It was Shklovsky who gave Khokhlova the idea of a programme composed of newsreels about Gorky’s return to Moscow and three adaptations of his short stories. Only one of them was made, Delo s zastezhkami, a religious satire published in 1896 with four characters: three hoboes and an old bigot. The writer approved of Khokhlova’s script. It was a difficult shoot, mainly using exteriors, and “marked by the search for the autumn sun” (Khokhlova, 50 let v kino). She applied Kuleshov’s preparatory methods. “When I delivered the film, one of the executives asked me where I found real tramps for the film”, said Khokhlova. “I had to admit that one of the tramps was Kuleshov’s very active actor and production designer Galadzhev and the other two were students at the GTK” (the Moscow Film School that later became VGIK). She put them opposite an experienced stage actress who played the role of the bigot. According to Ana Olenina (Aleksandra Khokhlova, Women Film Pioneers Project, Columbia University, New York 2014): “Kuleshov’s lessons in analytical editing and the rhetorical power of montage is there in a scene that creates an ironic perspective on the matron: multiple shots of her zealously kissing relics in church, are intercut with images of tired workers waiting outside. A sarcastic title card comments ‘The lady is accumulating sanctitude.’ In another scene, Khokhlova’s montage juxtaposes an angry conversation between the matron and her workers with shots of a boiling pot of jam, the steaming liquid becoming a metaphor for escalating tension, as a boiling kettle works in Po zakonu (By the Law)”.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz

A simple story set in the years when country dwellers were pouring into the city, with a hint of a crime film. Sasha, a young peasant woman, arrives in town pregnant. One police officer takes her under his protection, but another denounces her as the wife of a detainee accused of having murdered the village teacher. The film’s ending is lost but easy to assume: a flashback shows that the husband is innocent and reveals the real killer. The film was made at Belgoskino, a small studio in Leningrad. “To study the militia’s character and its mechanisms”, Khokhlova spent time in a police station, observing arrest procedures, witnessing a prisoner having a seizure, from which she drew inspiration for a memorable episode with Liudmila Semionova (Chertogo koleso/The Devil’s Wheel, Tretya meshchanskaya/Bed and Sofa). It seems that the heroine comes out of her inertia in this moment of female solidarity, as she does when she befriends the police officer’s wife. In her memoirs, Khokhlova seems to be mainly concerned with her actors. She had studied with Stanislavski and his creative principles seem to oppose the expressive acting style developed by Kuleshov (decomposition and mechanisation of gestures and movements), of which she had been the most notable practitioner: “I was above all trying to make people look real, not like actors. So I was pleased when they thought that my leading actress was a cleaning lady, and they asked me why was I taking her with me, when she was an actual actress who had studied at the GTK”. On the other hand, the editing style is Kuleshov’s, and the cast combines members of the collective – Andrei Fayt, Galadzhev – and actors from different backgrounds.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz