The Revolution might be feminized… Bed and Sofa (1927)

Problems which at one time seemed too difficult for the most talented thinkers have now been solved by the inanimate but all-powerful conditions of production. The same forces which for thousands of years enslaved women now, at a further stage of development, are leading them along the path to freedom and independence.

Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1909)

 

It was one thing to take control of the means of production in 1917 but any attempt to forge a new society was going to have to involve changes in the role of women and their relationship to work and men. Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the evolution of the revolutionary movement’s thinking on this issue and served in Lenin’s first government before helping to form the Zhenotdel, the women's department of the Central Committee with the aim of improving women’s position in the new economy. Before it was closed in 1930 as Stalin tightened his grip, the “Woman’s Committee” played its part in educating women about the new marriage, education, and work laws.

 

From 1918 all marriage was now civil, and divorce was made much easier for both sexes, developments that Kollontai hoped would weaken the institution and lead individuals to focus their loyalty to the state and not family. Yet, while women were expected to be equal participants in the workforce, invariably they retained command of household chores and in terms of parenting, despite the introduction of maternity leave, and the setting up of child-care centres, there was a growth of single parent families in the 1920s. Divorce made easier, was more common and the family was being undermined as intended.

 

Even though men and women had equal rights men still viewed housework and domestic chores as women’s work.

David K. Klass How the Russians Really Live

Lyudmila Semyonova

In 1926 a new Family Code attempted to address the issue by restoring the “economic partnership” of marriage and allowing women an equal share of family property in the event of a split. Alimony obligations were strengthened and other measures to help support women and children. Perhaps this was the starting point for this film and the attempt by writer-director Abram Room and co-writer Viktor Shklovsky to detail the state of romance as the first decade of communist rule drew on for women's position had not improved as had been hoped.

 

Whilst falling out of favour and critical of the Family Code as little more than a restatement of western capitalist ideals, Alexandra Kollontai had been calling for the reintroduction of romance for some time arguing in Make Way for the Winged Eros (1923) that:

 

Collectivism of will and spirit will conquer individualistic self-sufficiency. The coldness of spiritual solitude, from which people in bourgeois culture often seek salvation in love and marriage, will disappear; a multitude of ties binding people to one another in emotional and spiritual union will grow. The feelings of people will change in the sense of a growth of community, and the inequality between the sexes and every kind of dependence of woman on man will disappear without a trace, lost in the memory of past centuries.

 

What Room and his co-writer made of this can perhaps be seen in a film which, the director wrote about in Kino magazine before production:

Love, marriage, the family and sexual morality are pressing contemporary topics, which have been discussed thoroughly in the press and at public debates… but have not yet been touched upon at all by the cinema. Or more precisely, the Soviet cinema has not yet tackled them in earnest, and if it has come upon them by chance, it has shown a shallow, primitive 'delicacy'. We were hypocrites, some rules of decency… stopped us if not resolving then at least sharpening, revealing and posing these subjects…

 

The aim was to make a film focused on a small cast and in an intimate space into which the camera “goes into the very thick of the action, looks at the world through the eyes of the heroes and lives alongside them…”. It is a startlingly frank examination of the relationship between a young married couple, Kolia (Nikolai Batalov) and Liuda (Lyudmila Semyonova) and the former’s former Red Army pal Volodia (Vladimir Fogel) who has come to Moscow to find work as a printer. Like a number of films of this period it makes its points in ways that reach beyond the assumed censorial control of the Party… that would come later and there was certainly a negative reaction on release from the powers that be.

 

Vladimir Fogel and Nikolai Batalov

Watch out, spoilers ahead.

 

Bed and Sofa largely leaves out the party line but at one point it was going to feature a speech from the head of the apartments committee condemning the immorality of the inhabitants of the basement flat of Third Meshchanskaia Street. There was also going to be a different resolution in which Liuda heads off to train as a draughtswoman or similar but all were rejected by Room in favour of a more open-ended one that was viewed very dimly by Party officials and yet one which my Gen-Z daughter fully enjoyed.

 

The film is exactly as Room promised in terms of the forensic depiction of the emotion from his three fine leads and it’s one that genuinely surprises as it portrays the impact of the printer’s cuckoo on the complacent construction worker husband. Wiki has them as a working-class group whereas Kolia is a draughtsman working on restoring the Bolshoi Theatre and so the men are craftsmen and not poor. There are wonderful views of Kolia taking his lunch leaning on the crotch of one of the Bolshoi’s naked male statues whilst taking in the bustling street scenes far below.

Nikolai Batalov's placement was no accident...

His is the outside world while his wife hardly ever leaves the flat and her daily duties. Liuda has decadent tastes though, spending her time reading magazines and with pictures and possessions all through the flat, including one of Douglas Fairbanks by their mirror – shades of A Kiss from Mary Pickford released later in 1927 and featuring Abram Room as one of the players. Soviet Russia was more open to Western cultural influence certainly judging from Liuda’s sharp bob and fashion taste. She may be taken for granted by her self-interested husband but she’s no shortage of fashionable clothes even though their apartment has only a single bed and that sofa where mostly sleeps their cat.

 

Into this environment comes Volodia who we see travelling into Moscow with some marvellous shots of his train and the outskirts of the city from Grigori Giber who’s work inside the small apartment is equally impressive. Liuda’s close ups are often the punctuation point of interaction between the two old pals and whilst she is initially unsure of the new arrival, he soon demonstrates a more chivalrous and caring approach to domestic life. Whilst her husband is away on work, Volodia takes her outside to an air show and it’s the first we have seen of her outside of her domestic realm. The pure joy of their plane ride contrasts to her daily drudgery…

 

The relationship that begins with Volodia feels genuine, there’s no suggestion that he’s scheming beyond his romantic ambitions and this makes the next development all the more surprising as after Kolia’s return and discovery of their affair, he is eventually offered a place on the sofa with his friend now promoted to the bed. What could possibly go wrong? The answer is plenty but not quite in the way you would expect as the boys still enjoy each other’s company and competitive games of drafts… and somehow their camaraderie needs to coexist with the new romance.

Vladimir Fogel and Lyudmila Semyonova

The film has so many moment of high quality in the film as Room promised in his Kino article, a “condensed” film in which everything is focused on the acting thereby maximising the inventiveness of the scriptwriter, director and cameraman*. This he called aesthetic economy with a room full of clues – and so many deft “touches” of which Lubitsch would be proud – as the narrative is moved along with sparse intertitles.  Glances and looks are all it takes and the cat plays its part too… gradually the balance shifts and in unspoken ways, Kolia is welcomed back into the bed as well as taking turns on the sofa.

 

Liuda becomes present and we see Volodia frantically searching the calendar to see if it might be his but, unable to decide who is the father, the two offer to pay for Liuda to have an abortion. The scene in the “private clinic” as she goes alone is so well done with a group of half a dozen women given numbered tokens called out as at a cheese counter when their order is ready. It’s too much for Liuda and as the men arrive much later to see what has happened she is already back home packing and ready to leave them and Moscow far behind.

 

As she packs, she takes her pictures with her, including her own. She picks up a clay model of the cat, now deceased, and tears fall onto the painted eyes… her cat was a true companion whereas the boys have never really taken the responsibility.

The abortion clinic waiting room

There are so many moments during the film and it is packed with overt and hidden meaning. Kolia is immature but then so is Volodia who despite his ability to make tea, is almost as willing to let his lover do the chores. The balance is wrong with each paring and crushed by the double threat of their entitled indifference Liuda heads off on a train with similar shots to Volodia’s arrival. She is free for her future – unspecified but still with child – leaving the final scene to the boys who faced with new decisions about bed or sofa decide on a cup of tea as the first priority. Who knows maybe they don't even need a woman?

 

It’s difficult at this remove to be precise about Room’s meaning but as he insisted in the Kino piece, that the basic task of the film "was not to solve, but only to sharpen, not to instruct, but only to lay bare and pose this theme for the audience to discuss." To the extent that what is shown was typical of a post-revolutionary society still in flux, he was targeting the conflicted thinking of the new regime on “the woman question”. Alexandra Kollontai’s hopes had not materialised and she was by now relegated to overseas duty as a diplomat whilst the NEP was about to be replaced by Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and a far more prescriptive and ruthless society.

 

In 1927 the questions of women’s role could still be asked but not for much longer.

The location is within the Meshchansky District which these days has parks and cafes... 

*I'm reminded by my mother-in-law, noted Wellsian scholar and English Literature academic, Dr Sylvia Hardy, that Room's work was part of the Russian Formalist movement as was his scriptwriting partner Viktor Shklovsky who was a major contributor to the movement's beginings in literature. The basic tenents of Formalism in film context emphasise the aesthetic and technical elements of the medium as alluded to in Room's comments above. This is to foreground the meaning and to remove the author's voice and other conflicting artefacts in the presentation of art.

As Room said in 1925, “Cinema is pre-eminently realism, life, the everyday, objectivity, properly motivated behaviour... If we had to characterise theatre and cinema in simple terms we should have to say: theatre is ‘seeming’ whereas cinema is ‘being’.”

Needless to say this did not suit the Stalinist regime as it wanted more imposed meaning and there's a very instructive artice here in The Slavic Review by Maria Belodubrovskaya Abram Room, A Strict Young Man, and the 1936 Campaign against Formalism in Soviet Cinema. Stalinist cinema did not want naturalism but a curated reality. 

1. A number of quotes were sourced from Julian Graffy’s book, Bed and Sofa: The Film Companion (Publisher: I.B. Tauris, 2000)
2. Details of Aleksandra Kollontai are from BOLSHEVIK FEMINIST: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai by Barbara Evans Clements, Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1979
3. Alexandra Kollontai 1923. Make way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth. First published: in Molodoya Gvardiya (Young Guard) magazine #3 in 1923
4. LIFE INTO ART: Laying Bare the Theme in "Bed and Sofa, Rimgaila Salys, Russian Language Journal Vol. 52, No. 171/173 (Winter-Spring-Fall 1998)
5. How the Russians Really Lived. Willis, David K. Klass, New York: St. Martens Press, 1985.