She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, with the following results:
Page 99 of my book is the last page of Chapter 3, which focuses entirely on the Factory of the Eccentric Actor's 1926 film, The Overcoat (Shinel'). Because FEKS founders Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were mere teenagers when they began their artistic experiments, their work is often considered less mature than the more famous Soviet avant-garde films of the 1920s. In general, my book provides a cultural history of FEKS and its filmic output. On this particular page, I am concluding the chapter by summing up the group's remarkable and innovative approach to the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's classic short story, focusing specifically on the collective's treatment of the strange protagonist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who is all at once eccentric, funny, and piercingly tragic:Learn more about Monuments Askew at the Rutgers University Press website.In developing Akaky as an Eccentric protagonist, the directors introduce a conflictual play not merely among the tenets of Left-Futurism and the haunting images of Expressionism but also the easy comedic grace of American slapstick film, in which the major protagonists manipulate the objects around them both to make the audience laugh and to remake their environment in unpredictable ways. The audience feels safe laughing at slapstick protagonists because, despite their foibles and difficulty integrating themselves into the modern world, they are also unquestionably sympathetic and the hero of the tale. Akaky, in contrast, is barely the hero of his own close-up, and laughing at him is morally ambiguous at best because his audience runs the risk of identifying as the subject of his mournful plea, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” From this perspective, the uneasy combination of genres is put to singular use, in the sense that the “Eccentric manner” of the kino-play offers a comedic approach to a tragic character. Moreover, the combination of perspectives offered by the multiple authors and influences—imperial, Soviet, Ukrainian, German, and North American—calls attention to how much is lost when one considers the project a national one rather than a contact zone for a collection of outsiders, immigrants, and eccentrics: Gogol, Kozintsev, Trauberg, Nosferatu, Chaplin, Akaky. From a national cinema framework, then, Eccentrism is best seen as a secondary or peripheral movement, the work of daring youngsters, Leningrad’s alternative to Moscow, one that offers another subject relation, vis-à-vis the Eccentric protagonist, to cities, monuments, canons, and genres.Though it's not the most engaging introduction to my book, coming as it does at the tail end of a chapter, the passage, oddly enough, sums up the book's arguments quite well. My central claims are all at play here: FEKS was juggling genres, literary theory, inspirations, authors, and visions of a mythical city in a film that has somehow escaped sustained analysis. This excerpt hints at some of the formal analysis conducted in the chapter (how Akaky takes up space within the frame of a close-up) while also addressing the way the film uses cinematic devices to capture Nikolai Gogol's remarkable shifts in tone, style, and register. As it turns out, page 99 is an apt introduction to the Eccentrism that stands at the heart of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor.
If someone were to read page 99 alone, that reader would get a gloss on one specific Soviet film that requires greater cultural, theoretical, and formal analysis to be understood. On the one hand, I'm pleased that this experiment delivers a sample to the reader that is so clearly emblematic of the book's larger goal: that is, to give FEKS the kind of scholarly treatment that has been lavished upon the collective's contemporaries. On the other hand, if this reader were not already interested in the topic of Soviet silent film, then they would definitely miss out on some of the book's more enjoyable acrobatics: personal histories, creative disagreements, long forgotten diaries, archival discoveries, and gossip. Just by flipping the page, this reader would find themselves at the beginning of one of four of the book's "eccentric interludes," and smack-dab in the middle of a bitter break-up between FEKS founders, Kozintsev and Trauberg. These interludes reflect on why Eccentric history is so challenging to write: a collective is rarely in agreement. And when almost every member of a collective writes a memoir decades later, there are many competing claims to parse. I think I'd rather lure an unsuspecting browser in with page 101, but I'm not sure that's playing within the rules of the game.
--Marshal Zeringue
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