Cavendish, Philip. The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 762 Cavendish, Philip. The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s. Berghahn Books, Oxford and New York, 2013. xii + 342 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Filmography. Bibliography. Index. £68.00: $110.00. Philip Cavendish’s fine new book invites us to look anew at a number of Soviet films from the 1920s, this time seeing them not as the product of solitary director-auteurs imposing their artistic vision on a crew of more-or-less pliant technical assistants, but rather as the result of the creative genius of the ‘men with the movie camera’, the camera operators whose abilities to select lenses, organizeeffectivelighting,andframeshotscontributedsomuchtoSovietavantgarde cinema during the silent era. Focusing on five particularly productive partnerships between cameraman and film director — Eduard Tisse and Sergei Eizenshtein, Anatolii Golovnia and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Andrei Moskvin and the FEKS directors (Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg), and Danylo Demuts´kyi and Oleksandr Dovzhenko — the author sets himself the goal of teasing out the ‘signature’ of the under-appreciated camera operator. The result is not just an informative education in the technical procedures of shooting a film in the Soviet 1920s, and not just a long overdue appreciation of the talents of these brilliant technical artists behind the camera, but also a fascinating reassessment of films we thought we knew well. Although in his first chapter Cavendish makes the claim that his argument ‘challenges the very notion of the auteur in relation to Soviet avant-garde cinema’ (p. 13), in practice his approach is not quite that radical. What he seeks for his cameramen is rather an expansion of the notion of the auteur that would include them: ‘It will be argued that the camera operator should be recognized as “co-director”, and thus co-author, of the many experimental classics of the post-revolutionary silent period’ (p. 13). Since his focus is on the camera operator’s role, of course Cavendish tends to give credit to the cameraman in question over the director in question, but much of the time it is difficult or impossible (despite Cavendish’s advocacy) to sort out which person should get the credit for which specific device or effect in a film. If the unedited footage of Que Viva Mexico shows Tisse experimenting with different lenses, for instance, that does not mean that Eizenshtein had no hand in the experiment, nor does it tell us what the effect of Eizenshtein’s choice from among these shots might have been, had he had the chance to work with this footage. Although the final calculus of authorship must have too many variables for us to settle these questions satisfactorily in all cases, Cavendish is undoubtedly right that camera operators have been given too little credit for their work, and his book comes as a welcome corrective. The great strength of this book is the way it looks so closely and carefully at the techniques — truncated camera angles, mirrors, specialized lenses — used REVIEWS 763 by avant-garde camera operators during the 1920s. Cavendish is particularly attentive to the cameraman’s lighting choices. He points out, for example, that the intense ‘natural’ beauty of the apples in Dovzhenko’s Earth was the product of Demuts´kyi’s skill with artificial lights, mirrors, and the monocle (single-element soft-focus) lens (p. 274), while Tisse’s use in The General Line of ‘core lighting’ (‘sources striking the face from the sides and slightly from the rear’) was intended to add drama and ‘an impression of naturalism’ to the faces of the untrained actors the practice of typage had brought onto the set (p. 109). Seeking to soften the focus of his portrait shots, Golovnia placed a thin layer of gauze over the lens at times in Mat´ (p. 149). Anybody who teaches early Soviet film will want to consult Cavendish’s detailed, technical descriptions of the devices employed by particular cameramen for particular films. Indeed, attentive description is Cavendish’s forte, and for the most part he avoids interpretation, almost as if answering Susan Sontag’s plea in Against Interpretation for ‘essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking...