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| Valéry Inkijinoff |
With the exception of Bristol’s Slapstick Festival, so glorious and so long ago, this year is likely to be festival-free for me thanks to our global pandemic and quarantine strictures. The 36th Silent Film Days in Bonn is one of the first to run in Europe and the organisers having decided to stream some of the films along with the live accompaniment mean that for a few days, those of us who couldn’t make it, can experience something of the immediacy and ambience of the festival.
So it was that I huddled my laptop, in Berlinale t-shirt
with Pordenone mug topped up, to watch this crystal clear restoration of
Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia (1928) and listen to the visceral
interplay between accompanists Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Stephen Horne on
headphones… and it was almost like being there; the most exciting stream I’ve
watched in lockdown.
This is the first time I’ve seen this third part of
Pudovkin’s so-called revolutionary trilogy – after Mother (1925) and The
End of St. Petersburg (1927) – and it has the same paced intensity as those
films but, moved to the steppes of Mongolia, is a simpler and lighter film that
ultimately carries as much emotional force. It’s an almost symphonic film with
the restored version including even more shots of the sunning countryside which
punctuates the human interactions and the remarkable story arc of Bair, the
Mongol (Valéry Inkijinoff). It’s easy to imagine sense being lost in these
endless deserts and Blair’s journey is bewildering, comic and ultimately
ferocious.
These 143 minutes of shifting moods and fortunes could
ask for no finer accompaniment than that provided by Baldry and Horne. Stephen
and Elizabeth-Jane first collaborated on a score for Stella Dallas which was as
the former says on an interview on the Festival site, not “through composed”
but a mixture of composition and improvisation. Since that first collaboration
they have mostly worked with “a plan” which allows them both space to improvise
and to join together on some pre-medicated sections whilst they know each other
so well they also play on spec, and sometimes sight unseen. The beauty of their
method is that most of us can’t spot the join and I’d be hard-pressed to guess
how much of what they played for Storm was composed beforehand.
Pudovkin’s film is full of shocks and sudden turns as
well as lengthy sections of pastoral outlooks and monastic calm and between
piano, flute, accordion, harp, bells and wooden percussion, the two musicians
had everything covered in a seamless flow of invention, uncanny interplay and
some delicious melodies. Their choice of notes followed the lines of narrative
but also the most pleasing of musical decisions, themes that chimed exactly
with the watcher’s emotional response as well as the characters. They make it
sound so easy but even as a man sitting on the end of the row in a virtual seat,
I felt the live audience’s reaction to the mix of sound and sight.
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| Valéry Inkijinoff with silver fox fur |
The film was shot in the Buriat-Mongolian republic, in
and around the capital, today called Ulan-Ude, in south-central Siberia, just
north of Mongolia. The restoration shows how fine the cinematography of Anatoly
Golovnia is and there look to be far more location shots than in the older copy
I was watching at the same time for the English translation – two laptops, one
notepad, and a pint of something brown.
The story begins in these wastelands as a dying man (star
Inkijinoff ‘s actual father) sends his son off to market in order to bring back
food. He gives his son, Bair (Valéry Inkijinoff) a silver fox pelt which will
buy them security and food, but a visiting priest wants to take the fur as the
family’s contribution to the upkeep of the temple. Bair and the priest tussle
and as the former prevails, the priest’s amulet falls to the ground and, as he
leaves, Bair’s mother picks it up, later to gift it to her son.
Inkijinoff gives an extraordinarily powerful performance and
was a graduate of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s “biomechanical” theatre – as was Sergei
Eisenstein – which aimed to allow a greater range of emotional expression than
the naturalistic approach of the time. According to Professor John Mackay of
Yale University, Pudovkin asked Inkizhinov to produce “a deliberately narrowed
range of movement to indicate emotion, and explosions of accumulated energy in
sudden fury…” and edited the film around his actor’s remarkably controlled
physical expression. Such control and release is, of course, a rhythmic gift to
the accompanists and the interplay between actor and editor, piano and harp was
more exhilarating than any Sunday afternoon solo silent film stream had any
right to be!
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| Viktor Tsoppi is the face of imperialist exploitation |
Bair heads off across the steppes to market where we find
lots of fascinating faces – the film is full of them, all used by Pudovkin in
the manner of Eisenstein to create a physiological discourse on their own.
Among this local colour the western features of unscrupulous fur-trader, Henry
Hughes (Viktor Tsoppi) stands out like a bad pelt. He tries to under pay for
Bair’s silver fox fur leading to a riot. The troops are called in and Bair ends
up in the mountains where he gets caught up helping a group of partisans in
fighting the British!?!
It’s interesting now to consider Great Britain’s place in
the World in 1928, a time when, incredibly as it might seem, we were even more
unpopular than we are now… The British were never a colonial power in Mongolia although
at the time the film is set, 1920, we were certainly supporting the White Russians
in the civil war against the new Bolshevik regime. It seems that the British,
being the imperial power, bar none, were the perfect casting for the film’s bad
guys; unlike his previous two films, Storm was not based on domestic
events and was more of a revolutionary fable; none the less powerful as propaganda
and, in some ways, more enduringly affecting… I was certainly ready to run out
and take on the powers that be in Hertfordshire by the end.
Fantasy it may be, but Storm is meticulous in the
details it presents of Mongolian life and none more so than in capturing the Buddhist
ritual Feast of Tzai near the residence of the lama. There’s a lovely sequence
when preparations for the feast are juxtaposed against the preparations of the
British Commandant (I. Dedintsev) and his wife (L. Belinskaya) as their
extensive collection of toiletries and state paraphernalia contrast with the
holy symbolism of the ritual dress and circumstance. There is a distinctly
un-revolutionary preference for the traditional rituals but they represent the
independent culture of the un-conquered souls of the native population.
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| The Feast of Tzai |
Away from the temple, the business of imperial rule must
continue as British soldiers attempt to take two hundred cattle from the locals
by force only to be met with resistance from the partisans and Bair. In the
skirmish Bair is captured and sentenced to execution by a decent-looking
soldier who reluctantly marches him off to a lonely ridge to do the deed. Bair
has no idea of what his fate is to be but as he slumps off to his doom the
British notice his amulet and open it to find an ancient script confirming that
he – or rather the priest – is the descendent of Genghis Khan.
This makes Bair ideal for a puppet leader and the Brits scramble
to counterman their orders only to find that he has been shot, twice, and
fallen over a deep sand bank. He is carried back and there are bloody scenes of
surgery as he’s brought back to life almost like a Golem and finally stuffed
into evening clothes and given respectability and new rank. It is here that Inkijinoff’s
physicality is at its most powerful; he doesn’t smile or react, he just is… an unyielding,
taught body, refusing to connect or even drink, eyeing up the goldfish captured
for display just as surely he has been.
Now, just when you’ve almost forgotten, that silver fox
fur returns to the story as a gift from Henry Hughes for the Commandant’s daughter
(Anel Sudakevich) and it proves to be the catalyst for Bair’s re-awakening.
Events begin to speed up towards a breath-taking finale that literally sees the
Mongol whip up a storm that blows away not just the British but all possessions
and the shackles of empire. Stephen and Elizabeth-Jane joined in the revolutions,
bringing the noise in a perfectly paced crescendos of chaotic chords and tumultuous
tones; you have to wonder how long piano and harp would take to re-tune but it
was worth it!
So, a taste of the unique atmosphere of the Bonn Silent
Film Festival and a combination I look forward to being replicated in the UK
whenever possible.
The film is no longer streaming on the Bonn site but there’s an interview with Stephen and Elizabeth-Jane. There’s also a link to donate to the Festival as this helps provide the support to keep it going in these impossible times. You must keep believing though, what would Bair do?
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| Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Stephen Horne |
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