Lev Kuleshov on Animation: Montaging the Image

Kuleshov’s connections with animation: Writing and making

In order to paint a broader picture of Kuleshov’s involvement with animation, I will start with his article called ‘Very Much Wanted Art’ (Ochen’ nuzhnoe iskusstvo) that came out in 1933, five years prior to his lectures, in the All-Union specialized newspaper Kino Gazeta (Kuleshov, 1933). ⁷ The article was published among other front-page articles dedicated to the opening of the first conference of animators, and needs to be considered in its general historical context. In the history of Soviet animation, 1933 marked the beginning of major shifts in animation production, resulting in a complete technological and aesthetic transformation of Soviet animation – shifts that remained largely invisible to the general public. As of 1933, animation was produced by several animation studios that worked with a variety of techniques, including paper drawings, cut-outs, flat marionettes, etc. ⁸ However, by 1936, the small Moscow animation studios were merged with a newly founded major animation studio, Soiuzmul’tfil’m, that at the time worked exclusively with the celluloid (cel) technique. Since the cel technique is based on layering of the animated image, the use of cel allowed for production of industrial animation, i.e. animation produced by a conveyor-belt-style assembling of the animated image. The method was borrowed from the American Walt Disney and Fleischer Studios. Soiuzmul’tfil’m was not the first Soviet animation studio that employed the cel technique for animation production: it had been implemented two years earlier at the Experimental Animation Studio at the Scientific-Research Department of GUKF (Eksperemental’naia mul’tmasterskaya pri Nauchno-issledovatel’skom sektore Gosudarstvennogo upravleniia kino i foto) the head of which, Viktor Smirnov, following a governmental authorization, studied the cel technique of animation production in the USA at the Disney and Fleischer studios in 1933. Thus, in 1933, Soviet animation began moving away from the diversity of animation techniques and styles to a unified production style that employed celluloid, attempting, in part, to cultivate a more unified animation aesthetics.

In terms of the Soviet discourse on animation that was burgeoning at the time, there was a considerable tendency towards regarding animation as either a cinema’s servant performing the facilitating functions – creating intertitles or illustrative images of objects and phenomena that could not be reproduced by photographic means ⁹ – or as a means of entertainment and indirect propaganda capable of producing short satirical films. The latter position was in line with the new tendencies in animation production supported by Main Administration for Cinema and Photo (GUKF). Such a position on animation adopted by administration officials can be illustrated by the Decree #13/001 of 14 January 1934 that was issued by the Central Administrative Board of Cinematography upon Smirnov’s return to the USSR. The decree stated:

In order to develop comic genre of drawn animation and to master Western-European and American technology, and also in order to study the technological process of such films’ production, an experimental animation studio must be organized as a part of scientific-research sector of Central Administrative Board of Cinematography with a direct subordination to Central Administrative Board of Cinematography. (Elizarov, 1966: 10)

In his article, Kuleshov occupies a position rather unpopular with the officials at the time, but the one that was shared by those animators and animation directors who were at the cradle of Soviet animation. For Kuleshov, animation did not have to be limited to a very narrow function; he considered it to be a versatile form capable of dealing with different topics, tasks and genres of serious as well as entertaining content independently of cinema. He writes:

The art of animation is exceptionally convenient, mobile and multi-faceted for serving to most diverse parts of our cultural front. Animation can show everything equally expressively, succinctly, and artistically on the screen, from purely technical educational topics to the topics of big political and artistic import. (Kuleshov, 1933)

Further, Kuleshov acknowledges the potential of animation for performing different functions – within the realm of live-action cinema, it can represent that which is non-representable in the photo-real and, as an independent medium, its possibilities are endless. Additionally, through discussing animated films directed by such Soviet animators as Leonid Al’marik, Vladimir Suteev, Lev Atamanov and others, Kuleshov points towards his own aesthetic preferences in animation criticizing ‘light’, entertaining topics, and animation based on gags, and showing a preference for films that deal with deeper and, in his view, more important content. He also expresses his negative attitude towards the use of animation combined with live-action footage (tiaga na nature) that, as Kuleshov (1933) states, caused enormous damage to the development of Soviet animation. Although, in the article, Kuleshov does not address this issue in any detail, such a position is consistent with his general attitude towards animation as a medium capable of developing through its own means, rather than relying on the material of live-action cinema.

Kuleshov’s article demonstrates not only his understanding of animation in terms of its medium specificity, and its cultural importance, but also his awareness of the contemporary situation in animation production. Considering that Kuleshov is not as a rule associated with animation production, and that film directors at the time rarely worked with animation, one could wonder: (a) why a film director is so much aware of the situation in a field that is not his area of expertise; and (b) why did Kuleshov write (and was probably solicited to do so) this article for Kino Gazeta in the first place?

These questions can be answered by looking at Kuleshov’s kul’turfil’ma ¹⁰ (cultural film) Forty Hearts (Sorok serdets, 1930) dedicated to electrification of the country and the construction of 40 electric power plants. In this film, Kuleshov uses animated sequences produced by a group of animators directed by Ivanov-Vano at studio Mezhrabpomfil’m located in Moscow. The film is a truly amazing case of using animation – here animation does not follow a unified style consistent with the narrative, but rather illustrates specific narrative and argumentative points, and performs a function of attracting attention to the cause together with impressing and affecting the audience. The film comprises such an extensive variety of animation techniques, including drawn figurative and non-figurative animation, cut-outs, flat marionettes, and stop-motion animation, that it turns into a spectacle demonstrating a wide repertoire of images and aesthetics that animation can create. Curiously, Kuleshov himself was not particularly proud of the film. In his memoir 50 Years in Cinema (50 let v kino), written in collaboration with Alexandra Khokhlova, a laconic description of the film (which gives praise only to the animated sequences) is concluded with a phrase: ‘Thank God the film did not survive!’ (Kuleshov and Khokhlova,1988: 101). Apparently, a complete hour-and-a half version of the film indeed did not survive, but 49 minutes of it, with almost half of them being animated, are freely available online. It is interesting to compare the film with its script published under the title ‘Main Road (Forty Hearts)’ (Stolbovaia doroga [Sorok serdets]) (Kuleshov, 1988: 227–252). ¹¹ The publication does not explain the status of the script, i.e. whether it was the final approved script or an earlier version that was subject to rewriting, but there are many discrepancies between the scenes that can be found both in the film and the script, two of which I will discuss. Firstly, some of the sequences conceived in the script as live action are turned into animated sequences in the film (e.g. the sequence following the intertitle ‘What job can an electric horse do?’ that features an animated lit-up running horse, which is suspiciously reminiscent of the horse in Eadweard Muybridge’s experiment). Secondly, there are animated sequences in the film that are absent from the script. For instance, the sequence that follows the intertitle ‘One can send herds of horses to villages by these wires’ features a looped image of waves that is rhythmically interchanged with an image of a moving line of horses, visualizing the analogy between electric waves and horses as a unit of power. It is not clear why these changes were made in the film and, considering that Ivanov-Vano names Muybridge’s horse experiment as one of the sources used for learning to create animated drawings of animals (Ivanov-Vano, 1980: 24–25), it would probably be fair to suggest that the images created in the animated sequences were to a higher degree defined by their creators from Mezhrabpomfil’m studio rather than by Kuleshov. However, the aesthetics of the images created in these sequences also resonate with Kuleshov’s thinking about creating an animated image as a rhythmic unity of fragmented parts that will be discussed further below.

There was at least another project conceived by Kuleshov that would have involved working with animation. In the same memoir, Kuleshov and Khokhlova write about the famous Russian Soviet poet Vladimir Maiakovskii’s film script titled ‘How are you?’ (Kak pozhivaete?), written in 1926, that Maiakovskii wanted Kuleshov to direct. According to Kuleshov and Khokhlova (1988: 96), ‘the script had an unusual form, and required a special approach’, i.e. use of animation, in particular animated gags. Although the script was never officially approved, and never turned into a film, the very fact that the film was conceived by Kuleshov as a combination of live action and animation points to Kuleshov’s thinking about the potential of animation, as well as seriously considering working with it more, and that the kul’turfil’ma Sorok serdets was not an exception, but rather an unrealized tendency in Kuleshov’s work as a film director. These facts demonstrate that Kuleshov was practically involved in animation production, and knew this field from within. He also had a particular vision for animation development, and understood the problems with which animation contended at the time. Thus, the fact of his giving lectures to a group of animators at Soiuzmul’tfil’m becomes less puzzling and more grounded in Kuleshov’s own cinematographic experience and expertise.

Kuleshov’s lectures: Movement, acting system, and animated character

The four lectures that are preserved in the RGALI comprise two themes: commentary on animated films released by Soiuzmul’tfil’m that have already been discussed here, and interpretation of Kuleshov’s own theories of montage and acting in relationship to animation. The latter becomes the primary topic of lectures three and four, and will be discussed further in the present article. It is important to point out, however, that the general approach that Kuleshov adopts to talk about his montage and acting theories is highly self-critical: in the spirit of anti-formalism, Kuleshov denounces his theoretical methods and asserts inadequacy of his cinematic conceptions to the contemporary tasks of Soviet cinema. And yet he talks about them at great length. Moreover, he suggests that they could be of use for animators.

Kuleshov begins the topic of acting with a disclaimer that the methodological approach to acting in animation is different from that of live-action cinema. He gives an example of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s acting system as the one that would be more applicable in live-action cinema and theater, and suggests that another system, ‘similar to Stanislavsky’s one’ (Kuleshov, 1938b: 2) – the one developed by the French musician and teacher François Delsarte – would be most useful in animation for creating a human image. Addressing his audience consisting of animators, Kuleshov asserts:

I think, the knowledge of Delsarte[’s system] will be extremely interesting for you because it will help you to approach realism. If in theater, and in live-action film Delsarte would move you away from realism, in animation there will be the opposite result. The matter is that Delsarte did some very interesting work … He very carefully, in much detail, studied all of the art that existed before him, sculptures and paintings. He studied all of the expressive positions in fine art and sculpture and found the common laws in order to detect the plastic manifestations of a range of emotions, a range of a person’s states that are expressed by the body as well as by the face. The knowledge of his discovery, the knowledge about the external expression of the feelings, I think, is necessary for animation. (p. 3)

This passage that becomes the point of departure for Kuleshov in his discussion of the particularities of Delsarte’s system needs at least three clarifications along the lines of the following questions: (1) What are the specificities of Delsarte’s acting system? (2) What is Kuleshov’s relationship with Delsarte’s acting system? and (3) Why, according to Kuleshov, is it Delsarte (and not, for instance, Stanislavsky) who is important for animation? These three parts of Kuleshov’s statement will lead to understanding Kuleshov’s theory of the animated image that, even though it was not articulated as such, was at the heart of his thinking about animation, and was imbedded in his discussions of animation during the lectures.

Delsarte developed his system as a theoretical approach to acting but also as a practical set of exercises the purpose of which was to teach actors to understand bodily gestures and their meanings, and to train them to express human emotions in such a way that they would be read correspondingly. Delsarte himself never wrote an overview of his acting system, and did not leave a coherent description of it. According to Nancy Lee Chalta Ruyter (1999: 75), his written materials include: the prospectus for a book that would trace the development of his ideas; his 1865 address before the Philotechnic Society; and fragmentary notes and diagrams. However, his daughters, as well as his students popularized his system in several countries around the world. In particular, in the United States it became famous due to Delsarte’s student Steele MacKaye, and became a part of the theoretical foundation for the elocutionary movement. ¹²

In Russia, Delsarte’s acting system became known as early as 1903, when, according to Mikhail Yampolsky (2005: 32), ‘Yuri A. Ozarovsky lectured on Delsarte’s teaching’, achieving ‘real popularity around 1910–13, when the former director of the Imperial Theatres, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, became its propagandist’. ¹³ According to Volkonsky (1913: 7), Delsarte’s acting system, like any other art, has its material; and the material of acting is gesture. Delsarte understood gesture (i.e. bodily or facial movement) as a two-sided phenomenon: as a simultaneously semiotic and aesthetic sign. As a semiotic sign, gesture reveals a particular emotion. As an aesthetic sign, gesture points to a particular emotion. The task of art, according to Delsarte, is to bring the two sides of the gestural sign together (Volkonsky, 1913 : 68). ¹⁴ Thus, for Delsarte, by gesturing in a particular way an actor is capable of creating the appearance of the emotion that the character is supposed to be experiencing at a particular moment. Viewing a human body as a constituency of parts that move independently of each other, Delsarte developed a detailed taxonomy of gestures in which every move of every part of the body is interpreted as rendering an expressive (emotional) meaning and thus as participating in the construction of the expressive meaning of the whole gesture or movement of the actor’s body (see the taxonomies and their explanations in Volkonsky, 1913: 70–121). The task of the actor is to understand which gestures should be used with the purpose of rendering particular emotions, learn and internalize them through practicing and rehearsing, and recreate them during the performance. Volkonsky draws an analogy between acting according to Delsarte’s system and speaking a foreign language. He writes:

You have to think how to play the part while you are preparing for it; during the performance, you have to play. The more you think during practice, the less you will have to think during the performance. It is the same as learning a foreign language, is it not? The better you know your grammar, the less you are going to think about it. (p. 9)

The second clarification that has to be made is that, despite denouncing Delsarte’s system as unsuitable for acting in theater and cinema, Delsarte’s acting principles were at the foundation of Kuleshov’s own system of actor’s training. As if rearticulating what Volkonsky wrote in his main volume on Delsarte’s system, The Expressive Man: Stage Upbringing of the Gesture (Vyrazitel’nyi chelovek: stsenicheskoie vospitanie zhesta), Kuleshov (1987a: 347) writes the following about acting in cinema:

Cinema requires as little acting from the model as possible: to portray is impossible in cinema because it is theatricality, and, consequentially, if we accept the necessity for the model to express one feeling or another, he should express it in a way that is defined by nature. When a person is painfully sad, he cries. In any case, he would neither make a duck face nor smile. Why? Because nature has made man so that every emotion he experiences is accompanied by a specific sign in his body and face. Of course, in actual life, man instinctively, and quite naturally will give a correspondent expression to his body, because he does not think about it, and when he thinks about it, standing in the frame, his instinct more often than not deceives him. Consequently the teacher must show the pupil the law of nature that corresponds to the particular task. And when the pupil masters these laws organically, will learn to unconsciously express them, he will express this or that emotion impeccably correctly. Thus, it is important to find and establish the laws, and then practice. For theatre actors these laws have been discovered by Delsarte. It would not be a bad idea to re-examine them and extract from them anything that might prove useful to the film-maker. ¹⁵

Here Kuleshov urges the establishment of a system of acting for cinema that takes into consideration the specificity of the medium, and points to the appropriateness of Delsarte’s concepts as a basis for such a system.

The laws most appropriate for film acting that Kuleshov keeps formulating and reformulating in his further writing are also directly related to Delsarte’s system. In particular, it is approaching the actor’s body as a combination of parts that move separately but, as they are assembled, they produce a whole, a cinematic image. Kuleshov (1974: 99) believed that ‘people performing organized, efficient work appear best on screen.’ In order to achieve the ideal of the cinematic movement for an actor, as Kuleshov states, it is necessary to ‘construct the work of film actors so that it comprises the sum of organized movement, with “reliving” held to a minimum’ (p. 100). Thus, it is the sum total of the actor’s gestures, not the actor’s experiencing the emotions of the character (as in Stanislavsky’s method), that is at the heart of the actor’s construction of a character and thus the whole of the image. The actor’s body that produces the cinematic image does not preexist as a whole, rather it is constructed from the fragments of the gestures performed by different body parts. As Yampolsky (2005: 43) points out, for Kuleshov, the most important part in Delsarte’s system were the laws for the combination of gestures, or, in other words, the question of how ‘the [expressive] sense [is] derived from oppositions, contrasts, parallelisms etc.’ of the movement of the fragmented parts of the body. ¹⁶ Kuleshov takes on Delsarte’s approach to acting that perceived the human body as fragmented. In such a body, an expression of feeling occurs through assemblage of particular movements of the parts of the body in a specific way. In other words, the feeling expressed by the body as a whole is assembled from the fragments of the bodily gestures, i.e. movements of eyes, head, hands, fingers, etc.

Such a conceptualization of a human body as a sum total of its fragments is analogous to that of a mechanism whose work as a whole is determined by the work of its separate parts. Anna Olenina’s (2013) parallel between an actor and an inanimate object that she makes in her article on Kuleshov’s acting system goes along these lines of enquiry. She writes that in the 1920s there was a belief ‘that Kuleshov’s ideal actor was a puppet, a passionless automaton performing stunts with a machinelike precision’ (p. 300). And although, as she explains later in the article, for Kuleshov this was not the case, the approach to the human body as a mechanism points towards two aspects of actors’ movement, according to Kuleshov. First of all, the body of the actor, similarly to the body of a puppet, is viewed as an assemblage of its parts, where each part is viewed independently as participating in the production of a particular expression of feelings. Here, the precision of movement guarantees adequacy of the movement’s interpretation. Secondly, the movement of the body is also an assemblage producing a combination of movements, each of which is a discrete entity, in which case the wholeness, the continuity of movement, is created anew each and every time from these fragments.

Another term that can be used to describe the process of assembling fragments into a whole is montage. Tracing the etymology of the term, the Russian scholar Ilia Kukulin (2015) maintains that its contemporary meaning emerged almost simultaneously in Germany and Russia between 1916 and 1918, and was derived from the French word montage ‘which meant “mounting” and “assembling”’ (p. 59). The very approach to the human body as a set of parts that have to be arranged to produce a specific expressive meaning is very similar to Kuleshov’s editing (montage) experiments, the most famous of which were the spatial and facial experiments (the latter of which became known as the ‘Kuleshov effect’); these experiments demonstrate that the cinematic meaning is created not in one frame or shot, but rather through editing a sequence of shots, i.e. as a result of assembling fragments of film. That is why, when Yampolky (2005: 31) asserts that ‘there is every reason to believe that [Kuleshov’s] theory of montage derives genetically from the new conception of the anthropology of the actor and is based completely on it’, he understands the actor and the film as different media that can work in a similar way, according to the same montage principle.

Kukulin (2015: 59) maintains that it was Kuleshov who introduced the term ‘montage’ into the Russian language in his 1917 article, ‘On the Tasks of the Artist in Cinema’, in which he, for the first time, writes about montage as a foundational principle of cinema. However, montage in a sense of mounting and assembling parts to produce a whole image is exactly what happens in animation before the digital. The parts of the animated image are mounted on a background and assembled in a particular way to create an image. Moreover, the very movement of an animated character is created from fragments – frames of either drawings or static positions of marionettes or puppets only become assembled into an animated image through movement of a filmstrip. Thus, the process of creating the animated image is an act of mounting and assembling, with the animated image being an entity that comes into being through montage of its fragments. This process is essentially dialectical with the synthesis occurring in the filmstrip movement.

Such an approach to the animated image radically differs from the one described by Eisenstein. According to Eisenstein, the foundational principle of animation is plasmaticness, which can be understood as fluidity and ultimate potentiality of the image, or, as Anne Nesbet (1997: 22) poetically formulates it, ‘the mysteries of a contour that has learned to exceed itself’. According to the principle of plasmaticness, the plastic animated character is capable of limitless transformation and acquisition of any possible form. However, such interpretation of the animated image ignores its materiality and the specificity of its production. It is more of a perceptional projection onto the animated image from the spectator’s point of view rather than an attempt to understand the image in its coming into being. The concept of plasmaticness that presupposes transformation of an initially whole image into another whole image is not concerned with the way the animated image is produced, with its assembledness. I suggest the term assembledness as an alternative to Eisenstein’s plasmaticness because it allows for thinking through the animated image from the position of its production rather than spectatorial perception.

The assembledness of the actor’s cinematic body and gesture is one of the qualities pointed out by Walter Benjamin in regard to the comic movement of Charlie Chaplin. In a short fragment from 1935, Benjamin (2008: 340) writes that ‘the innovation of Chaplin’s gestures is that he dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations’, which are assembled in the process of consumption by the audience, thus creating a continuity of the cinematic image. For Benjamin, the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity as foundational cinematic principles stem from the very technological specificity of cinema. And thus Chaplin who presumably understands this specificity, and moves in a specifically cinematic rather than theatrical way, is capable of creating films that are essentially cinematic. Benjamin’s description of cinematic movement is very similar to Kuleshov’s understanding of actors’ movement. Curiously, for Kuleshov, Chaplin is also the epitome of an ideal cinematographic gesture, but for a different reason: ¹⁷ Chaplin’s gesture is ideal in terms of rhythm and metrics, which for Kuleshov is the next step in the work of the film actor. As Kuleshov (1974: 104) puts it:

When the elementary precision of the actor is achieved, it is best to go on to the time element in his work, to metrics and rhythm. It is insufficient to perform precise and measured movements; it is necessary to be able to do them in time.

In his lectures to animators, Kuleshov points out that Chaplin managed to create an almost complete fusion of music and action in his two films, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). ¹⁸ He references these two films as examples of what should be done in animation: each gesture, each movement should be viewed in time, as a musical note, and should be seen as constituting a particular rhythmic pattern. It is not a coincidence that in his letter to Chaplin, Kuleshov (1987b: 419), stating the task of ‘a perfect moving picture’, emphasizes two aspects: construction of the best spatial movement of shot material, and construction of the best distribution of such movement in time. Praising Chaplin and his work, Kuleshov writes, ‘In your moving pictures … we, for the first time, saw an example of distinct and clear work on every movement and positioning of the actor in conjunction with a precise and harmonious montage’ (p. 418). Kuleshov expected the same precision of image movement and harmony of montage in animation – this is the reason why he emphasized these qualities in his lectures, and why he spent so much time explaining his theories of montage and acting to the animators. Animation, as a terrain of assemblage, provides ideal conditions for precision of the gesture and harmony of montage, and Kuleshov, probably, saw his role as directing animators towards achieving this.

Conclusion: Rethinking Kuleshov’s film theories for the medium of animation

The lectures demonstrate that, while denouncing his cinematic theories of montage and acting, Kuleshov seems to be positive that they can be applied to a different medium – the medium of animation. It is as if Kuleshov is transplanting them into the new media ground hoping that here they will be able to survive and grow. This transplantation was consistent with the demands of animation at the time: harmonization of the movement and music, precision of gesture, rhythm, and metrics – all these aspects of Kuleshov’s cinematic theories were the characteristics of animation that Soviet animators sought to improve in the 1930s. Thus, Kuleshov’s theories of acting and montage were the ones that could be of practical help to those working at the animation studio. On top of being of practical use at the time, Kuleshov’s theories can now give us new insights into questions about the animated image as a rhythmic unity of fragmented parts, and provide us with a theory of the animated image that takes into consideration its medium specificity and materiality of production. It allows for considering the process of animation production in its entirety as an important factor that to a large extent determines animation aesthetics. Concomitantly, Kuleshov’s theory allows for considering the intermediality of animation and seeing how the phenomenon of assembledness pertinent to cinema and theater is rendered in animation. Such an approach would focus on the quality of assembledness, since it can help understand the coming into being, movement, and functioning of the animated image. Additionally, consideration of assembledness in animation can help us draw parallels and connections with broader cultural–historical phenomena and principles if we agree with, for instance, Kukulin (2015) that montage is a foundational characteristic and principle of modernism. From this perspective, animation (in particular cel animation) can be seen as a medium that until very recently, before the introduction of the digital, was functioning according to essentially modernist principles.