Yana Meerzon
Forgotten Hollywood Michael Chekhov's Hollywood Film Practice viewed through Prague School Aesthetics
Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), Russian émigré theatre artist, a nephew of Anton Chekhov, and a disciple of Stanislavskii, developed an acting technique that recognizes the product of an actor's activity (a stage mask) as an aesthetic object and a sign. It is “a real body signifying an imaginary body, which represents a complex of effects known as character” (Steen and Werry 146). It is also a semiosphere (Lotman, Universe) permeated by intercultural and interdisciplinary artistic connections; a psycho-physical unity consisting of rhythms and movements based on cultural and personal archetypes together with ideal images born in the performer's imagination. Chekhov's acting in film is the only visual example of his technique of creating a stage mask or film mask with the theatrical means of characterization (Powers, Michael Chekhov) available to today's audience. This article focuses on Chekhov's film figure (this term will be explained below) of Max Polikoff in Ben Hecht's Spectre of the Rose (1946), demonstrating that although this part was not the most impressive in Chekhov's repertoire, it was both an archetypal and an individual film figure.
Chekhov emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1928 and spent the rest of his life in the West, trying to continue his career both in theatre and in film. Liisa Byckling notes that “Max Reinhardt recognized Chekhov's talent for cinema and wanted to direct him to Hollywood” (379). Chekhov moved to Hollywood much later, in 1942, thanks to the recommendation of Sergei Rakhmaninov. There, Chekhov enacted several stereotypical Russians, i. e. the Soviet peasant Stepanov in Ratov's Song of Russia (1944). In 1945 Chekhov was nominated for the Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category, for the role of Professor Brulov in Hitchcock's Spellbound. Apart from that, he participated in a dozen films, the majority of which are forgotten.
As Lotman notes, the film industry not only employs existing shtampy (clichés) and behavioral models of characters, but also creates new ones on the basis of an actor's physical appearance and techniques (Lotman, Ob iskusstve). For example, in Hollywood the increased interest in Chekhov's figure coincided with the increased fashionability of Russian themes due to Russia's role as an ally in the Second World War. At that time Hollywood represented Russians following the popular cliché of the good, simple, kind folk of an ally country, which partly predetermined Chekhov's career in American film (Byckling 385).(1) Later, Hollywood exploited Chekhov either in dramatic parts to play “a wise old man,” i. e. Brulov in Hitchcock's Spellbound or Professor Shuman in Vidor's Rhapsody (1954), or in comic ones, to play “a clown or a fool,” i. e. Max Polikoff in Hecht's Spectre of the Rose or Gobylin in Castle's Texas, Brooklyn, and Heaven (1946) (Byckling 402). In other words, in Chekhov's film figures, Hollywood producers looked for a combination of a culturally established archetype and the actor's personal acting type (Chekhov, Actor) or cliché, always oscillating within the duality of dramatic/comic characterization of his masks. As Quinn specifies,
in theatre or film acting, two different objects must be conceived by the actor: the image of character that exists in his reading of the play, and the material body that will correspond to and fulfill that image on stage. In Michael Chekhov's theory of psychological gesture — the “archetypal” mental image of the character's body that underlines all acting choices — we are very close to the Prague School concept of the Stage Figure. (Quinn, “Prague School” 76).
Chekhov creates tragicomic film figures which embrace his experience both as an actor and as a spectator representing a certain duality between cultural and film archetypes. Contained within the boundaries of a classic Hollywood narrative, each of them includes the fundamental elements of a classic character: “subjectivity, proper names, ‘tags' and star personalities” (Thomson 180).
Using the works of the Prague School theoreticians, including Mukařovský, Veltruský, Jakobson and Bogatyrev, and their modern followers, Lotman and Bordwell, this essay analyzes Chekhov's film figure in accordance with his individual body language and in the correspondence to the Proppean model of the fairy tale. It describes Polikoff, in Propp's terms, as a dispatcher (otpravitel'), whose function is to open the story, to set a hero on a journey and put him/her face to face with his/her destiny (Propp).
Prague School Film Aesthetics and Michael Chekhov's Ideas on Acting in Film
By analogy to the Prague School's notion of stage figure (Veltruský) and Chekhov's stage mask (Chekhov Michael Chekhov; Quinn, “Prague School”), the term film figure signifies the viewer's image of an actor's creativity on the screen, and it is a construction both on the part of the actor and the spectator. Film figure represents, according to Mukařovský, “a system of components aesthetically deautomatized and organized into a complex hierarchy, which is unified by the prevalence of one component over the others” (“Attempt” 170). Similarly to stage figure, film figure acquires a number of sub-structures meant to express a character's emotions. All of them carry the dynamics “by the interference […] of two types of gestures: gesture-signs and gesture-expressions” (Mukařovský, “Attempt” 174). These gestures encompass movements of the body, hand gesticulants and facial expressions.
As Jakobson maintains, the aesthetics of film is different from that of theatre, since the language of the former is composed exclusively of signs. If in theatre things function both as things and as signs, i. e. as signs of signs (Bogatyrev), on the screen “it is precisely things (visual and auditory), transformed into signs, that are the specific material of cinematic art” (Jakobson, “Cinema” 146). As a part of film material, film figure functions as an equivalent to lighting, sound, and space used in narration. In fact, it constitutes film's mise-en-scene as any other object employed to express the artistic will of a narrator/film director, who stages the event for the camera and forms the aesthetic entity of a film, thus manipulating the spectators' knowledge of the fictional events and influencing their perception. The chain of visual images characterizes any film figure as a text composed by a fusion of actor's and director's devices.
In his article “Semantika kino” (“The Semantics of Cinema”), Viktor Shklovskii invented the concept of cine-language, by analogy with the verbal one, stressing its unique mode of communication. “Cinematography is an art of semantic motion. The core material of cinematography is the special cine-word, a piece of filmed material with a particular significance” (Shklovskii, Raboty 32). Moreover, according to Shklovskii, gestures, facial expressions and movements dominate the acting devices in film. “Cine-people and cine-action we see on the screen are perceived as long as they are comprehended. […] People moving on the screen are kind of hieroglyphs. Those are not cine-images but cine-words, cine-concepts” (Shklovskii, Raboty 30-35).(2)
On the screen, the actor's body language, i. e. gestures, movements and facial expressions, dominates verbal and vocal expressions and is an element of a cine-language (Lotman, “Semiotika kino” 356). A cine-sign, similar to a mask in commedia dell'arte, consists of external and internal elements of a character/type, which overshadow the personality of an actor. In film, the individuality of an actor, his/her physique, vocal features — is either equal or superior to that of a character (Quinn, “Celebrity”). Character types determine the acting style of a performer and influence the viewer's perception. “If the actor looks and behaves in a manner appropriate to his or her character's function in the context of the film, the actor has given a good performance — whether or not he or she behaved as a real person” (Bordwell 132).
In film, the individuality of an actor — his/her physique, type of voice, or specific gestures — is either equal or superior to that of a character (Quinn, “Celebrity”). As an aesthetic object, film figure corresponds to character — an artifact or a construct, an agent of cause and effect in a continuous narration and a collection of traits (Bordwell 86) determining the audience's reception guided by its collective and individual expectations toward the artifact and its archetype. The audience's expectations embrace conventions (a tradition, a dominant style, or a popular form); and experience, “derived from everyday life and from other experiences” (Bordwell 28).(3) It is the audience's function to bring the semantic meaning into “the overall pattern that is perceived […] both subject matter and abstract ideas” (Bordwell 25). Thus, the film audience, similarly to one in folklore, “expects the actor to execute the code precisely, erasing his inventive impulses while focusing his subjectivity in gestures that conform expertly to coded expectations” (Quinn, Semiotic 76). Therefore, Bogatyrev's theory of the relationships between stage and audience in the folk theatre, based on the idea of a communal censorship and recognizable types presented is applicable to film. The audience takes part in the formation of an artifact or an acting sign in both reception of film and that of theatre. In both cases, stage or film figure embraces literary character, the individuality of actor (either his/her acting technique or personality) and the ideal expectations of spectator.
Although Chekhov developed his acting technique mostly for theatre actors, his personal experience with the camera made him sharpen his theories and adjust them to the purposes of film. Chekhov illuminated the importance of radiating, objective, rhythm, and sense of a whole for film. He adapted his technique to the new type of spatial and temporal relationships dictated by the new spectator — the camera, a closely watching eye. As Chekhov declares, only the principles of “friendship” between actor and camera can emancipate the actor's creativity from the total authority of the director and cinematographer (Chekhov, To the Actor). According to Chekhov, “in front of the camera the actor must be extremely economical in the use of gesture and facial expression”; instead, the actor should increase “the strength of the Radiation, call up the emotions that you want until you are filled to the brim, and then imagine that a soft gossamer ‘veil’ descends upon you, ‘veiling’ your expression”. The action of the imaginary veil “results in both economy of expression and real ‘presence,’ which the audience experiences” (Powers, “With Michael Chekhov” 165). Chekhov's view corresponds to Bordwell's, who describes the difference of perception in theatre and in film by stating that in film acting, determined by the distance of the camera, only facial expressions and movements are relevant. (Bordwell 134).
In his acting, Chekhov uses a combination of various techniques from Stanislavskii's psychological approach to Meierkhol'd's constructivism, stressing the necessity of distance or Shklovskii's defamiliarization (ostranenie) between the I of an actor and that of a character. Shklovskii's defamiliarization is similar to de Saussure's treatment of language as “a system of differences” (Lodge 15), and thus proposes to look at things dialectically. The image as the artistic material of art is also understood as not allusive but dialectic:
An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life, which are revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object — it creates a “vision” of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it. (Shklovskii, “Art” 25).
According to Chekhov, in order to create an aesthetic object, an actor must work with aesthetically pure material — a defamiliarized self or his/her own psycho-physicality, which makes a stage figure lively (Boner 176-177). Chekhov looks for actor's skill of co-experiencing (sochuvstvie) with a character, which already contains a sense of distance between actor and character (4). Co-experiencing then implies the actor's defamiliaraized perception of a literary figure, which he/she is to incorporate on stage within the boundaries of his/her body as a stage mask. Thus the technique of co-experiencing undermines the actor's emotions and stresses those of the character. It also has strong similarities with Shklovskii's view on art and literature, in which “blood is not bloody. […] It is material either for a structure of sounds or for a structure of images. For this reason, art is pitiless or rather without pity”, which we must consider from the viewpoint of its structure (Shklovskii, Theory 159).
As an actor, Chekhov possessed the technique of a double vision employing humour as a combination of self-irony and distance, which corresponds to the bitter irony of Anton Chekhov and formalists’ ideas on parody and grotesque (Shklovskii, Theory; Eikhenbaum; Tynianov). Chekhov's comic acting was a form of displacement analogous to Eikhenbaum's definition of literary grotesque, as playing with fantastic, irrational and constructed reality (Eikhenbaum 288-291). Chekhov analogously defined theatrical grotesque, using the example of Meierkhol'd's directing, specifying that the grotesque means to re-imagine and re-construct everything on stage in order to destroy reality. It is to stretch the imagination “in order to avoid imitating life” (Chekhov, Director 39). Chekhov's definition of theatrical grotesque is also in line with Shklovskii's views on parody as a hyperbolization of the inner and outer characteristics of a character (Theory 152).
Although Chekhov suggests making a film figure recognizable by starting its construction by defining its archetype, his personality, known to Hollywood audiences as a Russian emigre actor celebrity, dominates each of his screen images. Celebrity represents the public persona of an actor playing a role. “Celebrity in its usual variety, though, is not composed of acting technique but of personal information. […] In the context of this public identity there then comes to exist a link between performer and audience, quite apart from the dramatic character” (Quinn, “Celebrity” 156).
Chekhov's transformation is always based on individual characterization. To Chekhov, a film actor (although tremendously depending on the will of a director)(5) must still differentiate between his/her I and the I of a character, and visualize his/her future figure or mask as an aesthetic object, looking at it as if from the standpoint of a spectator. Chekhov stresses the importance of conveying through non-verbal acting devices a visual image (zritel'nyi obraz) arising out of character's speech and actions (Chekhov, Literaturnoe Nasledie V.1). Therefore, according to Chekhov and similarly to the Prague School, an actor has to foresee each gesture, movement, and intonation of his/her character and define it rhythmically as a dominant of a film figure. Moreover, each of his/her characters embraces a Psychological Gesture that originates in actor's imagination, transforms into movement or action, and is manifested in the time and space of a performance (Chekhov, To the Actor). As a result, each of Chekhov's film figures is a sign based on a particular archetype — the fundamental or denotative signification of a character.
Chekhov believes that any actor with rich imagination is able to enact any personality, no matter how far it may be removed from actor's own I. He lists several constantly intervening inner and outer elements entering the structure of any stage or film figure, such as text, feelings and emotions of a character, a character's super-objective,(6) a character's individual atmosphere, and the actor's Higher I, functioning as actor's artistic vision (khudozhnicheskoe otnoshenie) of his/her future artifact (Chekhov, “O tekhnike aktera” 320). More importantly, artistic vision assumes the pre-existence of an aesthetic function of a film figure, which takes root in Chekhov's idea of imaginary body and imaginary centre, the signifiers of actor's physical/outer characterization of a film figure and of its psychology or inner characterization (Chekhov Literaturenoe nasledie 1:104). The imaginary body together with imaginary center, and future gesticulants and vocal elements of a stage/film figure, appears in actor's imagination stimulated by means of his/her concentration on the literary text.
Moreover, like the Prague school, Chekhov recognizes the dichotomy of collective versus individual subconscious of actors and spectators as shares of a cultural langue, within which a film figure emerges. For instance, Chekhov uses the archetype of clown or more precisely, the Chaplin archetype, (defined by Shklovskii as a cine-language), to construct his Polikoff in Spectre of the Rose.
Chaplin does not speak, he moves. He operates with cinematic material rather thantranslating himself from the theatrical language to that of the screen. The comic element of Chaplin's movement is […] in its mechanicity (Shklovskii, Raboty 21).
Similarly, Polikoff's figure resembles commedia dell'arte's Harlequin, consisting of duality or compulsive doubleness (Kimber 23), characterized merely by gesture, movement, rhythm, and facial expressions as its primary elements.
Chaplin creates a tragicomic character which embraces opposite qualities. Stylistically, it is built on the dual relationships between melodrama and slapstick; psychologically, it represents the heroism of a little man, which is always pitiful and laughable (Volkonskii 105). But it is always creation of a mask, of the Other, through which the persona is visible; the mask, however, is as important as the persona itself. The essence of Chekhov's characterization technique is in this ability to create the archetypal, easily identifiable mask, through which the audience perceives actor's persona — a “clown with the sorrow in his eyes”.
Observations
In 1946, screenwriter Ben Hecht filmed Spectre of the Rose, based on his own play, which he “would have thrown away in his early years” (Fetherling 153). After Chekhov's success in Hitchock's Spellbound, Hecht invited him to play the failed producer Max Polikoff together with two other “old-timers”: Judith Anderson (as Madame La Sylph, a ballet teacher) and Lionel Stander (as Lionel Gans, a poet). Although Hecht was known as “the Shakespeare of Hollywood”, he was no director. In this film he rushed to achieve the Hitchcockian atmosphere of suspense without having the latter's directorial gift (MacAdams 240). As a result, the film setting and acting (Chekhov's in particular) was damaged due to flat camera angles and primitive editing.
However, it is still possible to see in Chekhov's film figure of Max Polikoff the unified semantic structure embracing both the telling name (Russian émigré Polikoff), an American cultural archetype, i. e. a salesman (7), Charlie Chaplin's screen mask of a pitiful and touching tramp, and Chekhov's persona as a celebrity actor. Apart from the literary archetype of unsuccessful merchant (from Shakespeare's Shylock to a group of characters emerging in Yiddish literature of Sholom Aleichem and later Isaak Babel'), Max Polikoff resembles personages from Ben Hecht's childhood, the Russian Jews from the Lower East Side in New York (Fetherling). Polikoff the dreamer and failed businessman also stands for those emigrants who were, like Dickens' Oliver Twist in London, seeking fortune in the New World, in reality in many cases sinking down to the low depths of New York, Chicago and other big cities.
Spectre of the Rose opens with Max Polikoff approaching the dance-class of his old friend Madame La Sylph, the former prima donna of the English ballet. Using the range of non-verbal characterization techniques, Chekhov, as early as in the opening shot, presents the essence (a whole) of his character, based on the archetype of Chaplin's clown. The camera depicts Polikoff walking up the stairs. Everything from his gait to the manner he is holding his hat and constantly crumpling a piece of paper is Chekhov's semantic gesture of the character. Chekhov's outer characterization technique, embracing Polikoff's jumpy, springy gait, light-hearted waving of a cane, humming as if calculating something, and his dandy-like costume including a tall hat sitting on the back of his head, illuminates character's archetype — a gambler at the vanity fair. His vocal characterization (including even his accent) just underlines what has been given to the character through the actor's gesticulants.
Analyzing Chaplin's film language, Mukařovský describes his gestures as both conventional signs universally comprehensible, which “acquire supra-individual validity” (“Attempt” 174) — that of an archetype, and social signs standing for a particular character, which “like words — signal certain emotions or mental states” (“Attempt” 175). Thus in Chekhov's performance as Polikoff, the clowning gait and appearance would be archetypal, whereas his waving of hands is strictly individual to the character.
Polikoff enters the class of La Sylph spitting out numerous compliments to her beauty and talents, which provokes the old lady to question the real purpose of his visit. Polikoff is broke but full of enthusiasm. Moreover, as the following dialogue demonstrates, he is dreaming of “the lovely smell of art”, planning to produce a new ballet starring Andrey Sanine — the brilliant dancer suffering from a depression after the mysterious death of his wife and partner, Nina.(8)
Polikoff's speech as well as his fate, always being on the road in search for the beauty of art, is marked by Chekhov's personal connotations. Throughout his career in the West, Chekhov had gone through different types of relationships between the artist and art in its commercial forms. For instance, in France in the early 1930s he went through the unpleasant experience of being the producer and the artistic director of an unsuccessful theatre company, which is reflected in his/actor's irony towards Polikoff. As Polikoff tells La Sylph, among other troubles he had lived through, the last one was the most disturbing: he was fired from the position of a ballet company's stage manager because he lost two trunks full of costumes somewhere on the road. This fact does not surprise La Sylph, who reacts with a sarcastic comment that the failure is in Polikoff's nature: a loser and a clown equally unable to manage anything, whether it be selling vegetables or producing a show.
However, Chekhov's Polikoff is not only a great gambler but also a great liar, like Gogol''s Khlestakov (The Inspector General), who can be viewed as the artist's personal/professional comic archetype. Chekhov played Gogol''s Khlestakov for the first time in 1921, on the stage of Moscow Art Theatre (directed by Stanislavskii). In Meierkhol'd's words, it was the first true embodiment of Gogol''s character — comic and phantasmagoric at the same time. It was the impersonation of theatricality and comic grotesque: “Chekhov appears on stage with a pale complexion of a clown, with eyebrows as crescents. This is a revelation in acting and a bold move towards theatre of grotesque” (Meierkhol'd qtd. in Chekhov, Literarturnoe nasledie 1: 445). (9)
Chekhov's Polikoff as a figure of comic grotesque corresponds to Shklovskii's laying bare the device (obnazhenie priema), the process of representing “an aesthetic form without any motivation whatsoever” (Theory 147). Chekhov's Psychological Gesture, an imaginary (invisible for an audience) physical image/ sign of Polikoff, resembles that of his Khlestakov constructed on the principles of hyperbole. “In Chekhov's Khlestakov all the most simple feelings — hunger, light-headedness, ability to fall in love — were hyperbolized, in fact it was the hyperbolized commodity” (Knebel' 13).
Moreover, Polikoff functions as a Proppean dispatcher, who sends a hero (Sanine) on a journey trying to produce a ballet on promises but without any financial support. Polikoff is, therefore, responsible for the following events, despite his personal attitude: “the feelings of a dispatcher do not influence the course of an action” (Propp, 74). The affair results in Polikoff's indebtedness and inability to pay his partners and creditors. The scene between Polikoff and the angry lawyer of the artist and set/costume designer Kropotkin is the typical “lie scene” from The Inspector General (act 3, sc.6).
In the 1921 production Chekhov's drunk Khlestakov told stories to the Mayor and his guests about his life in the capital city, resulting in the tour de force of acting/lying — Khlestakov's description of a 700-rouble watermelon which he ate at home. In Chekhov's acting the realization of form as such (osoznanie formy) (Shklovskii, Theory 153) was in the visual representation of a watermelon in a shape of a square, an iconic sign corresponding with Khlestakov's erratic imagination. In fact, it was Chekhov's artistic or romantic irony (Markov 305), a form of the actor's defamiliariazation, which created Khlestakov not as a character but as a type, a generalized symbol and a sign (Markov 305).
Correspondingly, the scene in Spectre of the Rose represents the lying Polikoff, who tries to convince Kropotkin and then La Sylph that he indeed has the money and as an honest producer will pay everyone shortly. Technically, Chekhov's acting is based on the same principles of artistic irony he was exploring in Khlestakov. Furthermore, Chekhov's costume and make-up of Polikoff — a single fair lock of hair standing up on his forehead, an artificial flower in his lapel, a polka dot bow tie — are reminiscent of those of Khlestakov, which proves that the resemblance in the outer characterization leads to that in the inner characterization and is actor's personal archetype.
Clowning as a device of dual structure is similar to parody. It also contains both the material being parodied in its estranged form, and a new artistic text — a parody itself — raised on the background of the first one. As Tynianov specifies, “the essence of parody lies in a dialectical play with the device. If a parody of a tragedy results in a comedy, a comedy parodied may turn out to be a tragedy” (116). Therefore, the mask of Chaplin's tramp is constructed on the very same principle. It paraphrases and parodies the mask of Max Linder. (10) The smile enters Chaplin's mask as the essentially public part of the image, determining the individuality of its user as vulnerable and sentimental (Clayton 136). Recognizing under Chaplin mask Charlie himself, the audience can relate to the various Chaplin's characters.
Chekhov's masks follow this tradition. Although his Polikoff stands even farther away from the original, it is a paraphrase of Chaplin. The actual make up and costume of Chekhov's film figure corresponds to the idea of physical mask, whereas his method of rehearsing by taking on the imaginary body and center, corresponds to the notion of psychological mask. Chekhov's masks, switching between the private and social functions of his characters, express the existential duality of a clown and clowning.
His [the clown's] reactions to a surrounding circumstance are completely unjustified, “unnatural” and unexpected. […] His transitions from one emotion to the other do not require any psychological justifications. Sorrow and happiness, extreme agitation and complete poise, laughter and tears — all might follow one another spontaneously and change lighting-like without any visible reasons. (Chekhov, To the Actor 143)
Thus, Chekhov employed gestures, movements, facial expressions, and rhythm as the outer means of characterization to portray the inner world of his characters. In this aspect, Chekhov's Polikoff follows Chaplin's clown, which combines and transcends a variety of human feelings (Chekhov, “O tekhnike aktera” 233).
In Polikoff's office (the former dance class of La Sylph), the preparations for the opening night are at full steam. The artist Kropotkin (also a Russian emigrant in search of work on Broadway) together with his lawyer is waiting for Polikoff, who was supposed to pay his honorarium. Polikoff runs into the office agitated and unhappy (his partners, of course, decided not to run the risk with this show). He takes a second to evaluate the danger of the circumstances and utters a monologue/hymn to Kropotkin's talent, using all his energy and abilities to persuade the artist of his devotion and admiration. Polikoff plays his role as a most skilled tragic actor, who seriously feels offended when Kropotkin's lawyer reminds him of dates and numbers, and finishes his speech with the assurance that the cheque is in the mail and will arrive any minute now.
In this episode, the audience is presented with Chekhov's irony in its full power: it witnesses the usage of a meta-theatrical device in film acting. Chekhov enacts in Polikoff's speech a play within a play based on actor's ironic distance/defamiliarization from the character. He demonstrates both the humour of Polikoff's situation, sympathizing and co-experiencing with his character: the dream must come true and the show must go on, even if Polikoff will be broke again.
In this scene Polikoff is literally “pushed against the wall,” which conditions Chekhov's focus on his facial expressions and gesticulants as the dominant outer expressive tools. Polikoff's mask consists of opposite facial expressions oscillating between the representation of grief and admiration. Polikoff's hand gesticulants are dominated by several gesture-signatures, such as constantly crumpling a piece of paper, touching his cheek, and fixing his hair (11) — the basic elements of a clown-figure structure.
The same tendency can be seen in the scene representing the opening night of the ballet. Polikoff the dispatcher makes everything possible to open the ballet, even against the musicians' decision not to play without payment or the intention of the police to arrest Sanine as a suspect in his wife's murder case. The scene between musicians and Polikoff at the box office demonstrates what an enormous amount of energy it takes him to keep everything under control. The shot depicts a tiny space of a box office with the musicians, La Sylph and Polikoff at the center engaged in a heated argument. The camera — the director's closely watching eye — and Chekhov are focused on Polikoff's/film figure's facial expressions and gesticulants, which seemed to be borrowed from tragedy, but violated in this acting discourse by Chekhov's ironic attitude to his character. The typical theatrical gestures of grief (arms raised, body trembling) are conveyed here through petty gestures — Polikoff's twitching fingers, crumpling and picking at a piece of paper.
At large, this scene is a spatial metaphor for the entire idea of the film. As Polikoff is kept away from his object of desire — a successful ballet with Sanine, “a real piece of art”, which will make him rich — in the closed space of this office, so is Sanine kept away from his object of desire — the beauty of dance and music — in the closed space of his sick mind. Although Polikoff manages to open this production, a “hymn to beauty”, (another indirect reference to Chaplin's beggar in City Lights, (Mukařovský, “Attempt” 177), it doesn't help cure Sanine's mental condition. Sanine commits suicide at the end.
Specter of the Rose closes with the representation of Chekhov's character — broke again, back on the road. Therefore, this spiral or zigzag-like structure of the character focuses on creating a self-absorbed figure or mask, lacking its inner development, based on the universal archetype of a clown and on Chekhov's personal archetype of Khlestakov. Polikoff represents a structure of displacement, the fundamental device of irony (Shklovskii, Theory). As an actor, Chekhov mocks Polikoff's perpetual enthusiasm once again in his closing monologue (“I will be back in the spring”). Polikoff's speech epitomizes not only actor's irony towards the character, but also is Chekhov's expose as an artist, the layout of his own journey: always on the road looking for an ideal actor and theatre. Thus, Polikoff is a dichotomous structure based on Chekhov's ability to mix laughter with tears, to create stage and film figures as multiple signs. As Chekhov states, “if you are going to act a tragedy, you must be very humorous. If you are going to act vaudeville, you must act tragically. Inwardly, you will be crying in comedy and laughing in tragedy” (Chekhov qtd. in The Drama Review 71). In other words, it is the rhythm of actor's body in space that is the governing principle of Chekhov's performance, the technique of creating an acting sign in its tripartite composition: as the essence of a depicted object, the object itself and actor's relation to it. Therefore, Chekhov's film figure, as any human being on the screen, “when entering the art of cinema, becomes a world full of complex cultural signs. On one extreme is the symbolism of the human body present in different cultures […]; on the other extreme is actor's work as a means of communicating with audience and a certain semiotic communication” (Lotman, “Semiotika kino” 324).
Notes
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© Yana Meerzon
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TSQ 34
Toronto Slavic Annual 2003
Arkadii Shteinvberg. The second way
Roman Timenchik. Anna Akhmatova in 60s
Le Studio Franco-Russe
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