Eccentrism’s counter-rebel: the sign, the trickster and the end of FEKS

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s 1927 film S.V.D. was the last of their films produced as the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) and the first in the directorial duo’s longer history of historical appropriation and adaptation. While the film has been held up as FEKS’ application of the Formalist method to the genre of historical melodrama, I argue that the tensions produced by the S.V.D.’s con artist and trickster Medoks help to establish a demarcation line between Eccentrism and Russian Formalism, and simultaneously present FEKS with a dead end: if the Eccentrics’ allegiance is to the compelling figure of the trickster, then the trickster’s delight in sabotaging revolution presents a political and ideological problem within the Eccentric platform. In order to trace the complexities presented by S.V.D., this article examines, first, the historical context of the film’s making; second, the transformation of Decembrist history into a narrative arc; third, the relationship between Formalism and Eccentrism as distinct movements; and, finally, the shifting emphasis from ambiguous sign to the mercurial figure of the trickster, who appears here in the perplexing role of anti-revolutionary villain, as a defining feature of Eccentrism.