Nonetheless, Russian cinema continued to receive international recognition. Two films - Menshov's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears and Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun - received the Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, in 1980 and 1994, respectively. The work of Andrey Konch- alovsky, who has plied his craft in Russia as well as in Europe and the United States with features such as Runaway Train (1985) and House of Fools (2002), is also highly regarded. In the late 1990s Aleksandr Sokurov emerged as a director of exceptional talents, gaining international acclaim for Mother and Son (1997) and Russian Ark (2002), the first feature film ever to be shot in a single take.
9
THEATRE AND BALLET
Theatre
Russian drama in the nineteenth century got off to a slow start because of strict government censorship, particularly after 1825. This atmosphere was conducive to the flowering of Romanticism, especially as manifest in patriotic spectacles. Melodrama, Shakespeare, and musical plays were the backbone of Russian repertory until the 1830s. The best-known plays of the new realistic school were those of Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Nikolay Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev. Until 1883 the imperial theatres, under strict government controls, had a monopoly on productions in Russia's two major cities, Moscow and St Petersburg. It was not until the monopolies were rescinded that public theatre was able to expand, although the state troupes, such as the Bolshoi in Moscow, continued to offer the most professional productions.
Theatrical life in Russia was dominated in the first decades of the twentieth century by the directors Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhoid. Just as Russian writers regarded literature as an art of social significance, so Stanislavsky believed that theatre was a powerful influence on people and that actors should serve as the people's educators. These convictions led in 1898 to the foundation, with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, of a people's theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre (later called the Moscow Academic Art Theatre), which became the arena for his reforms. Nemirovich- Danchenko undertook responsibility for literary and administrative matters, while Stanislavsky was responsible for staging and production.
Disappointed with the initial performances, Stanislavsky reflected that it should be felt there were living characters on stage, the mere external behaviour of the actors being insufficient to create a character's unique inner world. Fighting against the artificial and highly stylized theatrical conventions of the late nineteenth century, Stanislavsky sought instead the reproduction of authentic emotions at every performance. To seek knowledge about human behaviour, he turned to science and began experimenting in developing the first elements of what became known as the Stanislavsky method, his most lasting contribution to the theatre. He turned sharply from the purely external approach to the purely psychological. A play was discussed around the table for months. He became strict and uncompromising in educating actors. He insisted on the integrity and authenticity of performance on stage, repeating for hours during rehearsal his dreaded criticism, "I do not believe you."
A turning point in Russian theatre came with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko's restaging in 1898 of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. This new production was a triumph, heralding the birth of the Moscow Art Theatre as a new force in world theatre. In staging the play, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had discovered a new manner of performing which emphasized the ensemble. Stanislavsky felt that, though actors had to have a common training and be capable of an intense inner identification with the characters that they played, they should still remain independent of the role in order to subordinate it to the needs of the play as a whole. The new production of The Seagull was also pivotal for Chekhov. After the failure of the original production in St Petersburg in 1896 Chekhov had resolved never to write another play, but, following the acclaim he received for Stanislavsky's production, Chekhov went on to write, specially for the Moscow Art Theatre, The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903), plays which are still performed across the world today.
Commanding respect from followers and adversaries alike, Stanislavsky became a dominant influence on Russian intellectuals of the time. In 1912 he formed the First Studio, where his innovations were adopted by many young actors. In 1918 he undertook the guidance of the Bolshoi Opera Studio, which was later named after him. There in 1922 he staged Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin, which was acclaimed as a major reform in opera direction. From 1922 to 1924 the Moscow Art Theatre toured Europe and the United States with Stanislavsky as its administrator, director, and leading actor.
The Stanislavsky method, or system, developed over 40 years. He tried various experiments, focusing much of the time on what he considered the most important attribute of an actor's work - bringing an actor's own past emotions into play in a role. But he was frequently disappointed and dissatisfied with the results of his experiments. He continued nonetheless his search for "conscious means to the subconscious" - that is, the search for the actor's emotions. In 1935 he was taken by tlie modern scientific conception of the interaction of brain and body, and started developing a final technique that he called the "method of physical actions". It taught emotional creativity; it encouraged actors to feel physically and psychologically the emotions of the characters that they portrayed at any given moment. The method also aimed at influencing the playwright's construction of plays.
Meyerhold was initially one of Stanislavsky's actors, but he soon broke with his master's insistence on realism and began to formulate his own avant-garde theories of symbolic, or "conditional", theatre. In 1906 he became chief producer at the theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a distinguished actress of the time, and staged a number of symbolist plays that employed his radical ideas of non-representational theatre. Meyerhold directed his actors to behave in puppet-like, mechanistic ways, thus introducing into Russia a style of acting that became known as biomechanics.
Meyerhold's unorthodox approach to the theatre led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908. Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell'arte and oriental theatre, he went on to stage productions in St Petersburg and elsewhere, putting his talent and energy into creating a new theatre for the new state. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, he staged brilliant, inventive productions, both of contemporary drama and of the classics; his greatest artistic success as a director began with Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnificent Cuckold (1920) and ended with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin's story "The Queen of Spades".