Produced by Goskino
Directed by Lev Kuleshov
1,673 meters (approximately 83 minutes upon release)
Based on the story "The Unexpected" by Jack London
Released December 3, 1926.
Cast: Alexandra Khokhlova, Sergei Komarov, Vladimir Fogel, Pyotr
Galadzhev, and Porfiri Podebed.
"By the Law" is a melodrama that takes place in a remote area in the Yukon during the gold rush at the turn of the century. A group of five gold prospectors -- Michael an Irishman; Hans Nelson, the Swede leader of the expedition; his English wife Edith; a Dutchman named Dutchy; and Harky. They have been unsuccessful, and, deciding to move to another location, they order Michael, who does most of the manual work in the camp, to dismantle their prospect equipment. While dismantling the sluices, he discovers a large amount of gold nuggets, and they decide to remain and work their claim. The months move by into winter, and Michael begins to resent the fact that, although he located the gol,d he still continues to do the cooking and the manual labor around the camp while the others mine the gold. When winter sets in, he goes mad and, returning from a hunt, he shoots and kills the Dutchman and Harky. After a savage fight, Michael is subdued by Edith and Nelson. Nelson wants to kill the Irishman, but Edith takes the shotgun away from him and says, "You can't kill him - only the law can punish him."
When exported, the studio was amazed at its reception and the critical opinion in Europe, although the film did not have all the normal ingredients of the films being shown at that time. It was unique that it had neither a villain nor a hero, and the film surprised and attracted the advance guard Parisian filmgoers who had been attracted to the Thomas Ince and William S. Hart films just a few years before.
Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), born in Tambov, Russia, was the first aesthetic theorist of film art and one of the first cinema directors under the Bolshevik regime. At fifteen he was a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture. Two years later he was a set designer and was occasionally acting in films at the Khanzhonkov Studio in Moscow. At the studio he worked with Yevgeni Bauer and had a role in Bauer's film "After Happiness." Upon Bauer's death, he completed the film. In addition to making films, many of these fledgling directors issued "manifestos" stating their opinions on all sorts of ideas. After the overthrow of the Czarist government, Kuleshov joined the Bolshevik army and served on the Eastern Front with a camera team. Returning to Moscow with the defeat of the Czarists armies, he was recruited as an instructor in the State Film School and given his own "workshop." Kuleshov admired the work of D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, especially the use of crosscutting in editing. He developed what came to be known as the "Kuleshov effect" in which, through montage, each shot acquired a different shade of meaning according to its place in the sequence. To produce his montage, he filmed the face of a popular actor and juxtaposed it upon clips of archival footage containing a wide variety of objects. Although the actor's face remained the same, the feeling of seeing the same face superimposed over various objects gave each scene a different feeling. Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein disagreed on what the so-called "montage" was, and it's amazing that D.W. Griffith produced "The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance" without using the word. Kuleshov married Alexandra Khokhlova, one of his students at the workshop. She went on to collaborate and star in five of his films. One of the first films that Kuleshov's "group "produced was the witty parody "The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviksz" (1924), and two years later his most popular film, "By The Law." Most of the films produced by Kuleshov's group were fairly successful with the public, but they often met with government disapproval for not containing enough propaganda.
Goskino, the government cinema agency that assigned special projects and provided the funding, wasn't pleased with Kuleshov's work ,and they gave him a final chance to redeem himself with a minimum amount of money. Kuleshov and his literary advisor sought a story with few characters, few sets and no elaborate costumes. They finally chose Jack London's grim tale, and they added a few scenes of their own, notably the birthday party from a scene in Dostoyevsky. It was one of the least expensive film made by the Soviets, and it was well-received at home and in Europe, but, at home, he was again criticized for not including enough propaganda. The government finally withdrew most of the funding for his workshop, and, leaving the producing and directing part of the cinema, he remained as an instructor in the film institute during the remainder of the silent era. The film was not shown in the English speaking countries until 1939, and Kuleshov was finally allowed to make films again during WW II.
During the immediate years following the Civil War between
the Bolsheviks and the soldiers loyal to the government, many
foreign films were imported into Russia, and, since the public
had a choice, the majority of the population preferred the foreign
imports to the home grown propaganda films. In June of 1923,
a Soviet purchasing group in Riga brought back to Russia a collection
of Baby Peggy comedies, and Erich Von Stroheim's very popular
"Foolish Wives." The revenue obtained from the foreign
films was used to purchase film stock for the Bolshevik producers.
In 1925, two American journalists were clearly offended by the
ascendancy and appeal of American films. "Russian reels
were hard to find in Moscow last summer . . . four times out of
five, I would be seeing another Hollywood product. I have seen
scantly filled theaters snuffing and sobbing over Baby Peggy and
the Japanese valet who loved her while her parents quarrelled
and
committed adultery. And I have gone away in high dudgeon that
even a social revolution could not ban such films or change the
sentimental audiences."
A few years ago while searching for her films in foreign Archives, Diana Serra Cary (Baby Peggy) located a few of her films in the Russian film archives in Moscow.
Jack London (1876-1916) was born in San Francisco. At the age of sixteen, he was a hobo, a waterfront vagrant and a sailor. He became a Socialist and made soapbox speeches, was arrested and then spent a year in high school and a few months at the University of California. He joined the gold rush to the Klondike, and, upon his return, several of his stories were accepted by magazines. In 1900 a book of his collected short stories was published by Houghton, Miffen and Co. Encouraged he spent the next sixteen years writing 43 books and various miscellaneous works. He served as a war correspondent in Vera Cruz, Mexico, during the Pancho Villa problems. Many of his books have been made into films including "The Call of the Wild" and "The Sea Wolf."
On the same video from Kino International is a short film:
Produced by Mezhrabpom-Russ
400 meters
Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin
Released November 21, 1925.
Cast: Vladimir Fogel, Anna Zemtsova, Jose Raul Capablanca, Anatoli Ktorov, Ivan Koval-Samborsky, Yakov Protazanov, Yuri Raizman and Mikhail Zharov.
In 1925, Vsevolod Pudovkin was filming an instructional film, "Mechanics Of The Brain," for Mezhrabpom-Russ, and during a pause in the filming, he was asked to make a topical comedy of the International Chess tournament being held during November, 1925, at Moscow's Hotel Metropol. The only problem that Pudovkin encountered was that they could not ask the contestants to act in a comedy. One of the contestants was a very astute chess player, Jose Capablanca, and Pudovkin solved the problem by having his cameraman pretend to be a newsreel cameraman. The film taken at the chess tournament was combined with shots of other actors' hands and other objects. Using his montage method. he had the famous chess player acting a minor role. The hero's extreme preoccupation and the growing exasperation of the heroine (played by Pudovkin's wife, Anna Zemtsova) cannot be imagined apart due to Kuleshov's ingenious cutting and editing method. The result was a very humorous account of chess fever upon everyday Russian citizens, but then we have our own football fever!
Sources:
The International Encyclopedia of Film by
Dr. Roger
Manvell
Websters Biographical Dictionary
Kino by Jay Leyda
Encyclopedia of European Cinema by Ginette Vincendeau.
copyright 2002 by John DeBartolo. All rights reserved.