Toronto Slavic Annual No 1, 2003
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© Yana Meerzon, 2002
Yana Meerzon
Forgotten Hollywood
Michael Chekhov’s Hollywood Film Practice Viewed through
Prague School Aesthetics
Michael Chekhov (18911955), Russian émigré theatre artist, a nephew of
Anton Chekhov, and a disciple of Stanislavskii, developed an acting technique
that recognizes the product of an actor’s activity (a stage mask) as an aesthetic
object and a sign. It is “a real body signifying an imaginary body, which repre
sents a complex of effects known as character” (Steen and Werry 146). It is also
a semiosphere (Lotman, Universe) permeated by intercultural and interdiscipli
nary artistic connections; a psychophysical unity consisting of rhythms and
movements based on cultural and personal archetypes together with ideal im
ages born in the performer’s imagination.
Chekhov’s acting in film is the only visual example of his technique of creat
ing a stage mask or film mask with the theatrical means of characterization
(Powers, Michael Chekhov) available to today’s audience. This article focuses on
Chekhov’s film figure (this term will be explained below) of Max Polikoff in
Ben Hecht’s Spectre of the Rose (1946), demonstrating that although this part
was not the most impressive in Chekhov’s repertoire, it was both an archetypal
and an individual film figure. Using the works of Prague school theoreticians
and their modern followers, Chekhov’s film figure is looked at in accordance
with his individual body language and in the correspondence to the Proppian
model of a fairy tale. It describes Polikoff in Propp’s terms as a dispatcher/ot)
pravitel’, whose function is to open up the story, to set a hero for a journey and
confront him/her with his/her destiny (Propp, Morphology of the Folktale).
As Lotman notes, film industry not only employs existing clich
é/shtampy and
behavioral models of characters but also creates the new ones on the basis of
actors’ physical appearances and techniques (Lotman, Ob iskusstve). Chekhov
arrived in Hollywood in early 1940s. At that time Hollywood represented Rus
sians following the popular clich
é of the good, simple, kind folk of an ally coun
try, which partly predetermined Chekhov’s career in American film (Byckling
385). Although Chekhov was nominated for the Oscar in the “Best Supporting
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Actor” category, for the role of professor Brulov in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, (1945),
in his film figures Hollywood producers looked for a combination of culturally
established archetype and the actor’s personal acting type (Chekhov, To the Ac)
tor) or clich
é, oscillating within the duality of dramatic/comic characterization.
Hollywood exploited Chekhov’s persona either in dramatic parts as “a wise old
man” (Brulov in Hithcock’s Spellbound) or in comic ones as “a clown or a fool”
(Mark Polikoff in Hecht’s Spectre of the Rose)
1
.
Chekhov’s film figures embrace his experience both as an actor and as a spec
tator representing a certain duality between cultural and film archetypes. Con
tained within the boundaries of a classic Hollywood narrative, each of them in
cludes the fundamental elements of a classic character: “subjectivity, proper names,
’tags’ and star personalities” (Thomson 180). Chekhov’s film figures as well as his
stage masks are based on two different objects conceived by the actor: “the image
of character that exists in his reading of the play, and the material body that will
correspond to and fulfill that image on stage” (Quinn “The Prague School Con
cept of the Stage Figure” 76). In this dichotomy, Chekhov’s stage mask or film
figure are very close and resemble the Prague School concept of the stage figure
(Quinn “The Prague School Concept of the Stage Figure” 76).
Prague school film aesthetics
and Michael Chekhov’s ideas on acting in film
In analogy to the Prague School’s notion of the stage figure (Veltrusky, “Con
tribution to the Semiotics of Acting” ) and Chekhov’s stage mask (Chekhov To
the Actor; Quinn, “Prague School”), the term film figure signifies the viewer’s
image of actor’s creativity on the screen, and it is a construction both on the
part of an actor and on the part of a spectator. Film figure represents, according
to Mukarovsky, “a system of components aesthetically deautomatized and or
ganized into a complex hierarchy, which is unified by the prevalence of one
component over the others” (“Attempt”170). Film figure acquires a number of
substructures meant to express character’s emotions. All of them carry the dy
namics “by the interference […] of two types of gestures: gesturesigns and ges
tureexpressions” (Mukarovsky, “Attempt”174). These gestures embrace bodily
movements, hands’ gesticulants and facial expressions.
As Jakobson maintains, the aesthetics of film is different from that of theatre,
since the language of the former is composed exclusively of signs. If in theatre
things function both as things and signs, on the screen “it is precisely things
(visual and auditory), transformed into signs, that are the specific material of
cinematic art” (Jakobson, “Is the Cinema in Decline?” 146). As a part of film
material, film figure is in its functions an equivalent to lighting or sound used in
the narration. In fact, it constitutes film’s mise)en)sc
ène as any other object to
express the artistic will of a narrator/film director staging the event for the
Forgotten Hollywood
221
camera, thus forming film’s aesthetic entity and manipulating spectators’ per
ception.
2
The chain of visual images characterizes any film figure as a text com
posed by a fusion of actor’s and director’s devices.
As an aesthetic object, film figure corresponds with character — an artifact
or a construct, an agent of cause and effect in a continuous narration and a
collection of traits (Bordwell 86) determining the audience’s reception. In film,
the individuality of an actor — his/her physique, type of voice, or specific ges
tures — is either equal or superior to that of a character (Quinn, “Celebrity and
the Semiotics of Acting”). On the screen, actor’s body language: gestures, move
ments and facial expressions, dominates verbal and vocal expressions and is an
element of a cine)language (Lotman, “Semiotika kino i problemy kinoestetiki”
356). It becomes a cine)sign, which similarly to mask in Commedia dell’Arte
consists of external and internal elements of a character/type overshadowing
the personality of an actor
3
.
However, character determines the acting style of a performer and influenc
es the audience’s perception guided by its collective and individual expecta
tions toward the artifact and its archetype. Audience’s expectations embrace
conventions (a tradition, a dominant style, or a popular form); and experience
(“derived from everyday life and from other experiences” Bordwell 28)
4
. It is
audience’s function to bring the semantic meaning into “the overall pattern
that is perceived […] both subject matter and abstract ideas” (Bordwell 25). Thus,
film audience, similarly to folk one, “expects the actor to execute the code pre
cisely, erasing his inventive impulses while focusing his subjectivity in gestures
that conform expertly to coded expectations” (Quinn, The Semiotic Stage 76).
Although Chekhov developed his technique mostly for theatre actors, his
personal experience with the camera made him adjust his theory to the purpos
es of film. In his acting, Chekhov uses a combination of various techniques from
Stanislavskii’s psychological approach to Meierkhol’d’s constructivism, stressing
the necessity of distance or Shkovlskii’s defamiliarization between the I of an
actor and that of a character. Shklovskii’s defamiliarization is similar to de Saus
sure’s treatment of language as a system of differences, and thus proposes to
look at things dialectically.
Chekhov possessed the technique of a double vision employing humor as a
combination of selfirony and distance, which corresponds to the formalists’ ideas
on parody and grotesque (Eikhenbaum, Tynianov). Chekhov’s comic acting is a form
of displacement analogous to Eikhenbaum’s definition of literary grotesque, as play
ing with fantastic, irrational and constructed reality (Eikhenbaum, 288291). Chek
hov defines theatrical grotesque as the means to reimagine and reconstruct eve
rything on stage in order to destroy reality. It is to stretch the imagination “in
order to avoid imitating life” (Chekhov, Director 39). Chekhov’s definition of the
atrical grotesque is also in line with Shklovskii’s views on parody as a hyperboliza
tion of the inner and outer characteristics of a character (Theory 152).
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Yana Meerzon
Although Chekhov suggests making a film figure recognizable, starting its con
struction by defining its archetype, his personality, known for Hollywood’s audi
ence as the Russian emigr
é actor celebrity
5
dominates in each of his screen images.
Chekhov’s transformation is always based on individual characterization. To Chek
hov, a film actor (although tremendously depended on the will of a director)
must still differentiate between his/her I and I of a character and visualize his/her
future figure as an aesthetic object, looking at it as from the position of a specta
tor. Chekhov stresses the importance of conveying through nonverbal acting
devices a zritel’nyi obraz (visual image) arousing out of character’s speech and
actions (Chekhov, Literaturnoe Nasledie V.1:83). Therefore, according to Chek
hov and similarly to the Prague School, actor has to foresee each gesture, move
ment and intonation of his/her character and define it rhythmically, as the dom
inant of a film figure. Moreover, each of his characters embraces Psychological
Gesture that originates in actor’s imagination, transforms into movement or ac
tion, and is manifested in time and space of actor’s performance (Chekhov To the
Actor). As a result, each Chekhov’s film figure is a sign based on a particular arche)
type — the fundamental or denotative signification of a character
6
.
Moreover, Chekhov similarly to the Prague school recognizes the dichotomy of
collective versus individual subconscious of actors and spectators as shares of a cul
tural langue, within which the film figure emerges. In his comic parts, both in thea
tre and film, Chekhov uses the archetype of clown or more precisely Chaplin arche)
type. Chekhov’s clown, similarly to that of Chaplin, resembles Commedia dell’Arte
Harlequin, consisting of compulsive doubleness (Kimber 23), characterized by merely
gesture, movement, rhythm, and facial expressions as its primary elements.
Chaplin creates a tragicomic character, which embraces the opposites. Stylis
tically it is build on dual relationships between melodrama and slapstick, psy
chologically it represents the heroism of a little man, which is always pitiful and
laughable. But it is always creation of a mask, of the Other, through which the
persona is visible: the mask, however, is as important as the persona itself. The
essence of Chekhov’s characterization technique is in this ability to create the
archetypal, easily identifiable mask, through which the audience perceives ac
tor’s persona — a “clown with the sorrow in his eyes”.
Observations
In 1946, a screenwriter Ben Hecht, filmed Spectre of the Rose, based no his
own play, which he “would have thrown away in his early years” (Fetherling
153). After Chekhov’s success in Hitchock’s Spellbound, Hecht invited him to
play a floppy producer Max Polikoff together with two other “oldtimers”: Ju
dith Anderson (as Madame La Sylph, a ballet teacher) and Lionel Stander (as
Lionel Gans, a poet). Although Hecht was known as “the Shakespeare of Holly
wood”, he was no director. In this film he rushed to achieve the Hitchcockian
Forgotten Hollywood
223
atmosphere of suspense without having the latter’s directorial gift (MacAdams
240). As the result, the film setting and acting (Chekhov’s in particular) was
damaged due to flat camera angles and primitive editing.
However, it is still possible to see in Chekhov’s film figure of Max Polikoff the
unified semantic structure embracing both the telling name (Russian
émigré
Polikoff), an American cultural archetype, i. e. a salesman
7
, Charlie Chaplin’s
screen mask of a pitiful and touching tramp, and Chekhov’s persona as a celeb
rity actor. Apart from the literary archetype of unsuccessful merchant (from
Shakespeare’s Shylock to a group of characters emerging in Yiddish literature of
Sholom Aleichem and later Isaak Babel’), Max Polikoff resembles personages
from Ben Hecht’s childhood, the Russian Jews from the Lower East Side in New
York (Fetherling). Polikoff the dreamer and failed businessman also stands for
those emigrants who were, like Dickens’ Oliver Twist in London, seeking for
tune in the New World, in reality in many cases sinking down to the low depths
of New York, Chicago and other big cities.
Spectre of the Rose opens with Polikoff’s entering the dance class of his old
friend Madame La Sylph. Polikoff is broke but full of enthusiasm. He is dreaming
of “the lovely smell of art”, planning to produce a new ballet starring Andrey
Sanine — the brilliant dancer suffering from a depression after the mysterious
death of his wife and partner, Nina.
8
Using the range of nonverbal characteri
zation techniques, Chekhov, as early as in the opening scene, presents the es
sence (a whole) of his character, based on the archetype of Chaplin’s clown.
Everything from Polikoff’s gait to the way he is holding his hat and constantly
crumpling a piece of paper is Chekhov’s semantic gesture of the character. Chek
hov’s vocal characterization (including even his accent) just underlines what
has been given to the character through the gesticulants.
Analyzing Chaplin’s film language, Mukarovsky, similarly, describes his ges
tures as both conventional signs universally comprehensible, which “acquire
supraindividual validity” (“Attempt” 174) — that of an archetype; and social
signs, which “like words — signal certain emotions or mental states” (“Attempt”
175), belonging to a particular character. Thus in Chekhov’s performance of
Polikoff, the clowning gait and bodily postures would be archetypal whereas his
waving of hands is strictly individual to the character.
However, Polikoff is not only a great gambler at the vanity fair but also he is
a great liar, like Gogol’s Khlestakov (The Inspector General), which functions as
Chekhov’s personal comic archetype. Chekhov played Khlestakov, for the first
time in 1921, on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre, (director Stanislavskii). In
Meierkhol’d’s words, it was the first true embodiment of Gogol’s character —
comic and phantasmagoric at the same time. It was the impersonation of theat
ricality and comic grotesque: “Chekhov appears on stage with a pale complex
ion of a clown, with eyebrows as crescents” (Meierkhol’d, in Chekhov Literatur)
noe Nasledie V.1:445)
9
.
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Yana Meerzon
Chekhov’s Polikoff is also structured as a figure of a comic grotesque, correspond
ing with Shklovskii’s obnazhenie priema/laying bare a device (Theory of Prose 147),
the process of representing “an aesthetic form without any motivation whatsoever”
(Shklovskii Theory of Prose 147). Chekhov’s Psychological Gesture, an imaginary
(invisible for an audience) physical image/ sign of Polikoff, resembles that of his
Khlestakov constructed on the principles of hyperbole. “In Chekhov”s Khlestakov
all the most simple feelings – hunger, lightheadedness, ability to fall in love – were
hyperbolized, in fact it was the hyperbolized commodity” (Knebel’ 13).
Polikoff functions as a Proppean dispatcher / otpravitel’, who sends a hero (Sa
nine) onto a journey trying to put together a ballet without any financial support.
Polikoff is, therefore, responsible for the following events, although his personal
attitude, “the feelings of a dispatcher do not influence the course of an action”
(Propp 74). The affair results in Polikoff’s debts and no payments to his partners.
The scene between Polikoff and the angry lawyer of the designer Kropotkin (Geor
gy Zhdanoff) is a typical “lie scene” from The Inspector General (Act 3, Sc.6). In 1921
Chekhov’s drunk Khlestakov was telling stories to the Mayor and his guests about
his life in the capital, resulting in the tour de force of the scene — Khlestakov’s
description of a watermelon of 700 rubles, which he ate at home. Chekhov’s osoz)
nanie formy/realization of form as such (Shklovskii Theory of Prose 153) was in the
visual representation of a watermelon in a shape of a square, an iconic sign corre
sponding with Khlestakov’s erratic imagination. In fact, it was Chekhov’s artistic or
romantic irony (Markov 305), a form of actor’s defamiliriazation, which created Khles
takov not a character but a type, a generalized symbol and a sign (Markov 305).
Correspondingly, the scene in Spectre of the Rose represents lying Polikoff,
who tries to impress Kropotkin and than LaSylph that he indeed has the money
and as an honest producer will pay everyone shortly. Chekhov’s acting is based
on the same principles of artistic irony.
10
Moreover, in this episode, the audi
ence is presented with Chekhov’s usage of a metatheatrical device in film act
ing. Chekhov enacts in Polikoff’s speech a play within a play based on actor’s
defamiliarization from the character. He demonstrates both the humor of Po
likoff’s situation, sympathizing and co)suffering
11
with his character.
Clowning as a device of dual structure is similar to parody. It also contains
both a material being parodied in its estranged form, and a new artistic text —
a parody itself — raised on the background of the first one (Tynianov 116).
Therefore, Chekhov’s film figure is a paraphrase of Chaplin’s one. Chekhov em
ploys a nonverbal acting technique as the outer characterization of the inner
world of a character. In this aspect, he follows Chaplin’s clown, which combines
and transcends a variety of human feelings (Chekhov, Literaturnoe Nasledie
V.1:233). However, Chekhov’s movements, very elaborated in theatre, are limit
ed to hand qesticulants and facial expressions in film. This is what makes his
clown figure different from that of Chaplin, who favors the articulated body
language over his detailed mask (Mukarovsky “Attempt”).
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225
The same tendency can be seen in the scene of the ballet’s opening night.
Polikoff, the dispatcher, makes everything possible to open the production,
even against the musicians’ decision not to play without payment or the in
tention of the police to arrest Sanine as a suspect in his wife’s murder case.
The camera and Chekhov are focused on Polikoff’s facial expressions and ges
ticulants, which seemed to be borrowed from tragedy, but violated or concre
tized in this acting discourse by actor’s ironic attitude to his character. The
typical theatrical gestures of grief (arms raised, body trembling) are conveyed
here through petty gestures — Polikoff’s twitching fingers, crumpling and pick
ing at a piece of paper.
At large, this scene is a spatial metaphor of the film. As Polikoff is kept away from
his object of desire — a successful ballet with Sanine, “a real piece of art”, which will
make him rich — in the closed space of this office, so is Sanine kept away from his
object of desire — the beauty of dance and music — in the closed space of his sick
mind. Although Polikoff manages to open this production, a “hymn to beauty”, (an
other indirect reference to Chaplin’s beggar in “City Lights”, Mukarovsky 177), it
doesn’t help cure Sanine’s mental condition. Sanine commits suicide.
Specter of the Rose closes with the representation of Chekhov’s character –
broke again, back on the road. Therefore, this spiral or zigzaglike structure of
the character focuses on creating a selfabsorbed figure or mask, lacking its in
ner development, based on the universal archetype of a clown and on Chek
hov’s personal archetype of Khlestakov. Polikoff represents a structure of dis)
placement, the fundamental device of irony (Shklovskii, Theory). As an actor,
Chekhov mocks Polikoff’s perpetual enthusiasm once again in his closing mon
ologue (“I will be back in the spring”). Polikoff’s speech epitomizes not only
actor’s irony towards the character, but also is Chekhov’s expose as an artist, the
layout of his own journey: always on the road looking for an ideal actor and
theatre. Thus, Polikoff is a dichotomous structure based on Chekhov’s ability to
mix laughter with tears, to create stage and film figures as multiple signs. As
Chekhov states, “if you are going to act a tragedy, you must be very humorous. If
you are going to act vaudeville, you must act tragically. Inwardly, you will be
crying in comedy and laughing in tragedy” (Chekhov qtd. in The Drama Review
71). In other words, it is the rhythm of actor’s body in space that is the govern
ing principle of Chekhov’s performance, the technique of creating an acting
sign in its tripartite composition: as the essence of a depicted object, the object
itself and actor’s relation to it. Therefore, Chekhov’s film figure, as any human
being on the screen, “when entering the art of cinema, becomes a world full of
complex cultural signs. On one extreme is the symbolism of the human body
present in different cultures […]; on the other extreme is actor’s work as a means
of communicating with audience and a certain semiotic communication” (Lot
man, “Semiotika kino” 324).
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Yana Meerzon
Notes
1. The Cold War between Soviet Russia and USA had its affects on Chekhov’s film
career. Many of Chekhov’s friends and students (among them Beatrice Straight)
were accused in sympathizing with communists, and as result were blacklisted
during the late 1940s. Exactly at this time, Chekhov stopped making films regularly
and had to refocus his life again, involving himself in private teaching and coach
ing Hollywood’s actors. The only fruitful effect of that situation was that Chekhov
was able to influence a large number of Hollywood actors (Gregory Peck, Mala
Powers, Anthony Quinn, Ingrid Bergman, Garry Cooper, etc), who were able to
apply his technique and later pass it on to their younger colleagues.
2. The nature of cinema as an autonomous art explains its method of constructing
film figure not only with the actor’s means of characterization but also with those
of the director, who controls “over what appears in the film frame” (Bordwell 119).
Lotman finds three semiotic codes used in the creation of film figure: “1) directori
al; 2) everyday behavior; 3) acting as such” (Lotman, “Semiotika kino” 355), thus
recognizing in film figure a mixture of documentary and artistic representation.
This mixture equalizes actors and objects on the screen, making directing, shoot
ing and editing compete for the dominant position in the hierarchy of film aesthet
ics (Lotman, “Semiotika kino” 355).
3. Shklovskii’s kinoponiatie (cineconcept) about acting is the presemiotic concept
of acting sign, developed later in the Prague School.
4. The film figures of Charlie Chaplin and Max Linder are the examples of such col
laboration and become archetypes influencing all sides of film creativity.
5. Celebrity, in contrast, represents the public persona of an actor playing a role. “Ce
lebrity in its usual variety, though, is not composed of acting technique but of per
sonal information. […] In the context of this public identity there then comes to
exist a link between performer and audience, quite apart from the dramatic char
acter” (Quinn, 1990:156).
6. Chekhov believes that any actor with rich imagination is able to enact any person
ality, no matter how far it may be removed from actor’s I. He lists several constantly
intervening inner and outer elements entering the structure of any stage or film
figure, such as text, feelings and emotions of a character, character’s superobjec
tive, character’s individual atmosphere, and actor’s Higher I, functioning as actor’s
khudozhnicheskoe otnoshenie (artistic vision of) his/her future artifact (Chekhov
Literaturnoe Nasledie V.2:320). Chekhov’s artistic vision, correspondingly to Mu
karovsky’ views, assumes the preexistence of an aesthetic function of a film figure.
It originates in Chekhov’s idea of imaginary body and imaginary centre of a char
acter functioning as signifiers in actor’s outer characterization (Chekhov Literatur)
noe Nasledie V.1:104). Imaginary body of a future film figure together with its im
aginary center, gesticulants and vocal elements first appears in actor’s imagination
stimulated by means of concentration on a text, and then an actor incorporates it
into his/her actual presentation of a character on stage or screen
Forgotten Hollywood
227
7. In 1949 Arthur Miller created a tragic figure of a salesman, Willy Loman, depicting
a new tragedy and a new tragic hero — an ordinary guy, someone like you and me,
a product of the modern, highly praised, consumer society. For Loman as well as
for the comic Polikoff, everything is for sale, even the beauty of art.
8. Hecht’s choice of the name Sanine for the protagonist is clearly after the 1907 Russian
decadent novel Sanin by Mikhail Arzybashev. It has a historical connotation to Nizhin
skii for whose dance in La Spectre de la Rose Fokin adopted Carl Maria Weber’s “Invita
tion to the Dance”, 1911. Hecht’s choice of the name Nina, for the dead wife of Sanine
also has its literary allusions. Lermontov’s Arbenin from Masquerade loses his mind
after he has learned that his Nina, whom he had poisoned, was in fact innocent.
9. Moreover, in its grotesque, Chekhov’s Khlestakov appeared to his critics as the comic
mirror image of his expressionistic Erik in Strindberg’s Erik XIV, on the stage of the
First Studio, directed by Vakhtangov in 1921 (Markov).
10. Furthermore, Chekhov’s costume and makeup — a single fair lock of hair standing
up on his forehead, an artificial flower in his lapel, a polka dot bow tie — remind of
those of Khlestakov, which proves that the resemblance in the outer characteriza
tion leads to that in the inner characterization and is actor’s personal archetype.
11. It was the Russian opera singer Fedor Shaliapin who described the experience of
sochuvstvie. In Shaliapin’s terms, it is “I am not feeling as a character, I am feeling
for a character”. Shaliapin meant that when he is crying while playing Don Quix
ote, he is not crying as the suffering Don Quixote: he is crying as himself observing
Don Quixote’s suffering. Chekhov used this experience as an example of his vision
on actor/character relationships (Chekhov, To the Actor). Chekhov’s idea of sochu)
vstvie/co)suffering with a character contains a sense of distance between actor and
character. Cosuffering then implies actor’s defamiliaraized perception of a literary
figure, which he/she is to incorporate on stage within the boundaries of his/her
body as a stage mask. Thus the technique of co)suffering undermines actor’s emo
tions, stressing those of a character. It makes Chekhov’s theory antiStanislavskian.
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