“Prokofiev is a man of the screen in that special sense which makes it possible for the screen to reveal not only the appearance and substance of objects, but also, and particularly, their peculiar inner structure . . . His world is not the world of conventional stage sets, illusory backdrops and extravagant stage effects; his is the world of microphones, flashing photoelements, celluloid spirals of film, the faultless accuracy of meshing sprockets in the motion-picture camera, the millimetric exactness of synchronization, and the mathematical calculations of length in film montage. . . .”
—Sergei Eisenstein, “P-R-K-F-V”1
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was born in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate (currently a part of Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine) and studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory from 1904 to 1914. In 1918, a few months after the October Revolution, he moved to the United States where he resided until 1922. Returning to Europe, he settled in Paris in 1923, but frequently traveled internationally. His first visit to the Soviet Union was in 1927, and he gradually relocated there during the interwar period, settling permanently with his family by 1936.
Prokofiev’s fondness for technology and the precision that Eisenstein marveled at was not merely a sensibility inherent in the film scores he composed. According to Prokofiev’s biographer, music historian Simon Morrison, he “led an impulsive, impetuous life in the moment. He was smitten with the technological advances of the modern age and took full advantage of high-speed communication and intercontinental travel.”2 Prokofiev was also passionate about chess, and even beat José Raúl Capablanca himself on one occasion in 1914.3 He acquired a driving license in 1927, and car trips became an important part of his life until World War II.
In September of 1930, during his family’s stay in the village of La Naze outside of Paris, Prokofiev bought a Pathé Baby 9.5 mm film camera. His diary notes give us a sense of the many films he shot on this amateur format. It appears these were classic home movies that engaged family members and friends in dramatic stories conceived on the spot.4 This was precisely the kind of “bourgeois” amateur filmmaking that Soviet cultural authorities, such as Grigorii Boltianskii, were cautioning against, deeming it “a waste of film stock.” Almost a century later, nothing seems wasteful in the precious moments captured by Prokofiev’s camera.
Central to every home movie was the composer’s first wife, the Spanish singer Lina Codina, whom he called Ptashka (“Birdie”). Some of the most prominent artistic figures of the interwar period were involved in these home movies; the appearance of theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, makes perhaps the most poignant impression amongst Prokofiev’s amateur filmmaking collaborators. Some of the most tragic figures of Stalin’s purges by the end of the decade,5 here the stage director and actress appear in carefree domestic moments right when the thickening clouds of totalitarianism were hovering over their country.
The ultimate fate of Prokofiev’s home movie reels is unknown; what we know about the films is limited to Prokofiev’s own written descriptions, below. Extrapolating from notes in his diary, which he kept between 1907 and 1933,6 the most active period of his home movie making appears to have been the first month after his purchase of the Pathé Baby 9.5mm camera, in September 1930. Prokofiev’s diary offers less evidence of home movie making from the period between 1931 and 1933. And it has significant gaps, over a number of months at times. As Anthony Phillips observes, the pleasures of Prokofiev’s European life, with its lengthy road trips, tours gastronomiques, and vacations in idyllic countryside locations, give way to the “hopes and fears” related to Russia that dominate the pages of his diary after 1930.7 Any movie making that may have taken place during this period quite likely remained unregistered by the composer. At the same time, one should note that individual, domestic amateur filmmaking was less common in the Soviet Union than it was in France, and Prokofiev’s limited access to film labs may have made using the Pathé Baby too complicated. Evidently Prokofiev continued to shoot still photographs. On one occasion in May 1933, while traveling by train through Armenia, the secret police took his roll of film while he was photographing at a station near the Turkish border. They promised to return it upon examination, should nothing deemed objectionable be found on it. Two days later, Prokofiev notes, his film had still not been returned.8
Another mention of home movie making occurs almost two decades after the summer in La Naze during what can be called an annus horribilis in Prokofiev’s life. On May 25, 1948, a note in the diary of his second wife, Mira Mendelsohn, mentions the kind of “cine-fun” that resembles the playful films Prokofiev described making in 1930. This time the man with the movie camera was conductor Boris Khaikin, artistic director of the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad.
Khaikin claimed he would produce all the operas Seriozha [Prokofiev] would write, filmed him multiple times with his movie camera in a variety of situations (in particular, he captured a comic scene played out by him and Seriozha: both are standing on our open terrace, Seriozha in the pose of a beggar to whom he is giving money).
Subsequently in a letter he sent to Sergei and Mira on August 4, Khaikin described the huge success his film had with friends, foremost amongst them composer Dmitrii Kabalevskii.
“[Kabalevskii] said that S.S. Prokofiev in a domestic environment on the screen is absolutely unique, and a newsreel studio would pay a huge amount of money for [these shots]. I decided not to sell yet, since I received my vacation allowance. But later, in case I have financial difficulties, I mean to earn money on this film.”
To this Prokofiev replied: “I recommend selling the film and paying the composer.”9
To anyone familiar with Prokofiev’s biography these playful scenes from the life of the Soviet artistic élite would seem eerie; by that time his first wife would have been in prison for six months, where she was subjected to abuse and torture, designed to extract confessions of treason. She would subsequently spend eight years in labor camps.10 Prokofiev’s own political standing was so diminished at this point that he could not even petition authorities on Lina’s behalf. Blow after blow in his working life culminated in the cancellation of scheduled productions. As a result, he lost nearly his entire income and felt himself buckling under substantial personal debts – the situation jocularly alluded to in the home movies by Khaikin, and referenced again in Prokofiev’s response to his fellow composer’s jesting letter.11 Kabalevskii’s admiration of Prokofiev’s amateur talents as an actor did not prevent him from betraying Prokofiev soon thereafter, joining his critics when it became clear that he was out of favor.12 Indeed, Khaikin went further than most in his denigration of Prokofiev, writing a letter to the Committee on Arts Affairs in early December of 1948 “forewarning” of the various failings of Prokofiev’s recent opera A Story of a Real Man, on which he had spent much of that year working. Though he would have had ample opportunity to voice any such concerns to Prokofiev up to that point, the composer apparently never did so.
Home movies and the “snapshot versions of life” that they create present a special kind of puzzle to historians: the stories they tell are often slightly beyond the frame itself, present, but in need of decryption. Prokofiev’s reels may no longer exist physically, but the moments his home movies recorded leaves one with an indelible impression of the great composer’s reality. Perhaps Eisenstein was apt in his appraisal of Prokofiev. He truly was a man of the screen.
1. Sergei Eisenstein, “P-R-K-F-V,” in S. Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), 261- 263. The title of Eisenstein’s essay is a reference to Prokofiev’s famous manner of omitting vowels while writing.↩
2. Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1.↩
3. Edward Winter, “Sergei Prokofiev and Chess,” online, latest update September 7, 2021, https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/prokofiev.html (accessed May 19, 2022). ↩
4. Observing the ubiquity of this type of home movie, film scholar Ryan Shand traces its development, by the early 1950s, into a festival-defined genre of “family film.” Ryan Shand, “The ‘Family Film’ as Amateur Production Genre: Frank Marshall’s Comic Narratives,” The Moving Image 15, no. 2 (2015), 1-27.↩
5. Meyerhold was arrested on June 20, 1939 and executed by a firing squad on February 2, 1940, following months of torture. Less than a month after his arrest, on July 15, Raikh was stabbed in their apartment and died of injuries a few hours later. Prokofiev never learned what happened to Meyerhold – to him he simply disappeared. See an account of these events from the perspective of Sergei and Lina Prokofiev in Simon Morrison, Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 200-203. ↩
6. However, according to Simon Morrison, Prokofiev’s elder son Svyatoslav mentioned that between 1936 and 1945 his father “filled three notebooks with autobiographical remarks, lists of various sorts, and points of nascent works; between August 1952 and March 1953, he compiled a ‘short diary.’” Simon Morrison, “Sergei Prokof’yev: Dnevnik 1907 – 1933 by Svyatoslav Prokof’ev,” book review, Journal of the American Musicological Society 58, no. 1, 233-4.↩
7. Anthony Philips, “Introduction,” in Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1924 – 1933: Prodigal Son, ed. and trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), xv.↩
8. Sergei Prokof’ev, Dnevnik, 1907 – 1933. Vol. 3, 1926 – 1933, ed. Sviatoslav Prokof’ev (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2017), 477-8; see also Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1924-1933: Prodigal Son, ed. and trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 1059-62. Even during the post-Stalin times, photographing and filming “strategic objects,” such as railroads, required state permission, which most amateurs were well aware of.↩
9. Mira Mendelsohn-Prokofieva, O Sergee Sergeeviche Prokof’eve: vospominaniia, dnevniki (1938-1967), ed. Elena Krivtsova (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2012), 362-5.↩
10. Ibid.↩
11. Ibid.↩
12. This admiration resonates with Valentina Chemberdzhi’s observation that flattery was predominant in the lengthy letters Kabalevskii frequently sent to Prokofiev during this period. See: Valentina Chemberdzhi, XX vek Liny Prokof’evoi (Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2008), 230.↩
13. Morrison, The People’s Artist, 330-1.↩
14. Ibid.↩
15. As Richard Chalfen so aptly put it in the title of his book on amateur photography and film, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987).↩