Written by Joseph Horowitz
Program Notes
Seven years ago I took part, as the orchestra's pianist, in screenings with live music of the 1929 Soviet silent film The New Babylon. Every aspect of this astonishing movie surged in my comprehension and estimation - to the point that I now have no doubt that Dmitri Shostakovich's score, however little known (there is no suite by the composer), is one of the most formidable ever composed for film.
The New Babylon is art, it is propaganda, it's a political tract, it's an aesthetic anthem. For the young Shostakovich, it was doubtless a heady learning experience impacting on his future development as the great symphonist of his generation.
The film's topic is the Paris Commune of 1871 - a famous workers' uprising important to Karl Marx. The treatment combines a social context with individualized human drama. That is: compared to the best-known Soviet silent film - Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) - The New Babylon is multi-Dimensional. Both films are products of the feverish experimentalism of the Soviet 1920s. Both emphasize social context. But, additionally, this polemical celebration of the Paris Commune is infiltrated by a gritty love story, mating a fiery Communard with a hapless, placeless soldier. Moreover, this story is no sentimental diversion. Rather, its shattering hopelessness meshes brilliantly with the film's fierce depiction of class warfare and political betrayal.
The New Babylon marks the first collaboration of Shostakovich and the master director Grigory Kozintsev - initiating a historic forty-year relationship ending with the greatest of all cinematic Shakespeare adaptations: their epic King Lear. The latter 1971 film is enriched by the same double aspect: added to Shakespeare's human drama is a social dimension inspired, in part, by the oppressed multitudes inhabiting the most iconic Russian opera: Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.
As with Mussorgsky, as with the Soviet King Lear, The New Babylon miraculously intermingles the personal with the epic. In fact, the lead actors - Yelena Kuzmina as the shopgirl and Andrei Kostrichkin as the soldier - deliver two of the most riveting cinematic performances I have ever encountered. The seething discontent and confusion of Kostrichkin's soldier contradict the stylized "eccentricity" of the film's general aesthetic. I should also mention, as one of the film's many seductions, the poetic homages to the Parisian artists Honoré Daumier and Edgar Degas - which, however, co-exist with biting lampoons whenever "bourgeois" Paris is on display. How Kozintsev and Shostakovich get away with such a plethora of stylistic and the thematic ingredients I do not know.
In 1929, Shostakovich was all of 23 years old. Five years previous, he completed a First Symphony more impressive than anything by the young Mozart; it already encapsulates the iron and (incredibly enough) the pathos of his mature voice. In The New Babylon, he flaunts his enfant terrible energies. But as the film moves from satire to tragedy, Shostakovich's emotional range proves limitless. And he is already a master of shaping a cinematic trajectory in this first of his three dozen film scores.
The "Factory of the Eccentric Actor" created by Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (who co-directed The New Babylon) promulgated a manic aesthetic keying on the circus, Charlie Chaplin, and other antidotes to pompous high culture. Kozintsev and Trauberg also deploy the signature montage effects - a collision of imagery instead of narrative continuity - of Soviet silent film.
The young Shostakovich feasts on cinematic montage. It's omnipresent, typically juxtaposing decadence with travail. An example: the bourgeoisie sing the Marseilles while French soldiers prepare to attack French citizens. Shostakovich responds with feigned relish, then decomposes their song via the intervention of an Offenbach can-can. This compositional tour de force subverts a vixceral response with a political critique. Our shifting perspective on the goings-on keeps us alert. Meanwhile, the soldier himself can't decide which side he's on.
Notwithstanding its ideological message, The New Babylon doesn't spoon-feed the masses as would Steven Spielberg and John Williams decades later. It makes us both feel and think.