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Mosjoukine's Eyes by Jesse Lee Kercheval "One of the unassailable giants of silent cinema, Ivan [Mosjoukine]'s image as the quintessential, unrepressed romantic hero dominated pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. As an émigré in France, he triumphantly renewed his image and career, at least, for a while." - Le Giornate del Cinema Muto catalogue 1 "[Mosjoukine] was often associated with burning, mesmeric eyes." the eyes reach through time, distracted, feverish as a child, as hot in the light of the projector as our hearts, our hands, & as alive--how can he have died, alone, a pauper, in 1939? our eyes--in this theater packed to the last, far seats--mirror Mosjoukine's, his eyes reflect the over-arching Russian sky. for now, he is Michel Strogoff, secret courier for his czar, condemned to be blinded by the Khan for revealing himself--crying out-- as the Tartars whipped his widowed mother. sorrow is written in his gaze-- he has failed his duty; he has done his best & a sort of calm release--he will never see such sadness in this world again. will we, I want to ask, will we--now that Mosjoukine is dead? Michel Strogoff begs his mother not too look away, to be brave enough to let her face be the last thing that he sees. tears fill his eyes--water of this life-- as the heated sword, that thread of living fire weaves across the screen, then everything falls dark, everything drops down into the night already there & in this silent film, in this world where even blood cannot be red. a single drop oozes down Mosjoukine's cheek, a tear-shaped bead of black. 2 j'ai deux amours & one of them is paris. the other is an actor, dead more than sixty years, & forgotten in all the spellings of his transliterated name. O paris, city where I happened to be born, where Ivan Mosjoukine, brilliant star, fell far & fast to die destitute, abandoned by his public, the way he'd already died so memorably in Kean, crying out Hamlet's line, Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust! before he sees a light brighter than his own, & bowing, leaves the stage o paris, illuminated city east of everywhere I am, berth of all embarking, port of all return, street of truffles, bed of sharp remembered pain, on the banks, steep banks, of the river seine--o paris, enigmatic antidote--o glove thrown down which, au bon chance, climbs my hand again! you who took in Mosjoukine when revolution swept his world away, though my exile is metaphysical, may I ask the same of you? "Certainly, my pet," paris--or is it Mosjoukine?--replies, "regardez-vous!" I do & see the sun slip behind the sugared dome of sacre coeur, put the prickly sweetness in my pocket to munch for dejeuner, then stoop to scrounge the trash as Mosjoukine was said, in the end, to do & in the hush, I pick weeds to use as flowers. in the calm, I find sticks to build a fire. In paris, I do all this in all in paris. city I love as incurably, as irrevocably, as impossibly as I love a man as nearly beautiful j'ai deux amours, Ivan Mosjoukine, & one of them is you. 3 "Among L'Enfant du Carnaval's most memorable moments is the superb opening shot: Mosjoukine, in a harlequin's outfit, steals up to a dark curtain that fills the screen and yanks it aside . . . to reveal the vast teeming carnival crowds below." Never mind that your father was a landowner & you were destined for the law, you got off that train & became a child of the carnival-- the joy of your body nearly unrestrainable, always acrobat, jester, dancer poised on toe. So happy the landlord's daughter smiled at you you throw yourself backward on the bed bicycling the air then roll yourself into a sausage in the comforter, unroll so fast you blur. I have never felt as alive as you look on that screen. Never once do you go through a gate, if you can leap the fence. Never fence without dancing-- dance without the suggestion of a duel. Arms linked, you move through the carnival. Arms outstretched, you carry the naked dancer from the room. Arms open, you beckon to the audience. It makes me feel I am not living not really though a dictionary might call it by that name. Moving, you become a perfect poem. Moving, you become the very thing I try to write, & every day I fail. 4 "Following the 1917 Revolution, the troupe [with Mosjoukine] followed the Russian cinema's slow path of emigration to Yalta and, via Constantinople, to Western Europe." For no reason we set fire to the homemade signs that shouted from the lamp posts: Coat for sale--scarcely worn I can read the future--#1 Yevgeny Street Flat 27B We never repaid kindness. Or loans of clothes or bedding. We owned not the thinnest goddamn coin. We moved our feet that's what we did and our moving was what did it. We could have faced any direction since what moved us was the need to move. We would not sit still. We would not. We would not ossify. Not for anything or anybody. Instead we held our course were calm within it. We had our own two feet. We had the pavement warm beneath them. We had each other--pack of pups. We didn't envy even God. 5 "Lavish, light-fingered, and lilting with wit and imagination, Casanova was a historical fantasia, an epic comedy based on a real-life rogue. For Mosjoukine, the role of Casanova was pure moment . . ." say the word, bliss when the immaculate night routs the gaudy sun & velvet is drawn over window after window & candlelight begins to shine. (raw morning has yet to be imagined.) 6 Michel Strogoff is a movie, I know that. Mosjoukine isn't Strogoff, Strogoff isn't real. Yet, when Mosjoukine yells above the panicked rhythm of the horses-- Never be afraid! I think, He's talking to me. I think, He knows how terrified I've always been. Never mind that he is racing toward the vanishing of all he knew-- no one could stop the Russian revolution no one could stop the invention of sync sound. If he had been more timid, time would still have been the reef against which all his hopes would break but in the end, that doesn't matter-- in the end, we all must die in the end, we all will be forgotten So take the reins in one clenched hand-- & annihilate all fear 7 As Kean, you leave your heartbreak in the dressing room to play Hamlet's on the stage instead, saying, Actors are not allowed their own emotions. But it seems you spent decades rehearsing for the moment when what happened on the screen became your life as well. How else to understand your knowing nod when, in Behind the Screen, you return from war to find your name on your dressing room crossed out -- a younger actor's inked in its place. You wrote the scripts, or collaborated on them, directed yourself sometimes as well-- so surely, as you tried on tragedies for size, you had at least a premonition which ones might come true? & what of all those movies-- The Brigand Brothers, Kean, Morphia--where, after squandering great wealth you die in poverty, did you ever say, Ah, so this is deja-vu! I do, daily. I wrote a novel where the heroine almost dies in childbirth only to find myself, six years later, bleeding, bleeding, bleeding as if dying were the one thing I had left to do. Tell me, when you reached that wretched sanitarium, did you cry out-- for god's sake, cast another actor, for god's sake, let me write a better script. Or did you play Mosjoukine's Death as only you could do? 8 "The rapidity with which [Mosjoukine] is able to shift mood still astonishes, as does the gift identified by his contemporaries as 'expression in two tones' - the ability to show the feelings hidden by the expression of an apparently different emotion." In The Late Mattias Pascal, for one moment Mosjoukine's grief is boundless (I know, I know, I want to whisper-- I lost a daughter & a mother too--) but then his mother's death, --after agony, after great fear-- & his tiny daughter's vanish, withdraw before a battering of water by spiked blue wind before a brawl from land to sky he clearly feels a need to ululate, he feels a need to turn toward God & bow though he does neither only stands as the enigma that is life rains down blunt absolving blows 9 first, when we are born we are not anyone we are everyone the way an actor has to be-- this is the way god exists then, because we are not god, the world moves slowly in which is to say, the sun becomes the sun the sky, we learn, is both the sky & blue so why a long poem about Mosjoukine? because he is not me because he is no one thing in that, he is like god as such, I would not want him for my lover even if, as some physicist's believe, time does not exist-- I do not want to be his co-star & wife Natalie Lissenko or Kiki de Montparnasse or the Polish actress who bore the son who grew up to be a famous writer who looked very much like Mosjoukine who also married actresses who met an even sadder end instead, I want to be Mosjoukine but without the death from drinking, the debt, the son I hardly knew. I want to be Mosjoukine on the screen to be Father Sergius & take the axe to my own finger if blood is what it takes to be that vivid in a single moment but on the page--here. now. 10 "Mozhukhin approached sound films bravely, but roles for an actor with a heavy and ineradicable (and, it was sometimes said, unintelligible) Russian accent were clearly limited." Again, night falls-- its whiskers the prickle of winter that season we poets use as a metaphor for sleep & death Such metaphors mean less than nothing to me now Already I've walked too far on such thin ice already I've said too much . . . Mosjoukine-- what dialect do you speak now? 11 Imagine Mosjoukine's life as a silent movie. Once 18 reels long, now the curators at George Eastman House have-- in their vast collection--only the last 100 feet, less than 2 minutes if projected at the standard 16 frames per second. In it, Mosjoukine gets married one last time. The title cards are missing so it is not clear why the bride is smiling while Mosjoukine--pale--definitely is not. Because there is so little left of his life, we watch it twice. Then--for the hell of it-- the projectionist runs it backwards. Mosjoukine, trembling, hands back his ring. The bride goes right on smiling. They say the Institute of Film in St. Petersburg may have an alternate end filmed for the Slavic market which has always loved a good cry. In it, Mosjoukine dies-- smiling this time--& misses his own wedding. Toward the end of Mosjoukine's life, I fall asleep & dream I'm at his funeral-- nearly the only one who is--but the man sitting next to me shakes me awake. "Shhhh," he whispers in my ear, "no talking in the movies & no crying, not real tears." 12 "[In the end, Michel] Strogoff doesn't lose his eyesight to the executioner's burning hot sword because he sheds tears for his poor mother and thus saves his vision-this physiological miracle prepares us for one of the film's great moments: the close-up of Mosjoukine's slowly opening eyes as the villain lets out a terrified cry: 'He can see!'" I hope, in the end, you could see clearly 13 "[Mosjoukine] died from tuberculosis on 18 January 1939 at the age of 49. He was buried in a poor grave marked only by a wooden cross. Thus, his exile continued even in death." you traveled far & you were rash. the map's crease turned out to hold deep canyons, a long sad song of voyage. the gazetteer, the dead end of the road. Be consoled, old friend if existence were balanced on a sword point, if our crossing were nothing but a burden, then the map would not be folded, then there would be no map. © Jesse Lee Kercheval « Home | Contributor Notes » |
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