Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception

"Tsivian had this idea to try to reconstruct the history of early Russian cinema – the stuff that Ledya didn’t deal with, and that all the Soviet avant-garde despised – and to approach it through a deeply contextual history. This is a revolutionary book. It is the first major book in film studies that doesn’t deal with films per se at all, but with the experience of going to the cinema. Why do people go the cinema? How do they feel about going? What happens to them inside the cinema? What do they talk about? There’s even a chapter about things going wrong in the cinema – which I think is absolutely the most original idea: what happened when the film broke? I think what Tsivian shows is that because of the situation in Russia at the time that cinema arrived, reactions were a bit different than elsewhere. There wasn’t the automatic assumption that cinema was only for oiks: the intelligentsia and the newly emerging rich were also fascinated by it. For instance the daughter of a Siberian gold merchant opened a couple of cinemas catering especially for the upper classes. One was called ‘Just like Paris’, with private boxes. “There wasn’t the automatic assumption that cinema was only for oiks: the intelligentsia and the newly emerging rich were also fascinated by it.” And although the views of the labouring classes aren’t recorded, you do have a range of high-quality responses to cinema, which shows that it kind of went from top to bottom in Russia. There’s a wonderful chapter on the rise of the foyer, and how important it became as a place to meet your friends. Exactly. Not to say that that was the whole response, but the point was that there were some quite distinctive Russian features, and unlike in Britain and elsewhere, where cinema was for the ‘carriage trade’, in Russia it would seem that the middle classes and the affluent were quite attracted to it. It’s an extraordinary book on the phenomenology of the cinema experience. He uses incredibly varied sources: poets, journalists, writers of all kinds are frisked to get the little asides. He talks about a postcard Alexander Blok sent to someone, saying, ‘I set off to see you yesterday, but I got ambushed by a cinema at the end of the street’ – fantastic! Because it’s one of the greatest documents about the way that cinema caught people, and just drew them in. It’s a very Soviet-era book really, with a very wry attitude towards theory. And it takes you into the absolute difference of Russian cinema – the fact that early Russian cinema really was a different social and artistic experience. It even felt different from Western cinema, which is why the two didn’t really mix. I think it’s a wonderful book. I do regularly urge people to read it who have no interest in early Russian cinema at all, because it gives them tools to understand cinema in a way that nothing else I know does."