Cabin fever… By the Law (1926), Barbican with Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected… When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. … unable to do the unexpected, (they) are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives... In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.

Jack London, The Unexpected (1906)

 

There were several moments as this extraordinary film reached its climax when I lost track of which musician was making which noise so closely aligned were Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, especially as the former plucked the heavy strings whilst hammering their keys and Martin used snare, cymbal and bass drum in rapid polyrhythmic clusters. This was a classic Sunday afternoon Barbican silent film screening and the accompaniment plus the kind of knowledgeable and adventurous audience created such an atmosphere with this film that it was irresistibly entertaining. We were also left challenged by the force of Lev Kuleshov’s film and the eternal questions it addressed: mortality and morality, gold at the heart of all evil, a Soviet version of Greed, a proto noir mixed with post-revolutionary nervous exhaustion…

 

Now, I don’t suppose Jack London had all this in mind when he wrote The Unexpected*, the short story on which this film was based, in 1905**. That said, at 21 he had joined the Klondike Gold Rush goldrush in July 1897, with his sister's husband, one Captain Shepard. He suffered as many others did from malnutrition in the cold remote conditions and developed scurvy, losing four of his front teeth… and being marked for life by striations on his face. Later on, he covered the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904 for the San Francisco Examiner which saw him briefly imprisoned in Japan: honestly, he makes Ernest Hemmingway look a little lightweight!

 

So it was that London’s prose was filled with his personal experience of otherwise civilised folk faced with having to adapt to new “grooves” as the quote at the top references and you can see how the frozen wastes of the Yukon, the ephemeral nature of capitalist values and the poison at its heart enabled Kuleshov to, just about, get funding from Soviet production company Goskino for what was the cheapest film made in Russia, as the Barbican’s programmer, Tamara Anderson, said in her introduction pointed out that this might be a record that it still holds.

 

We had faces then... Aleksandra Khokhlova

The results are extraordinary on any budget, with superb performances from the director’s wife Aleksandra Khokhlova, her screen husband as played by Sergei Komarov and especially Vladimir Fogel as the villain of the piece… or is he? That is the question or rather the willingness of the others to decide on his crime and subsequent punishment.

 

It’s interesting for a soviet Russian film to have kept the story’s Yukon setting but this is a film about greed and the “rules” of society. The protagonists are five emigrees from old Europe all in search of gold and the freedom it will bring. Their leader is the Swedish Hans Nelson (Komarov) who is married to the English Edith (Khokhlova) whilst Dutchy’s country of origin speaks for itself (he’s played by Porfiri Podobed). Then there’s Harky (Pyotr Galadzhev) and the Irish Michael (Fogel) who is the butt of a lot of the camp’s jokes as well as being the manual labourer – the class system is alive and well even in miniature.

 

We find the group preparing for the day as Michael fetches water from the river and plays his penny whistle for his dog – much to the slight annoyance of Hans – but to our delight especially as it gave Mr Horne the chance to weave some playful lines on his flute. Michael’s easy-going nature is curtailed by his duties and after cooking breakfast for the team he is told to prepare the equipment for relocation after Hans announces that the current location will not produce the gold they want. Having just sat down to eat he shares a bemused look before trudging of, breakfast interrupted, leaving the others to pick off his food.

 

Michael is however just about to save their bacon, as it were, when during the dismantling of the mine he gives the waters one last chance and slushing the dregs around a washing pan finds the golden nuggets at last. As he labours we repeatedly cut back to the camp with the other four lounging in the early morning sub smoking and relaxing after eating their meals and his. They quickly absorb his role in reversing their fortunes and celebrate by dancing together, his exclusion a signal of the mockery to come now that he has made them rich.

 

Vladimir Fogel

Things reach a head after Michael returns from hunting to find them eating lunch without him and laughing about his “envy” – the standard slur for the workers from Capital - and the tone shifts in an instance as, gun in hand he blasts first Harky – who slumps forward almost comically, head balanced in his food and preventing the table from collapse – and then Dutchy. The other two are in shock but Edith responds the quicker trying to wrest the gun away as her husband sits slack jawed before finally pounding Michael into submission. It’s the most desperate scene and, as London had written, completely unexpected.

 

Now Hans and Edith tie Michael up and must treat him as a prisoner through the long winter months until he can be tried “by the law” … What follows is an exploration of the morality of these cultured people in the circumstances of wild nature as the cabin is flooded and isolated in bitter conditions, can they hold out till Spring to take their man to the police and the courts and where does the authority of the law reside?

 

Edith clutches her bible and Hans is the more pragmatic but still restrained by his own code and Kuleshov makes the most of the tension with quick cuts interspersed with frequent close-ups and the constant reminder of their isolation on the freezing lake. Michael meanwhile has an unknowable, conflicted persona, the hard-working whistler who looks after his dog and who was turned into a rage by hard-hearted teasing and who seems unable or unwilling to explain why he killed.

 

The management relax as their worker discovers their fortune...

There is so much to work out in the film and a number of possible readings and it was a privilege to be sat head scratching with the rest of the audience as Stephen and Martin whipped up the most visceral improvisations for the wild interiors of this battering wilderness. Food for the heart and mind at the Barbican as you would expect.

 

*Published in McClure's Magazine, Aug 1906, London's story is apparently based upon actual events involving prospectors at Latuya Bay, Alaska 1900. Details here from historian David Reamer in the Anchorage Daily News.

 

**The script, co-written with Viktor Shklovsky also incorporated elements of London’s story, Just Meat (1907).

Jack London prospecting in Alaska 1897, he was just 21.