Nor was this the only time when history was altered by the mythic images in Eisenstein's films. When he arrived at the Winter Palace to shoot the storming scene for October, he was shown the left ('October') staircase where the Bolshevik ascent had taken place. But it was much too small for the mass action he had in mind, so instead he shot the scene on the massive Jordan staircase used for state processions during Tsarist times. The Jordan staircase became fixed in the public mind as the October Revolution's own triumphant route. Altogether Eisenstein's October was a much bigger production than the historical reality. He called up 5,000 veterans from the civil war - far more than the few hundred sailors and Red Guards who had taken part in the palace's assault in 1917. Many of them brought their own guns with live ammunition and fired bullets at the Sevres vases as they climbed the stairs, wounding several people and arguably causing far more casualties than in 1917. After the shooting, Eisenstein recalled being told by an elderly porter who swept up the broken china: 'Your people were much more careful the first time they took the palace.'61
Meanwhile, Meyerhold was storming barricades with his own revolution in the theatre. It began with his spectacular production of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe (1918; revived in 1921) - a cross between a mystery play and a street theatre comedy which dramatized the conquest of 'the clean' (the bourgeois) by 'the unclean' (the proletariat). Meyerhold removed the proscenium arch, and instead of a stage constructed a monumental platform projecting deep into the auditorium. At the climax of the spectacle he brought the audience on to the platform to mingle, as if in a city square, with the actors in their costumes, the clowns and acrobats, and to join with them in tearing up the curtain, which was painted with symbols - masks and wigs -of the old theatre.62 The war against theatrical illusion was summed up in the prologue to the play: 'We will show you life that's real - but
* Usually described as 'temporal expansion through overlapping editing'. See D. Bordwell and K. Thompson, Film Art, An Introduction, 3rd edn (New York, 1990), p. 217.
28. Liubov Popova: stage design for Meyerhold's 1922 production of the Magnanimous Cuckold
in this spectacle it will become transformed into something quite extraordinary.'63 Such ideas were far too radical for Meyerhold's political patrons and in 1921 he was dismissed from his position in the commissariat. But he continued to put on some truly revolutionary productions. In his 1922 production of Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck's Magnanimous Cuckold (1920) the stage (by the Con-structivist artist Liubov Popova) became a kind of 'multi-purpose
scaffolding'; the characters were all in overalls and identified themselves by performing different circus tricks. In Sergei Tretiakov's 1923 play The Earth Rampant, adapted from La Nuit by Marcel Martinet, a drama about the mutiny of the French troops in the First World War, there were cars and machine-guns, not just on the stage but in the aisles as well. The lighting was provided by huge searchlights at the front of the stage, and actors in real soldiers' uniforms passed through the audience to collect money for a Red Army plane.64
Some of Meyerhold's most interesting techniques were close to those of the cinema, in which he also worked as a director (he made two films before 1917) and (thanks to his impact on directors like Eisenstein and Grigory Kozintsev) arguably had his greatest influence.65 In his 1924 production of Ostrovsky's The Forest, for example, Meyerhold used montage by dividing the five acts into thirty-three small episodes with pantomimic interludes to create contrasts of tempo and mood. In other productions, most notably that of Gogol's The Government Inspector in 1926, he placed certain actors on a little stage trolley and wheeled it to the front of the main stage to simulate the cinematic idea of a close-up. He was deeply influenced by movie actors such as Buster Keaton and, above all, Charlie Chaplin, whose films were shown in cinemas right across the Soviet Union. Chaplin's emphasis on mime and gesture made him close to Meyer-hold's theatrical ideal.66
