Kino

"Leyda was a young American film enthusiast who, seized by the example of Russian cinema, had this extraordinary idea that he would go to Moscow and sit at the feet of the world’s greatest film maker and theorist: Eisenstein. He wasn’t the only person who had that idea – famously Samuel Beckett thought exactly the same and wrote to Eisenstein, but never got a reply. Leyda did get a reply, and went and studied with Eisenstein at VGIK, the film school, in the early 30s. He was an intern on Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, and took an extraordinary gallery of photos of the making of that film which are absolutely crucial now, because the film was lost: it was censored, banned, shelved, and then accidentally destroyed during the war. So Leyda knew Soviet cinema from the inside, and he decided in the 50s that he would write a proper history about it. “Samuel Beckett wrote to Eisenstein, but never got a reply.” I think the great thing about this book is that, although it was written during the height of the Cold War , it manages to be incredibly sympathetic to different aspects of early Russian cinema. It’s true that Leyda was politically and temperamentally quite sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but it’s not the work of an apologist in any way – it’s the work of a friendly observer. It’s much more about art than politics. I first read the book in the mid-60s and it became an absolute bible for me – it really was one of those books that shape your life. I read it with great enthusiasm, but there’s a lot I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’t pay any attention to the beginning – which talks about pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema – I just plunged into the 20s. But Kino was the only source on the pre-Revolutionary period for years, until we finally got to see those films in the late 1980s. There’s a section which Leyda called ‘witnessed years’; there’s a whole different tempo about that, where he’s actually talking about things he saw, and a tremendous feeling of excitement. It’s very scrupulous about what he had and hadn’t seen, and there’s absolutely no attempt to cover things that he gets from secondary sources. It also lets his own opinions hang out – it’s beautifully written, of course, but its sophistication is in making clear where he stands in relation to the material he could and couldn’t get at. Very few histories do that: they flatten things out. Of course, it has blind spots and weaknesses, but that’s part of its charm and its probity. I think it’s an absolute model. It’s one of those books, and there are just a handful of them, that when you go back to it – I’ve been going back to it for decades now – you always find different things in. They were always there but you never noticed them: and that, I think, is the mark of a truly great book. Oh completely! It was an absolute vade mecum: I mean you couldn’t orient yourself in relation to Soviet cinema without it. And if you were one of those who grew up with it then it shaped your view, but that’s just how strongly marked one was by the book."