The Measures Taken

The Technique= Circus. The Psychology= Head over Heels

A season at the NFT this month, Children of the Revolution- Celebrating Kozintsev and Trauberg gives a rare glimpse of one of the most little-known strains in the Constructivist movement of the 1920s- Eccentrism, an amalgam of jarring techniques, modernist disorientation, Keystone Kops slapstick and Taylorist mechanisation. Published by Kozintsev and Trauberg while still in their teens, and thrown at Petrograd passers-by from a moving car, the 1921 Manifesto of the Eccentric Actor is a playful counterpoint to the Futurist sturm und drang: self-referential and witty, undercutting its violence with a touch of the cute.

Salvation in the Trousers of the Eccentric


Importantly, the Eccentric Manifesto serves as a corrective to the still depressingly prevalent view of the 1920s avant-garde as haughtily aloof from ‘popular culture’, a myth which sees the artistic ‘vanguard’, in a parody of Leninism, as a kind of puritan imposition, trying to ‘improve’ its audience. In fact, Eccentrism marks an early salvo in the battle of vanguardism against ‘high art’ and in favour of all that horrified its denizens: read between the lines of their proclamations and you can see punk’s revaluations, via their smart-dumb fetishising of slapstick, amusement parks, Hollywood and Americanism, the belief that Communism has to harness to itself the mass production and mass art of the USA. They proclaim- ‘YESTERDAY- the culture of Europe. TODAY- the technology of America. Industry, production under the stars and stripes. Oh, Americanisation! Oh, Undertaker!’


Risk, bravery, violence, chase, revolution, gold, blood, laxative pills, Charles Chaplin, wrecks on land, sea and in the air, surprise cigars, operetta prima donnas, adventures of all sorts, skating-rinks, American books, horses, struggle, chansonettes, a salto on a bicycle and thousands and thousands of events that make today beautiful



Eccentrism, in its early incarnation as the acting school The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) first of all abolished the theatre’s preoccupation with subjectivity, with the depiction of a character’s inner torments. The model for this, physically and politically, was slapstick- Chaplin himself would return the favour with the Constructivist tributes all over Modern Times. If anything could work as agitational slapstick, it was films like Chaplin’s The Bank (1917); the opening scene of which shows Charlie walking up to a bank vault, unlocking the door and walking past the unguarded gold bars to pick up a mop, bucket and cleaner’s uniform. Or Buster Keaton’s Haunted House (1920), where Keaton’s bank teller pours glue on the notes, covering the customers in useless money that they can’t physically remove from their bodies. While the progenitors of method acting like Stanislavsky would spread their pernicious insistence on Representation all over cinema history, Eccentrism offered another, woefully un-acted upon possible future for film- take Chaplin or Keaton, their irrationalism and their contempt for authority, and harness them for the creation of a rational society. Walter Benjamin approved of this approach, citing the Eccentrist’s ‘overcoming of inner impulses and the body centre…the man who has the chair he is sitting on pulled from him and stays sitting’


Presentation- rhythmic wracking of the nerves
The author- an inventor-discoverer
The actor- mechanised movement, not buskins but roller skates, not a mark but a nose on fire. Acting- not movement but a wriggle, not mimicry but a grimace, not speech but shouts

The earliest surviving example of Eccentrism’s foray into filmmaking is The Devil’s Wheel (1926), a delirious cut-up comedy of the Leningrad lumpenproletariat, centring on an amusement park and the descent into the dissolute of a Red Army man (many of the films of the early Soviet film vanguard centred on this figure, frustrated by the failure of the revolution to spread, at the risk of disillusion- Protazanov’s visionary Aelita solves this problem by having its protagonist start a revolution on Mars). It establishes a tension from the very start between its socially redeeming aims and its obvious joy in the criminal underworld it caricatures. The first scene shows a Leningrad apartment block, surrounded by rubble, with blasted-out windows which are suddenly filled with people dancing, fighting, kissing. As Ian Christie points out in his Introduction, the film anticipates the French New Wave in its un-socialist realist conception of social realism- presenting the everyday via the Verfremdungseffekt of jump-cuts and cheap but effective tricks. Nothing is too crass for them, much of the film’s tricks rely on such obvious props as sticking fireworks in the background, having its characters walk through halls of mirrors.

For the director- a maximum of devices, a record number of inventions, a turbine of rhythms


The tension in Eccentrism between its Bolshevism and its fixation on the socially dubious comes out in certain moments in The Devil’s Wheel. At one point the hoodlums, led by a circus magician named ‘Mr Question’ go to attack a Workers’ Club, and one briefly wonders which side Kozintsev and Trauberg would want to win in that particular fight. There’s a prefiguring here of the Situationist notion of criminals as a wellspring of revolutionary possibility, as articulated in Attila Kotanyi's Gangland and Philosophy. The suggestion is that the world inhabited by these characters, with their obsession with thrill and sensation for its own sake, is the true and correct way of experiencing technologised everyday life. The manifesto itself hails ‘the cult of the amusement park, the big wheel and the switchback, teaching the younger generation the BASIC TEMPO of the Epoch’. The rollercoaster as educational.

We prefer Charlie’s arse to Eleanora Duse’s hands
The play- an accumulation of tricks. The speed of 1000 horsepower. Chase, persecution, flight.
Humped backs, distended stomachs, wigs of stiff red hair- the beginning of a new style of stage costume. The foundation- continuous transformation
Horns, shots, typewriters, whistles, sirens- eccentric music. The tap-dance- start of a new rhythm


This ambiguity continues in their celebration of the Paris Commune, The New Babylon, where events are viewed not through a Socialist Realist archetype, but through the eyes of a boutique shopgirl. There’s a refusal to incarnate the Heroic Worker who struts through Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Their Marxism was subtler than that- their 1926 Gogol adaptation The Overcoat is like a filmic essay on the section in Capital on commodity fetishism, instilling its quotidian subject with outlandish properties, giving it more animation and life than the clerk who owns it. Nonetheless in the 30s they too would turn to films of bygone revolutionary heroism, as in their hugely popular and populist Maxim trilogy. But the dialectic they outlined earlier on, the affinities between futurism and technocracy, revolution and the fairground- a taking literally of Trotsky’s phrase on revolution as a ‘festival of the oppressed’- is still rich with possibility. The Left is as ever all to ready to don its sub-Keaton stoneface- the Eccentric, meanwhile giggles on the barricades.