Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Roman Karmen has been called a great artist. And was he? In the year 2002, when I telephoned the University of Chicago film expert Yuri Tsivian, the following verdict came down: He’s, well, let’s say he’s an official classic, but he’s not remembered as a great filmmaker. If he filmed the surrender at Stalingrad, that wasn’t because he was a great artist, but because he was a trusted official. He was brave and reliable, but not anyone I would admire.

  Poor Karmen! And yet, what if Professor Tsivian were wrong? For that matter, even if he were right, how was Karmen supposed to act? All we can do in this life is our best. And if we believe in ourselves, if our best pleases us, haven’t we followed the correct line? And who’s to say that cinema isn’t gasoline? I know a lady who decides which movie to see as a result not of the subject matter but of which time is most convenient for her. Somebody’s got to pump her gas. Somebody’s got to defend her mind. We were soldiers, armed with a camera.

  Aged not quite fifteen, he arrived in Moscow in the same year that Lenin suffered his first two strokes and Comrade Stalin became General Secretary of our Party. His most treasured possession was the camera bequeathed to him by his martyred father.

  He sent photographs to Ogonyok magazine, and received his first press card in 1923, when we find him interviewing Vassil Kolarov, the Bulgarian hero. In his anxiety and inexperience he used too much magnesium oxide; the flash filled the room with black smoke. The negative was blank, so he went back to Kolarov’s hotel in the morning. Perhaps it was his smile, perhaps his honesty or simply his desperation. In any event, the young photojournalist succeeded in getting both picture and caption published. For years he was haunted by the ironic gentleness of Kolarov when he granted the youth another chance. With his customary readiness to reveal himself, he told this embarrassing story to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who laughed lightly. For some reason all his embarrassment flooded back; he couldn’t understand why; he’d issued this anecdote so many times that it was scarcely new-minted; it was not until he was old that he understood not only why the tale humiliated him before her, but also what had brought it out of him in the first place: her gentleness, oh, her gentleness.

  He photographed Lenin’s corpse lying in state, and captured many emotion-laden scenes, but the full power of images first impressed itself upon the young Roman Karmen later on in that same year, 1924, when he passed by an exhibition of German art arranged by Otto Nagel. Amidst the other flotsam hung “The Sacrifice” by Käthe Kollwitz. How can I describe this woodcut? The mother’s black cloak is open to reveal her breasts as she offers up her baby to death.

  In the same folio, which was called “War,” Karmen, stunned and riveted, saw “The Parents,” a black woodcut of a man mourning, supporting the hand in which his face is buried upon the back of his wife, who mourns in his lap; this couple comprise a dark mass of mourning, silhouetted against a white background and their outlines printed negatively in white.

  These two prints moved him to tears. But when, now scanning the walls almost ferociously in his determination to find every scrap of paper by this artist, he discovered “Hunger,” which would become leaf number two of most versions of her great “Proletariat” folio of 1925, the emotion which overcame him was anger—anger against an order which made people suffer in this way. And how strange it was that he was moved! For he had known hunger himself; and his father had suffered at the hands of the White Guards. This was the moment when he understood that the representation of reality can be more real than reality itself.

  I’ve seen a photograph of Karmen in a cocked sailor’s hat, smiling sweetly, his white teeth peeking up around one edge of that accordion-like instrument his father left him; it is 1926, and he stands before a banner for the cause of the German workers. A moment before the picture was taken, he had just praised Kollwitz’s “Hunger” once again.

  In 1927, when an exhibition specifically of the works of K. Kollwitz took place in Moscow, Karmen succeeded in photographing the artist, but by then she excited him somewhat less. He was living across the street from a billboard designed by Rodchenko; it advertised macaroni for Mosselprom. He used to study this billboard every day. It seemed to him that in this image every element was perfectly synchronized. Rodchenko not only conveyed information, he also defamiliarized it in the manner of the Russian Formalists (who had not yet been ruled alien to our Soviet culture). Furthermore, without in any way distracting us from his mission of selling macaroni, Rodchenko added whimsicality, even humor—a quality which our dear friend K. Kollwitz lacked.

  At the end of the decade we find him in every periodical from Prozhektor to Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia to Mayakovsky’s Lef. He’d begun with a still camera, but it was really motion which seduced him. Rodchenko would have been content to photograph a single shorthaired Moscow athlete whose Red Star badge proclaimed her READY FOR WORK AND DEFENSE; Roman Karmen showed us walls of athletes’ legs actually flashing beneath icons to Lenin and Stalin on Red Square!

  He captured Dmitrov, Gorki, Alexei Tolstoy, the interplanetary enthusiast-theoretician Tsiolkovsky and even the first American Ambassador, William Bullitt. In his inspirational films of this period, long tables of children bow over their studies; smokestacks vomit blackness above banner-hung posters, Mongolian-looking men in their autonomous folk costumes blow abnormally long horns which resemble the smokestacks.

  Thanks to the benevolence of our Soviet state, he’d succeeded in attending the State School of Photography in the malachite-columned hall of the former Yar Restaurant. Among his talents was the supernatural one of meeting all the people he needed to meet, and avoiding the unwholesome. Eisenstein himself is said to have gazed upon him brightly, all the while clutching a briefcase in his armpit. But a canniness entirely alien to, for instance, Shostakovich, kept the young man from accepting too many blessings from this god whom one would have thought to be eternally anchored to his pedestal. Instead, he became a protégé of the rival Pudovkin. He became friends with L. O. Arnshtam, who’d left Meyerhold’s theater at the last possible moment; in ’37, when Meyerhold and his wife disappeared, Arnshtam not only didn’t get taken but kept right on making movies for Lenfilm! He and Karmen were inseparable.

  From Dziga Vertov, who was already suspect on account of the formalism in his “Man with the Movie Camera,” Karmen kept personally clear, although he is known to have seen a number of the man’s newsreels. This scrupulous neutrality undoubtedly served him well in his later years, when he taught at the All-Union State College of Cinematography.

  In the cutting room, even the scratches on film leaders enthralled him, wiggling past his eyes like the light-streaks of Moscow trams in the night. Soon we began to associate him with the neoclassical pillared facade of Lenfilm Studio in Leningrad. One catalogue gushes: Unusual angles, the most incredible positioning of the camera, the play of light and shade, compositions—it was all new, unheard of and unique. The curator had evidently never heard of Rodchenko.

  In 1930, when his future with Elena was as tiny as a bomb which is still far overhead and he hadn’t even graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography, Vladimir Yerofeyev invited him to be assistant cameraman on our first Soviet sound film, “Far Away in Asia.” And so far away in Asia we find him, in collaboration with the renowned and slender Edward Tissé, recording the Kara-Kum expedition. Our new Soviet trucks will pass the test! The temperature reaches one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Karmen films the last drink of water. Here’s a photograph of Karmen on a camel’s back, with a turbaned guide behind him; he’s wasting no time; he’s filming!

  In China, wading a river with his cine-camera lashed to another camel’s back; in the ice-covered rigging of the Sedov with his camera clutched against the breast of his parka; in besieged Leningrad, leaning over the hood of a ruined truck to establish his position; with his camera at his eye in a New York penthouse; panning the Kino-Eye across a long S-shaped column of captured French soldiers in Vietnam; that was how he would spend his life. A film
every year and often more! Simonov remembers him as always working, even bandaged, sick or exhausted, no matter what his mood or how dangerous the conditions.

  He sincerely tried to film not only the essence, but the hope. When he produced his sound newsreels about the exemplary shock workers Nikita Izotop and Ivan Gudov, Gudov he filmed at his lathe; Izotop he filmed trying to study geometry. Did Izotop become a geometer? Not exactly. But thanks to his dedicated productivity he’d won the chance to try, as he never would have under capitalism. Now any worker had that chance. This is what Karmen wished to show us. Can such a strategy be called “art”? Roman Karmen didn’t care. He was no formalist, not he!

  In 1933 he made a film called “Parade on Red Square in Moscow.” In 1938, he made “Mayday.” In 1948 and 1952 he made two films each of which was called “Mayday on Red Square.” No one can say he neglected the home front.

  In 1938-39 we find Karmen shooting the newsreel series “Embattled China,” his sheepskin collar opened, his sheepskin hat high on his forehead so as not to occlude visibility, aiming a cine camera which curiously resembled a metal butterfly or perhaps the wind-up key of a clock at a burning tower. He repeatedly advised his colleagues to link all points in any temporal order, a credo which he had long since forgotten that he’d derived from Vertov. But no harm done! After this bow to dynamism, Karmen invariably linked all points in the order A., B., C. More impressive than the arrangement of points is the undisputed fact that the film team traveled twenty-five thousand kilometers. Upon his return, he wrote A Year in China, which—measure of his industriousness—he both started and finished in November 1939. This book achieved immediate publication. Its author was accepted into the Soviet Writers’ Union.

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  In 1936 he lay flat on his back during an Italian air raid and filmed straight upwards, with Ethiopian women and children dying all around him. He was always lucky, if you want to call it that. The resulting documentary, “Abyssinia,” undercut and embarrassed the Fascists. Almost immediately he began to film the twenty-two installments of our newsreel “On the Events in Spain.”

  I’ve been told that it happened like this: Karmen wrote a personal letter to Comrade Stalin, took it himself to the guards at the Kremlin gates, and waited a week—it’s like some old parable!—and then he and his fellow cameraman Boris Makaseyev got called to Central Board of Cinematography. Next morning they were both on a plane to Madrid. Roman Karmen had all the luck! On the same day, Shostakovich trembled at home in Leningrad, waiting to be arrested . . .

  Two Panzertroopers with cocked berets roll toward Madrid, the great gun between them pointing up at the sky. Somehow, Roman Karmen is hiding in a trench and filming them! In the words of K. Simonov: As we watched the films sent in by Karmen from far off Spain, we young poets were consumed with a burning envy of that man we did not know, that man with the camera who was now on the front line of the fight against Fascism.

  Street fighting in San Sebastián and Irún; women building fortifications on the outskirts of Madrid, as they would soon be doing on the outskirts of Moscow; a bullfight in Plaza de Torres of Barcelona, after which the bull-fighters and spectators went straight to the front—and here’s our clean young man, his dark beret not covering his ears, gripping the long lever of his cine-camera, leaning forward and down in the direction of its snout. (Dziga Vertov: The filmings in Spain represent an indisputable achievement of Soviet cinematography and reflect the great efforts of Makaseyev and Karmen. No matter that Makaseyev has been listed first. Their lens is now focused on the real, the direct and heroic aspect of the struggle.) In each of those twenty-two newsreels he warned us that this was merely the beginning of Fascist aggression, that another great war was coming.

  The most dangerous and terrifying sequences of the documentary “Spain” were shot by him alone; for when it came time for Madrid’s fiery doom, even Makaseyev departed; Roman Karmen was the only cameraman brave enough to stay.

  One of his newsreels from 1936 really got to her: the famous one with the closeup of the resolute young girl who raises her clenched fists; other youths behind her stand up for Spain with their hands and their rifles. And so Elena went to Spain. That was brave, absolutely. Of course I’ve also heard that she was experiencing some kind of love trouble at that time.

  What was going on inside her? None of us will ever know Elena; she’s as closed to us as any German. But she must have been captivated not only by the brave passion of these films, but also by the man himself. Sergei Drobaschenko remembers him as a man filled with energy and elegance—the antithesis of the helpless, rumpled Shostakovich.

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  Back at home, Shostakovich and Glikman went to see every installment of “The Events in Spain,” watching the Loyalists smile proudly beneath their triangular caps which resembled folded cloth napkins. Shostakovich was anxious about something—oh, me, very anxious!—From the screen of the Kino Palace, the Loyalists stared out at them, gripping their rifles; and Shostakovich, whose smile was somehow as irregular as the icy streets of Leningrad would be during the siege, said that he was very, you know, happy for Elena.

  No doubt he wasted many nights wondering how it must have been for Elena Konstantinovskaya and Roman Karmen in Spain. I know I have. Of course I’ve seen that photograph of Elena wearing her Order of the Red Star.25 She always achieved whatever she set out to do—except in one case, of course. So she got Karmen. It’s possible that she had set her sights on him years earlier, when he made that gripping newsreel of the Arctic pilot Farikh, shot at the snow-covered airport. Elena always liked fliers and rocket-men. All the same, anyone who writes about her quickly finds himself at a loss. She’s unknowable.

  What about Karmen? He said little about their time together, perhaps because, as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So we’d better limit ourselves to external evidence, by which I don’t mean official photographs: We see him smiling mirthlessly and boyishly beside the American bourgeois-romantic writer E. Hemingway, both of them wearing the dark Basque fighter’s caps. He clutches his camera in his lap. Hemingway looks bored.—This I will say: Roman Karmen always meant well, and his films praised and elevated us in all sincerity; his anger on our behalf was a loving, constructive anger, like Lenin’s; he raged against the Fascist murderers; he hated ignorance, exploitation, poverty; his heart was good. The most wonderful aspect of the Revolution was that we felt impelled to do things which were really beyond us—take the Revolution itself!—and every so often we succeeded. Shostakovich’s experiments, and Rodchenko’s, Vertov’s, Tsiolkovsky’s, were all of a piece. We were dreamers together, within the grand red dream of Comrade Stalin. And Karmen went beyond himself! Is it cruel to call him a mediocrity? I don’t think so. A man without legs is a legless man, and it’s never unfair to say what’s simply true: He’s not to be blamed for lacking legs. And is it Karmen’s fault that he’s not listed more prominently in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia?

  Now to Spain: There’s a certain sequence in his newsreels, a shockingly powerful sequence which shows an old lady in black with her child, who’s also wearing black, held in against her lap like something out of K. Kollwitz; the child looks sideways, the old lady looks straight at us with a scared expession; then a boy gazes at us from farther away; nearer, a young woman sits sideways on a blanket, gazing inscrutably at us; they are all sitting on the ground; and in the foreground lies a figure on its side, facing away from us, outstretching its white hands at these others; there is a bundle beneath its head, and at first we cannot tell whether it is living or dead. (In another print of the same film, our Kollwitz mother and child aren’t black at all. We can see more detail. Everything’s lighter and greyer.) These people are refugees; the Fascist bombers are coming. And here Karmen has somehow found the ability to do artistic justice both to his subjects and to his heart. Why now? Perhaps because he is in love.

  It is at precisely this juncture in his car
eer that we discover Karmen gradually moving from shots of groups to shots of individuals. Again I wonder why; the same answer comes to mind: The feelings he had for Elena were such that he finally understood with all his soul that one of us can represent us all just as well as the all contains the one. No doubt it was their passion, which rapidly flowered into marriage, which distracted him from filming the departure of Madrid’s gold reserves for Moscow, or our just and necessary liquidation of the Trotskyite Andrés Nin while he sat in his Spanish prison.

  Another sequence from “The Events in Spain”: a long line of helmeted soldiers with crossed bandoliers, some with binoculars, munitions at their feet; they gaze rigidly ahead. Suddenly the camera zooms in on a woman with long dark hair.

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  He was in Spain for eleven months. Within days of his return to Moscow, he flew to the Arctic in search of Levanevsky’s plane, that relic of the failed Polar flight to America. He then spent a year in the Arctic, on what the Germans call Rudolf-Insel. That same year he took the responsible step and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  By that time we trusted him sufficiently to give him the resources to direct his own films: “The Sedov Men” in 1940 and “In China” a year later. “The Sedov Men” was his respite; the stranded crewmen lined nicely up for him against their ship’s patchwork of black-and-white frozen steel; but he could feel the evil rising up everywhere, even out there in the Polar Sea. He could hardly sleep; he had to get to China! Long after it’s all over, K. Slavin will define Karmen’s credo thus: I must always be there, whenever fighting breaks out.

  And so I see him lurking with two Chinese insurgents in a cleft in a boulder, the soldier ahead sighting in, ready to snipe at the Japanese Fascists while Karmen very carefully begins to upraise the movie camera over the man’s shoulder, careful not to let the sun glint on the lens. (Touching Elena was far more difficult than this.) Through eleven provinces, and I’ve already cited that figure of twenty-five thousand kilometers, he recorded for all time the fraternal heroism of the Chinese workers, peasants and fighters.