to the Cinematographers' Union of the USSR. The union constituted a commission, composed of critics and historians, which started in a feverish mood, conscious of the legacy of the collective letters of 1929 and 1947 and its responsibility to create a museum, to achieve the dream of Eisenstein. The institution was founded in 1969 and the construction of the Kinotsenter began, but the Cabinet remained as the archives' repository. Naum Kleiman became the curator of the Cabinet in 1967 and, under his direction, it became an international centre for studies about Eisenstein's art and theory. The construction of the Kinotsenter ended in 1989 and the Museum finally opened, Kleiman becoming its director in 1992.
From the great precursors' legacy to future generations, the transmission of the cinema's history was finally ensured. And not any history: the project of Eisenstein inscribed itself in a peculiar context, an alternative path, with dimensions larger than Russia — an internationalist one.
Bufi Octave
