Jon Mirsalis on Piano

(Potselui Meri Pikford). This film is a delightful "cine-joke" exploiting the personalities of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and the Russian stage-and-screen comic Igor Il'inskii; it satirizes the excessive adulation of American film stars by jazz-age Muscovites. Pickford and Fairbanks were not aware that they were starring in a film when they made their celebrated visit to Russia in 1926. Sergei Komarov compiled random footage of the visiting stars and used the editing techniques he learned from Lev Kuleshov to weave the material into a full-length comedy. The result is a practical demonstration of Kuleshov's seminal observations on the construction of film reality through editing. The story concerns a pretty film-studio worker (Anel Sudakevich) who is infatuated with movie stars and therefore rejects the love of a lowly ticket collector in a movie house (Il'inskii). By a series of very funny incidents, Il'inskii receives a well-publicized kiss from the real Pickford, making him an instant celebrity.

Malevich:

"(The cinema has) thoroughly convinced itself that the concrete can only be manifested in rubbery, pneumatic cine-kisses. And should someone dare to show a screen without kisses, society would label him a crazy utopian, an abstract-minded degenerate offspring of a concrete-minded society." (1926)