Recognise this guy? It’s a great image by one of my favourite Soviet photographers, Alexander Rodchenko. A postcard of this portrait has been in my room, next to my mirror for a good while now. I really like the calm, stony stare and the montage in the glasses. It sums up an inexpressible mood in the way the best portraits do. I never thought to find out more about the man behind the glasses until this week.
Maybe you already know that this is Osip Brik (1888-1945), a key figure in Russian Formalism, a literary theorist and the scriptwriter of a masterpiece of Soviet Revolutionary cinema — A Storm Over Asia, aka The Heir to Genghis Khan, directed by Vsevelod Pudovkin (1928). I am ashamed to say I had not heard of Osip Brik until our tutors, John and Dejan, assigned his article ‘Theory and Practice of a Script Writer ’ for class. In the course of my own research I realized that this week’s reading was by the guy who I had been looking at every day.
Turns out Brik is one of those writers who reflects on the craft and seriously considers its place in our culture and society. Where does authorship lie in film? Who is more important in film — the director, or the writer? Brik comes at the whole question of authorship by undermining the question altogether when he says:
There are no poets or literary figures; there is only poetry and literature
So don’t be getting too up yourself. We are working as part of a community or an industry or, actually, an art — in the sense of artefact — which is bigger than we are and the work of any poet, director, or screenwriter, is just one part of a larger collaborative endeavour. There is no ‘single organizing intelligence’ no matter what those Cahiers du Cinema guys might want you to believe. Brik looks at the filmmaking process form the perspective of the screenwriter and considers the specificity of writing for film as opposed to any other kind of writing. The scriptwriter has to consider all the different elements of the film, and must work with the sound engineers, with the director and the editor to create the final work. The script is not important in its own right:
A script is the outline of a future film, set out in words (p.96)
Storm Over Asia or The Heir to Genghis Khan
Brik describes in some detail the processes by which he wrote Storm Over Asia.
The idea for the film came from a conversation he had with the writer, Ivan Novokshenov, about a story he was working on set in the time of the British occupation of Mongolia. Novokshenov’s story was about a young herdsman who was captured by the British and found to be wearing an amulet which said that he was the heir to Genghis Khan. The British saw this as an opportunity to exploit this young man and make him Emperor of Mongolia so that he would be their place holder.
Brik describes the process by which he establishes the political allegiance of the Mongolian. He wrote a scene where the young man comes across a ‘skirmish’ between the colonialist invaders and the partisans. The Mongolian takes the side of the partisans by coming to the aid of this one character and helping him to defeat a soldier and throw him down a ravine. We have no doubt of his political allegiance and we have also witnessed an action packed scene.
One of the most powerful scenes for me is when the young man is captured and is sentenced to be executed. The film intercuts between the young man being sent off to be killed by a reluctant executor and the discovery and deciphering of the amulet which declares the Mongolian to be the descendant of Genghis Khan. The suspense is built through the story telling and the cinematography but we realize that the credit for structuring these moments in this dialectic, cross-cutting way is very much the work of the screenwriter. This section ends with the declaration: “Bring Back the Mongolian” and the guy who has shot him must return and rescue him. The scenes of the recovery are probably some of the most cinematically powerful especially in the context of race which the film deals with so expertly. For they work on the body of the Mongolian to fix him, the surgeons wrap him in bandages, ‘whitening’ him and making him more their object to be used, worked on and exploited. As he recovers his clothing conforms more to the style of a Western idea of what a Mongolian emperor might wear. The final climax of the film sees him tear off these robes and fight the wealthy trader who had cheated him at the beginning of the film.
The film ends in a most amazing storm — Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia – and it unleashes some amazingly powerful cinematography and fantastic use of montage and editing. But this is not the ending Brik wrote. He wanted the people to march towards ‘Red Moscow’ and to create the connection to the Russian revolution. Brik complains that the ending is ‘too cinematic’:
It provokes the impression of a staged effect. I feel that Red Moscow would have been a far more credible final symbol than an artificial storm (p.103)
But, hey, you can’t have it both ways! The essay is all about how the work of the screenwriter is just a part of the cinematic process. Osip Brik explains the processes involved in writing this film, but honestly, I defy you to watch the film and think about the writing because it is a truly powerful piece of film-making. And, as Brik says:
The realised object thrusts the process of its construction out of our consciousness (p.99).
Once the film is finished, the script has no relevance and is not important. It ends up being tossed in the trash. So there are some important lessons in humility to be learned from reading Brik. And maybe now I should frame that postcard or get a bigger copy because Osip Brik was a very wise and thoughtful man who knew a thing or two about scriptwriting. So, thank you to John and Dejan for helping me find one of my mentors for the course hidden right there, in plain site on my dressing table.
V cool!!
I’ve haven’t met ‘dialectic’ and ‘specificity’ in decades! I wonder if there’s a way of uploading a picture to say Google to ask “who is this Google Ma?’