Kino has just released a restored version of Alexander Dovzhenko's great Arsenal (1929). What amazes me repeatedly as I watch it is not only the rigor, intensity, and invention of the film itself (Dovzhenko is one of the few essential filmmakers), but also our distance from Dovzhenko, the shrinking of our capacity to see and feel his work. The shock of seeing any Dovzhenko film, in addition to what of its original power it retains, is also the shock of realizing the impossibility of anyone's being able to think in film in this way ever again.
Arsenal gives the impression of having been dashed off with furious purposefulness. As a Party assignment, commissioned to celebrate a famous event in the revolution, Arsenal is a film of broad strokes and tremendous speed, evoking the inevitability of proletarian triumph. These are the main lines of the narrative: Ukraine is decimated from sending its sons off to fight the Great War. After the war, bourgeois nationalist forces seek to claim power. Opposing them, pro-Bolshevik workers at a Kiev munitions plant (the Arsenal) go on strike and barricade themselves in the plant. The end of the film shows a victory in defeat: The workers are all shot, but one of them, Timosh, magically does not die.
Dovzhenko breaks the narrative into self-contained sections that flow into each other. It often seems that things are happening too quickly in the film, or that one would need to be a Ukrainian scholar to "get" everything. In fact, Dovzhenko always constructs scenes meticulously; we are indeed shown causes and effects and given the clues and background needed to interpret apparently enigmatic incidents. But Dovzhenko's brilliance is in placing cause where we expected effect and vice versa, in drawing out "background" for its own sake and making whole small films out of it. ("In my film there is enough material for five or six films," he said—an understatement.)
The film shows war in the most oblique episodes conceivable—German troops arriving at a Ukrainian position to find it empty; a soldier dictating a letter to his family, then dying without having given the address; rows of the dead and of the living streaming by from the point of view of a train; cart horses racing through the snow to deliver a dead soldier to his mother, while she waits at a freshly dug grave. For once in a film, action is cinema, not spectacle. Do those who celebrate the economies of a Roger Corman (typically with the painful two-faced irony of the "bad movie" lover) have the ability to be astonished when Dovzhenko represents a train crash by showing an accordion sail across the roof of a stationhouse, land on the ground arched, and decontract in a final "death"? He does this not because he didn't have the money to arrange something more spectacular, but because that was the precise metonymy he wanted.
The new Kino tape has a modernistic orchestral score, but I recommend watching it with the sound turned all the way down. Without the music you can fully appreciate the fluidity of Dovzhenko's rhythms, his dynamics, his ability to control the pace of a scene by means of, for example, the fixedness of a gaze. Of course no one does the big, posterlike gestures and mass movements as well as Dovzhenko (Timosh pushing away a right-wing speaker and taking his place in front of a crowd), but it's necessary to feel the subtle, small ones (the mild gesture with which Timosh dismisses a bearded reveler who makes to embrace him at a victory parade: slowly lifting the ribbon pinned to the man's coat, then letting it flutter away) to understand why Dovzhenko rather than Eisenstein, Pudovkin, or Dziga Vertov was Andrei Tarkovsky's favorite Soviet director of the '20s.
By the way, horses talk in Arsenal, through the miracle of intertitles, and when you see them talk you realize all at once that 1) this director came from the country and knew horses; 2) the film is showing us a myth, an idealization of reality; 3) the triumph of the ideal over the real is the culminating point of the film, its tragic epiphany; 4) this epiphany is outside ideology; 5) there's no reason why horses shouldn't talk; but 6) horses should be allowed to talk in films only under the direction of Dovzhenko.
Dovzhenko offers us new conceptions of time, of the relationships between parts and wholes and between spirit and matter. So we should see him as a philosopher of cinema, someone concerned with the same problems that concern Henri Bergson. I don't choose Bergson's name at random; around the time Arsenal manifested itself, Hilary L. Fink's scholarly tome Bergson and Russian Modernism (1999) sailed across my roof and collapsed on my doorstep.
The titles of Bergson's major works fully evoke, even to someone who hasn't read them, the specific significance of this thinker, the realm in which he moves and dominates: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution. Bergson's thought and themes remain familiar to us today, even though Bergson no longer enjoys the cultural centrality he had in the years immediately before World War I. Fink sums up Bergson's philosophy as prescriptive: "Rather than reduce the world to its constituent parts (which is the function of the intellect, or analysis), we must rely on intuition, the immediate, 'artistic' contemplation of reality in its ceaseless flow, or duration."
Fink announces at the outset that in her study of early 20th century Russian literature and art (her net doesn't include film, theater, music, architecture, or dance), she is less interested in verifying an historical Bergsonian influence than in focusing attention on "the parallels (plus occasional differences) between works of Russian modernism and the philosophy of Bergson" and considering "how Russian modernist works may be viewed through a Bergsonian prism." The strength of Fink's book and its weakness both lie in this premise. Its strength consists in the richness and breadth of the material (and the author's facility with it); its weakness consists in the looseness of the connections Fink draws. The terms of Bergson's philosophy are so vast that it's impossible to think of a work of art that can't be shown to exhibit "parallels" with it. Add to that the fondness for vague, far-reaching pronouncements to which many Russian thinkers surrendered in their manifestoes and letters, and you have a recipe for soup.
The danger of the book is that it risks flattening Bergson into the semi-unintelligibility of words like "wholeness" and "intuition"—a danger that exists in Bergson too, but that Bergson's text constantly overcomes. Moreover, the parallels Fink finds between Bergson and this or that Russian writer are too often both obvious and unclear. She tries to relate poet Osip Mandel'-shtam's enthusiasms for Lamarck and Dante to his love of Bergson simply on the basis of the occurrence of words like "line," "flow," and "system" in the Mandel'shtam text—an unobjectionable procedure but also an unhelpful one.
There are far too many sentences like this one: "As with the interplay of intellect and intuition in Bergson's metaphysics..., [absurdist Daniil] Kharms similarly attempts to broaden the traditional concept of reason or logic in his art through the use of the absurd." Not only is the simile clumsy ("as with...similarly"), but the thought is forced and general: Obviously, a writer's "use of the absurd" will tend to "broaden the traditional concept of reason or logic," and obviously, this can be compared to how intuition broadens intellect, but at this level of abstraction, what difference does it make to Kharms, to Bergson, or to us? While we're on the subject of Kharms (a writer whom, by the way, every reader of this magazine would enjoy), it's telling that Fink announces an interesting project of examining how Kharms's attack on causality is "supported" by Bergson, but then goes on merely to cite a group of passages from Kharms and drape Bergson around them with her by-now-familiar casualness ("as with Bergson...", "might be elucidated by recalling Bergson's main criticism of Kant...", "in the same way that Bergson takes note..."). Her subsequent attempt to interpret Kharms's humor in terms of Bergson's famous theory of the comic in Laughter is just as mechanical, unintentionally falling into the very trap of the Bergsonian comical itself ("the automatic installed in life and imitating life").
Bergson and Russian Modernism would have been a better book if Fink had spent more time dealing with specific examples of Russian writers mentioning Bergson or discussing Bergsonian concepts. Her linking of the linguistic theories of the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov to Bergsonian metaphysics is unconvincing, but it's especially disappointing, and symptomatic, that she fails to interpret the single reference to Bergson she finds in Khllebnikov's complete works: a "humorous" diary notation about "Bergson's cabby." fink would have better spent five pages analyzing this enigmatic phrase—which surely must have resonances elsewhere in Khlebnikov—than on her usual wool-gathering ("a Bergsonian subtext may be found...", "Bergson's distinction...could be seen as a significant source...").
Significantly, one of the strangest parts of the book is the author's review of the fortunes of Bergson in the post-1929 Soviet Union. Fink indicates how Marxist critics (who considered Bergson as idealist) attacked him as all the more dangerous an enemy of dialectical materialism precisely because he was dialectical himself. Also, Fink is helpful in tracing the attitudes toward Bergson on the part of the prerevolutionary philosophers Nikolai Losskii and S. L. Frank. More scholarship on this level, in the area of the historyof ideas and ideology, would have made Bergson and Russian Modernism a useful and interesting book, instead of one so severeky limited by its own suggestiveness.
