diverted from what he saw as his professional duty by an order from the court.52 The one real legacy of Volkonsky's brief tenure was the discovery of Diaghilev, whom he promoted to his first position in the theatre world as the editor and publisher of the Imperial Theatre's annual review.* After 1901 Volkonsky became one of Russia's most important art and theatre critics. So when he began to propagandize the Delsarte-Dalcroze system, even setting up his own school of rhythmic gymnastics in Petersburg, he drew many converts from the Russian theatre, including Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The essence of Volkonsky's teaching was the conception of the human body as a dynamo whose rhythmic movements can be trained subconsciously to express the emotions required by a work of art.+ Volkonsky conceived of the human body as a machine which obeys 'the general laws of mechanics', but which is 'oiled and set in motion by feeling'.53 After 1917, this idea was taken up in Soviet film and theatre circles, where similar theories of 'biomechanics' were championed by the great avant-garde director Meyerhold. In 1919 Volkonsky set up a Rhythmic Institute in Moscow. Until he was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921, he also taught his theories at the First State School of Cinema, where Kuleshov was one of the directors to be influenced by them. In Kuleshov's own workshop, established in Moscow in 1920, actors were trained in a lexicon of movements and gestures based on the rhythmic principles of Volkonsky.54
Many of the most important Soviet directors of the avant-garde graduated from the Kuleshov workshop, among them Pudovkin, Barnet and Eisenstein. Born in Riga in 1898, Sergei Eisenstein was the son of a famous
* Diaghilev was dismissed when Volkonsky left the Imperial Theatre. Diaghilev's dismissal meant he was ruled out for any future job in the Imperial Theatre, so in a sense it could be said that Volkonsky had a hand in the foundation of the Ballets Russes.
+ The theory was not dissimilar to Gordon Craig's conception of the actor as a 'supermarionette', with the one important distinction that the movements of Craig's actor were choreographed by the director, whereas Volkonsky's actor was supposed in internalize these rhythmic impulses to the point where they became entirely uncon-scious. See further M. Yampolsky,'Kuleshov's Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor', in R. Taylor and I.Christie,
ancestry. In 1915 he went to Petrograd to study to become a civil engineer. It was there in 1917 that, as a 19-year-old student, he became caught up in the revolutionary crowds which were to become the subject of his history films. In the first week of July Eisenstein took part in the Bolshevik demonstrations against the Provisional Government, and he found himself in the middle of the crowd when police snipers hidden on the roofs above the Nevsky Prospekt opened fire on the demonstrators. People scattered everywhere. 'I saw people quite unfit, even poorly built for running, in headlong flight', he recalled.
Watches on chains were jolted out of waistcoat pockets. Cigarette cases flew out of side pockets. And canes. Canes. Canes. Panama hats… My legs carried me out of range of the machine guns. But it was not at all frightening… These days went down in history. History for which I so thirsted, which I so wanted to lay my hands on!55
Eisenstein would use these images in his own cinematic re-creation of the scene in
