Aleksandrov, Grigori Vasilyevich

b. 23 January 1903, Yekaterinburg, Russia.

d. 16 December 1983, Moscow.

“This was during the most terrible time of Soviet history. The film came out in 1938. On the one hand it proclaimed Stalin’s favorite slogan, ’life is better. Life is happier’. But, on the other hand happiness was only to be enjoyed by those who were still alive … He understood very well what he was doing when he made his `harmless’ musical films. He knew that stepping out of line caused trouble”.¹

What makes a great director? Definitions vary. In the case of Aleksandrov, the issue is challenging. Did he sell out after his innovative and collaborative work with Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s to make what we would define as “harmless entertainment” to save his own skin and survive? Or is the issue more complex in involving adaptation of important cinematic elements to a new and more hostile environment, preserving them in levels beyond the ideological and propagandist and thus ensuring their continuity over a long and changing period of time? Such is the challenge of his life and work in terms of honoring him as someone more than average and conformist.

Early years 

Aleksandrov worked odd jobs from the age of nine at his local Opera Theater, eventually becoming assistant director, and graduated in 1917 studying violin. From the very beginning his interests involved music and cinema, even briefly managing a movie theater, when he moved to Moscow. There, he met Sergei Eisenstein after acting in the Proletkult Theatre during 1921. This led to a decade long collaboration beginning with Aleksandrov’s major appearance in Eisenstein’s 1923 stage production of Ostrovsky’s 1868 comedy Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man, as well as the title character in Eisenstein’s first short film Glumov’s Diary (1923). 

Aleksandrov was already well-versed in comedy as well as techniques characteristic of early Soviet cinema. He co-wrote Strike (1924) with Eisenstein and others, appeared in Battleship Potemkin (1925), and co-directed October (1927) and The General Line (1929). Aleksandrov also accompanied Eisenstein on his Hollywood visit, meeting several comedy directors and seeing many films, before embarking on the ill-fated Que Viva Mexico project that he later edited in 1979.  In Switzerland he also wrote and co-directed with Eisenstein. The result is a short documentary on abortion Frauennot-Frauengluk (Women’s Misery, Women’s Happiness). He also scripted a short documentary, Oaxaca Earthquke (1931) among other projects. After writing and co-directing with Eisenstein a French documentary surrealistic short Sentimental Romance (1931), he and Eisenstein received Stalin’s order to return home, where they encountered a much different cultural and political situation from the one they left. Socialist realism became the norm and any form of cinematic experimentation was taboo. While Eisenstein suffered from this change, Aleksandrov was able to adapt and become one of Russia’s most prominent directors.

The winds of change

After successfully revealing his new proletarian consciousness to The Great Leader’s satisfaction in Five Year Plan (1932) and Internationale (1933), Aleksandrov was able to embark on the first of what would be his successful musical comedy trilogy – Jolly Fellows (1934). Following a meeting with Stalin and Maxim Gorky, Aleksandrov began the first Soviet musical having overcome Stalin’s skepticism, possibly aided by Maxim Gorky. It starred musical comedy actress Lyubov Orlova (1902-1975), who later became his second wife, featuring in many of his following films. The restoration opens with a quote from Aleksandrov. “The film is very dear to me. At that time people wanted to see cheerful inspiring films. Jolly Fellows met the demands of the time”. Naturally he will not mention why, but subtly allude to those difficult times. 

Credit sequences openly display the cards Aleksandrov uses in his game against the system. It shows graphic images of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, then teasingly states they will not be the stars. Instead the graphic images of Leonid Utesov (1895-1982) and Orlova appear, revealing who the actual stars are but revealing Hollywood comic influence behind their performance. A cow modeled on Felix the Cat writes the title with its tail. Animation will also appear in a film deliberately blurring boundaries. The film opens with a series of long shots presenting Utesov singing the main theme, the camera tracking right to left as it follows his progress. This sequence is probably influenced by Lilian Harvey’s carriage number in Congress Dances (1932), re-worked a year later in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932). Utesov was well-known for Soviet jazz in the 1920s, blending the cosmopolitan with Russian folk culture in a manner akin to early Aleksandrov. 

During the 1920s in Leningrad, he began collaborating with composer Isaak Dunayevsky (1900-1955) who later scored the director’s 1930s films. He then does a roll call of various cows who answer to their names. These opening scenes merge together Hollywood, comedy, and surrealism disguised in an entertainment framework vaguely concealing what might bring forth accusations of “formalism” in An Age of Terror. It is a Soviet version of “Entertainment as Utopia”, as Richard Dyer would say, appropriating Stalin’s axiom of “life is happier” expressing popular desires for a Utopia very different from their Ruler’s conception and contemporary practices of terror. Later, birds on a pole resemble musical notes, moving, chirping, and then flying away.²

Realizing that the Age of Experimentation is now over. Aleksandrov secretly keeps faith with the legacy he shared with Eisenstein but now expresses it in a different, yet concealed subversive manner. Parasols evoked by bourgeois females evoke those seen in October (1927) while Orlova’s musical numbers represent a Soviet reworking of Jeannette MacDonald. Later the musical rehearsal that turns into Hollywood slapstick also resembles those Delsarte and Meyerhold bio-mechanics frenzied bodily movements seen in earlier comedies such as Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which were by then banned. The twisted mouth movement of one performer in this manic scene, supposedly loved by Stalin, resembles those used by the two Chaldean clowns in the cathedral performance scene of Ivan the Terrible Part Two (1946) that also combine the circus and Meyerhold-inspired  facial gestures. Even the prestigious Bolshoi is not immune from this comedic invasion involving jazz (now banned in Germany as decadent) with ballerinas also joining in the fun. As well as recalling those earlier Soviet artistic experiments merging high art and low culture, Jolly Fellows reveals the integration of Hollywood silent comedy with banned Soviet experimentation presented within the “harmless entertainment” structure of a Russian musical comedy seemingly devoid of “formalist” associations. 

The Circus Theatrical Poster

The Circus (1936), is perhaps the peak of Aleksandrov’s achievements in Soviet musical comedy. Co-scripted with Isaak Babel, from an original play changed in the process, it again  weaves disparate elements into a cohesive whole, it not only reproduced the international aspect of comedy but also the lost tradition of Soviet internationalism now rejected in favor of Stalin’s “socialism in one country” dogma. But the world of entertainment is far from parochial, but international in scope embracing American Marian Dixon (Orlova) into its fold at the end. The film opens with Marian narrowly escaping lynching in a Southern town, aptly named “Sunnyville” into a train compartment containing devious German entrepreneur Kneishitz, who takes Marian and her Black baby to work as a human cannon in a Moscow circus. Marian was the mistress of a Black man who has been lynched for committing “the biggest crime in history”. Fearful of her shame, she keeps her child’s racial origins a secret until it is adopted by a circus audience of all races (Russian, Japanese, Georgian, Yiddish, and Black) into a new society where “You may have a kid of any color.” 

This is utopian idealism but it presents one common to the International World Revolution tradition of Lenin and Trotsky, still relevant today. The film presents the circus and, by implication, the Russian community as open and welcoming in its outlook, the audience finally booing the German off the stage like a vaudeville villain. Earlier, he swished his cloak like Count Dracula and disappeared from the frame in violation of the rules of socialist realism. The film uses linguistic diversity with characters often speaking German and English as well as Russian. As well as resembling a vaudeville villain, Kneischitz speaks in an unmistakable Hitler accent when he abuses Marian in one scene. This Nazi Max Linder caricature also has an exploited Chaplin figure working as his valet, fascism’s oppression of the little tramp, using a pump to inflate his master’s phony rubber “hard body”. Everything is fair game, including a tribute to Busby Berkeley towards the end. A close-up of Orlova finally moves from stage to outside reality, breaking the fourth wall of traditional cinema, a familiar Aleksandrov technique. The film ends with the reunited couples marching outside the Kremlin singing the main theme “Song of the Motherland” that became a Soviet classic. An inserted shot from another procession shows the obligatory banner of Stalin inducted into the film and also symbolized by the Georgian member of the audience that is less propagandist but inserting The Great Leader himself into a film promoting artistic and human internationalism associated with his despised enemy Leon Trotsky.  

Volga-Volga followed two years later. It became another popular success, so much so that Stalin sent a copy to FDR showing how The Soviet Union could compete with Hollywood. Appearing in the year of The Great Purge, the film adopts a less experimental narrative structure than its predecessors in its tale of a warring couple striving to get to Moscow to win First Prize for the theme song that is shown going through various stages of composition until the end, when it becomes a collective product of the whole community. Yet some breaches do occur. A chorus introduced the leading actors. The film opens with the hero and heroine embracing on a haystack. Then the camera tracks back to show that the haystack is on a boat transporting it across the Volga. Reality is not what it seems even under the rigid rule of an imposed dogma of socialist realism. Elements occur from previous films such as a singing waiter using bottles as a xylophone and a teasing formalist reference of an iris striving to close into blacking out the image until it finally succeeds. Yet the film ends with the entire group addressing the audience from the stage, emphasizing the role of laughter, ironical in that era, and bringing up placards announcing The End” rather than superimposing it on the screen, as they bow like a theatrical company to the audience they have directly addressed breaking further the conventions of cinematic narrative. After directing two films that earned Stalin’s approval, the director now feels that he can conclude his film by breaching normal conventions in the world of entertainment, where anything is possible. 

Volga-Volga

Following Sports Parade (1938), one of those many documentaries Aleksandrov made during his career to prove Bolshevik credentials, his next film starred Orlova in the title role of Tanya (1940). This was a Soviet re-working of the Cinderella story, whose heroine, if not moving from rags to riches, transforms herself from an illiterate peasant woman to becoming an award-winning Stakhanovite mill worker, winning her Prince Charming Engineer in a relation of equality as opposed to subservience. Despite its ideological propaganda, this musical comedy version of a fairy tale adapted by Viktor Ardov whose original title Cinderella earned Stalin’s disapproval resulted in Aleksandrov having to choose from twelve titles compiled by The Great Leader himself. The film presents the work ethic via several fantastic scenes with the director’s authorship inscribed in the opening scene when Orlova performs musical exercises from a radio using the theme from The Jolly Fellows as musical accompaniment. Circus began with a poster of Jolly Fellows being pasted over to announce this new production. Beginning in 1930 and ending in the immediate pre-war era, it became one of Orlova’s most successful films. Rigid boundaries separating reality and fantasy merge in this film, especially the flying sequence that envisages the world finally realizing the validity of the Soviet dream. The utopian nature of the fantasy sequences are designed to embody the new reality of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The film concludes with the camera craning up from the two lovers to reveal a statue of the new Soviet Man and Woman, wielding a hammer and sickle, that symbolically depict the New World that the main characters have helped to create. In this manner, the film’s entertainment world does prove that in the realms of musical cinematic fantasy, one can really be “dizzy with success.”³

Towards the 1940s and 1950s

The recently available Fighting Film Collection #4 (1941) is the only entry in the series I’ve seen but I’m wondering if Aleksandrov’s contribution resembles Trevor Griffith’s “Absolute Beginners” entry to the otherwise dire 1974 BBC TV Fall of Eagles mini-series. Shot at the beginning of Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of Russia, it is very far from the propagandist entry we would expect. Orlova appears in her role of postal worker from Volga-Volga singing different lines to the earlier film’s main song adapted to the new threat facing the Soviet Union. She operates as a one-woman version of that old Kino train of the early Bolshevik era, this time exhibiting newsreels to isolated villages. Music again functions as a key component of a new decade in which a nation has to fight the Nazis on their own. The first part shows her exhibiting a documentary about the British Navy and their new wartime ally. Then the second part changes focus to show a female tractor driver, aiding a Soviet armored vehicle that has run out of gas against German paratroopers threatening a Russian village. Sturdy females deal with the initial invasion and they take revenge on the enemy when the Soviet vehicle can come to their rescue. Section 3 reveals Orlova showing a film to a woman wondering about her sweetheart in which he plays a heroic role. This is an interesting fiction within a fiction since the screened film bears no relationship to the type of documentary seen in the previous segment. In the next segment Orlova visits an Army camp and encourages a male soldier to sing and contributes to the performance by playing an accordion accompanied by another soldier. The men march off singing new lines to the “Song of the Motherland from Circus.” This 59 minute film concludes with Orlova on her bike singing the same song. Significantly, even within the strict confines of a documentary Aleksandrov and Orlova manage to blur the boundaries of genres such as propaganda, newsreel footage, fictional representations, and entertainment to deliver their own form of authorship.

Despite being banned by Stalin for “poorly reflecting the struggle of the Soviet people against the German fascist invader”, had it been released, A Family (1943) would have contradicted such an absurd claim. By eschewing rigid standards of socialist realm, the film actually demonstrates the importance of humanity, warmth in personal relations, and a collective desire to work for a better world that would have inspired audiences had they been allowed to see it. Tank gunner Najaf (Mirza Babayev) mistakes the address given to him when on leave and ends up at the home of his sergeant’s family who welcome him nonetheless. Father, mother and daughter Katya (Orlova) represent a world beyond war, presenting the image of a utopian family in quasi-Hollywood imagery. Naturally, Katya sings and plays a duet on the piano with the family all bursting out in song at the end. The film then divides into segments often shot in lyrical imagery such as the arrival of the boat carrying a deep diver whose wife believes he has died when trying to stop an oil leak. Before that, Najaf speaks of his mother, he becomes an oil worker, the camera irises into her face after she has shot a bird for collective consumption. Another segment shows Katya as air-raid warden, the images meticulously revealing the danger and hard work of her profession. Behind her, the air raid lights diminish after the raid to reveal the stars and then dissolves to a close-up of the diver’s waiting wife, irises in on her as she kisses her reviving husband who has been thought dead. Whether this is fantasy or reality, Aleksandrov leaves up to the viewer. The film ends with a successful tank battle against the Germans, pictures of Najafs’ mother and his new family prominently displayed inside his tank. The film combines so many images from different sources weaving them together to inspire wartime audiences.

Following that, Aleksandrov wrote and directed the documentary People of the Caspian (1944) but he was to return to prominence with his post-war film Springtime (1947). This is, perhaps, his most accomplished self-reflexive film blurring together the boundaries between different worlds. Beginning with the director and camera crew about to begin the film, a shot appropriately book-ending the film with the credits “The End” appearing, the post-credits opening shot reveals a Russia in the midst of post-war reconstruction with a female chorus of workers marching along and singing a song presenting the world outside as a musical number. Featuring Orlova in double roles: scientist Professor Irina Nikitini and musical comedy actress Vera Shatrova, the plot involves chain-smoking film director Arkady Gromov (Nikolay Cherkasov)  initiating his next project about the hermit-like existence of a scientist and chooses Vera to portray Irina. Not wanting to interrupt her operetta career, Vera persuades Irina to be her substitute. During a number of amusing interludes Irina gets the rigid Gromov to see beyond his rigid stereotypes of a scientist while he, in turn, introduces her to the magic of cinema as they walk along studio sets, hear the performance of a romantic song, with Arkady rehearsing two actors by pronouncing their lines in the appropriate way, that only Cherkasov could do. In the meantime, Vera performs the function of Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1941) by not only introducing the stuffy scientific community to the world of song but getting them to join in as a chorus, even persuading one academic type to sing a solo. The double imagery is carefully introduced in the beginning of the film with twin dancers who may be real or the result of magic exposure on the cinema screen. Later Arkady sees two moons that split off and later merge, anticipating the final sequence of the film. When Arkady and Irina venture outside in a world constructed as a studio set, they encounter a world of lyricism similar to the opening scene. At the end both partners unite romantically in song with two Orlovas but they merge into her actual star persona with different make-up and dress from the two characters she has played. This is a really delightful film and where else would you find a singer Nikolai Cherkasov in a light comedy mood after his strenuous role as Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible?

Was Aleksandrov assigned Encounter at the Elbe (1949) as Kremlin punishment for his artistic daring in Spring Time? We will never know. Beginning with American and Russian troops uniting at the Elbe in 1945 in a brief moment of wartime solidarity, the film is a propaganda exercise showing how America gradually betrayed that alliance. But, despite the heavy handed message, it is well-directed and acted with Orlova delivering a very different performance as American journalist Janet Sherwood who turns out to be not what she seems. The film ends with the dedicated Soviet hero and rare, honest, 100% American friend, removed from the Army, and about to be sent to home civilian duty with HUAC parting as the Elbe Bridge separates them from each other. If propaganda about American intentions was necessary (including the threat of nuclear destruction) then at least a good director like Aleksandrov would not make it a tedious tract. He worked with an interesting team here including Eisenstein’s cameraman Eduard Tisse (1897-1961) and composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975).

The Composer Glinka

Unless Aleksandrov did not film the 1938 Sports Parade currently available on YouTube, then The Composer Glinka (1952) is his first color production.  Initially, one expects a stodgy Stalinist “great man” biopic dedicated to the people as in the final lines the composer utters, “I  always knew that music is written by the people and we are only composers” as he hears one of his operas sung by returning troops. But the film is much more. Like Glinka (1804-1857), Aleksandrov was influenced by many non-Russian influences but he merged them in his own version of Soviet cinema in the same way that Boris Smirnov’s title character earlier received exposure to the works of non-Russians such as Berlioz, Donizetti, and Berlioz before moving on to become the father of Russian classical music with his two main operas A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Rusian and Lyudmilla (1942). The film emphasizes the inspiration of the popular on the composer, as in the Ukrainian scenes where he hears many musical instruments and watches a dance routine by a peasant girl resembling a tap dance. Creativity is not lacking as in the scene of Glinkov at the piano composing his next work and an orchestral accompaniment following. Covert satire also appears in the scene of Tsar Nicholas I changing the title of Glinka’s first opera and employing a lyricist to ensure the work follows Tsarist lines. References to the contemporary practices of “The Great Leader” are surely not accidental nor is the line referring to the “disdain of Art by so-called aristocratic experts.” This is based on an actual historical incident and Aleksandrov could claim fidelity to the laws of history if any objection were raised. Aleksandrov’s Stalin-era experiences certainly influence this line. The Composer Glinka is worth seeing for its beautiful color cinematography as well as its subject matter having past and future relevance.

The thaw and its aftermath 

Paradoxically, Aleksandrov’s troubles began in the Khrushchev era. When Stalin died Aleksandrov filmed a color documentary on his passing – Great Mourning (1953). This is probably the most dreary and disheartening of his works since he had to toe the Party line in revering a Great Leader who terrorized both himself and millions of Soviet citizens.  The presence of Stalin’s henchmen Molotov and Beria delivering funeral orations cannot but evoke disgust in the minds of contemporary viewers.  This is possibly the direct and lifeless work of his career which accomplishes celebrating the death of a brutal murderer. But it was something Aleksandrov had no option but to do since Beria was still alive at this time, a possible heir to Stalin. Significantly, unlike Pudovkin, he joined the Communist Party a year after Stalin’s death and Beria’s execution. He does not appear to have been opportunist when joining could have worked in his favor but possibly felt he could now identify with the Party.

He then fell into disfavor due to his success in Stalinist era cinema confining his work to documentaries with the exception of two features Russian Souvenir (1960) and Starling and Lyre, both of which encountered heavy criticism so much so that colleagues such as Dmitri Shostakovich published a letter in support of him.  Aleksandrov obviously encountered professional jealousy as an award winning Soviet director. He and Orlova did attempt to adapt to changing times.

Russian Souvenir is not as bad as its detractors insist. It is a  Soviet color version of Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of M., West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) anticipating the later Hollywood Rom-Com genre prioritizing the values of Love and Happiness over the contemporary Cold war ideology within the new entertainment perimeters of a different era. In the opening scenes Orlova is the only Russian character on the plane and it is she who acts as intermediary in helping the Western character overcome their prejudices. Russian Souvenir is admittedly lightweight but it does contains traits of Aleksandrov’s self-reflexivity as in the opening credit scenes where the director uses subtitles to reveal the impossibility of filling the screen with different subtitles for different languages and beg the audience’s pardon for using Russian in the dialogue. As in Circus, East meets West once more in the hope of a mutual understanding that will transcend the “eternal fear” of living in a Cold War world.

Aleksandrov’s last feature Starling and Lyre (1974) was a lavish color blockbuster cinemascope film that was briefly shown in cinemas then hastily withdrawn and not seen again until shown on Russian television until the 1990s. Dealing with a Russian couple engaged in espionage during World War Two and infiltrating post-war American and business circles plotting World War Three against the Soviet Union, it not only evoked the world of Encounter at the Elbe but contrasted with the current policy of cooling down the Cold War. Resembling contemporary neo-noir, the film starred Orlova, then in her early 70s, playing a character who aged from her thirties to fifties but no amount of special lighting and make-up could really disguise her actual age. However, the real reason for withdrawal may have been a contemporary spy scandal that occurred in West Berlin as well as a too intimate portrayal of the lifestyles of the western “rich and famous” that would have evoked comparisons in the minds of Eastern audiences.⁴ 

Aleksandrov’s last, co-directed film was a documentary tribute to the wife he lost in 1975. He never recovered from this loss nor the death of a son by his first wife tortured in 1952 by the secret police to testify about his father being an American spy. Though released in 1953, his experiences led to his eventual death in 1978. Lyubov Orlova (1983) was a loving tribute to his partner released a year after his death.⁵ This documentary is interesting since it shows the connection between the circus antics of Glumov’s Diary and the musicians’ fight in Jolly Fellows as well as the excessive dance routine on the boat in Volga Volga blended with American slapstick comedy. The facial gestures of one musician in Jolly Fellows bears an uncanny resemblance to the two Chaldean circus performers in one scene in Ivan the Terrible Part Two (1946) – a hidden tribute to Meyerhold? A very touching scene shows the now adult Jim Patterson (who played the black baby in Circus) years later in the circus with Aleksandrov. The film ends by showing the cruise ship named after her. It had a checkered life in the post-Soviet era and at one point was going to be sold for scrap to the Dominican Republic. But it broke away from its moorings and was last sighted near the Irish coast. The ship could still be drifting today.   

Though no heavyweight in the league of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov, Aleksandrov does fall into the category of Great Director though his agency was often limited by the demands of his era.  He provided Soviet audiences with entertainment during very grim and life-threatening times, not in the manner of an ideologue but presenting the vision of a utopian otherworldly realm in the manner Richard Dyer describes – for those who survived. Like his three other contemporaries he worked within a system he obviously believed in but fought against its dogmatic structures in subtle ways producing a Soviet version of Hollywood’s “mindless entertainment” in a manner that would not evoke suspicion and instant execution during the dark days of the Stalin regime.. . Whenever he could, Aleksandrov combined the cosmopolitan with the national, producing a unique blend of cinema. However, he did not work alone and more research is needed on collaborators such as Orlova, Dunayevsky, purge-victim cinematographer Vladimir Nilsen (1906-1938), as well as other talents who came under his orbit such as Tisse and Shostakovich for various films in order to understand fully the important issues of the director’s authorship.

Filmography

• October (co-directed), 1927.
• The General Line (co-directed), 1929
• Women’s Trouble, Women’s Happiness (incomplete, co-directed), 1930
• Earthquake (short, co-directed), 1931
• Sentimental Romance (short, co-directed), 1931
• Que Viva! Mexico (co-directed), 1932
• Five Year Plan (short), 1932
• Internationale (short), 1933
• Jolly Fellows, 1934
• Circus, 1936
• Comrade Stalin’s Report about the Constitution of the USSR Draft, 1936
• Volga-Volga, 1938
• Sports Parade (1938)
• Tanya/ The Radiant Path (1940)
• Fighting Film Collection #4 (1941)
• A Family (1943)
• People of the Caspian (1944)
• Springtime (1947)
• Encounter at the Elbe (1949)
• The Composer Glinka (1952)
• The Great Farewell (1953)
• From Man to Man (1958)
• Russian Souvenir (1960)
• Queen’s Companion (animated, educational cartoon), 1962
• Before October (1965)
• Lenin in Switzerland (co-directed), 1965)
• On the Eve (co-directed), 1965)
• Starling and Lyre (1974)
• Lyubov Orlova (co-directed), 1983

Endnotes