Majakovskij wrote the script for a fantasy, Zakovannaja Fil’moj, in 1918 for the production company Neptun. The story about an artist fascinated by a film character – a ballerina – who steps out of the screen excited Majakovskij’s collaborators and was the first of its kind. (Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., with a similar surrealistic idea, was made six years later). The role of the ballerina who comes to life was intended by Majakovskij for his beloved Lilija Brik, and he himself played the role of the artist. The poet was dissatisfied with the film, along with his other cinema projects. Instead of representing the universal relationship between art and real life, the main conflict of the film is concerned with grand passions. In his articles written in 1913, Majakovskij had already formulated this problem and he tried to resolve it in his own films. Later the poet returned to the story of an artist and a character who descended from the screen in his script Serdce kino (Heart of the Screen) (Zakovannaja Fil’moj can be called its first version). Serdce kino was written in 1926 for VUFKU, the Ukrainian state film company, but it was never realized. Only small fragments from the Zakovannaja Fil’moj are preserved and they give an idea of the movie’s images. All else is lost.

Alisa Nasrtdinova