Kozintsev and Trauberg continued their experiments in the deconstruction of imperial Petersburg in The Overcoat, with a screenplay by Yuri Tynyanov. This was a fantasy based on Gogol’s short story, in which Petersburg—in accordance with contemporary ideological considerations—was depicted as an enormous prison. The beauty of the imperial city was rejected derisively by the young directors. The critics tied their film to the 1918 manifesto “How The Overcoat’ Is Made,” by Eikhenbaum (like Tynyanov, a leading figure in Opoyaz). At first coyly denying the article’s direct influence, Trauberg later did admit, “There were three Leningrad writers and scholars—Eikhenbaum, Tynyanov, and Shklovsky—for whom we always had not only understandable respect but unlimited tenderness.”14
As theoreticians of culture, the members of Opoyaz treated film rather disdainfully at first. “Cinematography is in its very essence outside art,” Shklovsky proclaimed. Eikhenbaum wrote something similar. But Tynyanov saw in cinema’s “poverty,” its flatness and monochrome, the aesthetic base of a new type of art.
In 1927 an anthology called The Poetics of Cinema, edited by Eikhenbaum, was published in Leningrad. Besides his own article, “Problems of Film Stylistics,” there were works by Shklovsky and Tynyanov. This anthology exerted great influence on the European theory of montage in film, but on a practical level personal contacts with the Opoyaz group—lectures, friendly chats, and the participation of Eikhenbaum and especially Tynyanov (who became head of the screenwriting department at Lenfilm in 1926) in the studio’s daily work—had an even greater significance for Leningrad filmmakers.
Movies became an important source of income for Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov. Perhaps that is why they seemed unperturbed by the radical changes made in their screenplays. The Overcoat was filmed and edited in under two months, and, according to Trauberg, the scenario was “cut and sewn anew.” This did not keep Tynyanov from defending the completed film when the Leningrad press called for sweeping the filmmakers from the studio. One Leningrad critic’s reasoning went something like this: Gogol was a national treasure, and the authors of the screen version of The Overcoat distorted and ruined it; therefore, they should be prosecuted.
An even more hostile reception was accorded New Babylon (1929), a film about the Paris Commune by Kozintsev and Trauberg. The Young Communist League (Komsomol) attacked it as an ideologically harmful work. In addition, New Babylon failed at the box office. Even the help of sympathetic theater managers was not enough. One manager proudly announced, according to Trauberg, that after an advertising campaign and special educational lectures, the audience at his theater had doubled for New Babylon: instead of twenty people, he had forty. It was a silent film, and the customers were particularly outraged by the music. The composer was the young Dmitri Shostakovich, who had been hired by Kozintsev and Trauberg when they learned that he had written an avant-garde opera based on Gogol’s story “The Nose,” which was close in spirit to their Overcoat.
Shostakovich arrived at the studio dressed in a soft gray hat and a white silk scarf. Kozintsev was presumably appreciative; he himself typically sported a colorful scarf and a thin cherry walkingstick. He also spoke in falsetto. The short, plump, and slow Trauberg must have seemed like Sancho Panza to Kozintsev’s Don Quixote.
The directors, whose combined age was under fifty, had never worked with someone even younger. They wanted a completely new approach from Shostakovich. As Kozintsev later explained, “in those years film music strengthened the film’s emotional content or, as they used to say, illustrated the shots. We immediately decided with the composer that the music would be tied to the inner meaning and not the external action and that it would develop contrary to the events, in opposition to the scene’s mood.”15 For instance, the tragic episode of the attack of the German cavalry on Paris was accompanied by a melody reworked from an Offenbach operetta, effectively caricaturing the scene. The average filmgoer in the late 1920s found Shostakovich’s music, in the words of a contemporary review that presaged Stalin’s later condemnation of the composer, “a muddle that gets in the way of understanding.” The acclaim for this forgotten score only came forty years later, when the restored New Babylon made a triumphant tour of European capitals.
