It was R. L. Karmen who got her next. Born in the same antediluvian year as Shostakovich, he was the one who even in his youth had a habit of standing with his legs apart like a heavy old man, the one who summed up his lifelong role: We were soldiers, armed with a camera. Unlike Shostakovich, his disposition was fundamentally cheerful, forward-looking. A laughing man dances, clutching at the bottles on a rope ladder, while an accordionist gazes lovingly up at him; thus runs one famous sequence of the movie “Volga-Volga,” which derives from Comrade Stalin’s favorite musical; more than one of us, particularly women, have compared Roman Karmen to that laughing man. Auntie Olga down the hall used to tell me that something about his likeness, which occasionally appeared in Izvestiya, used to make her feel resolute. (For good reason, she dropped dead of liver failure in 1964.) Karmen really must be considered an outstanding example of our successful Soviet man. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1942, 1947 and then again in 1952. Oh, he knew how to smile and laugh!
That smile of his, and the equanimity with which he agreed to commence, abandon or alter his projects as we suggested, gave rise to the supposition (highly beneficial to his career) that he accepted his place in a world whose cinema is as blandly necessary as the long petrol hoses entering the shiny square hoods of cars.
Roman Karmen has been called a great artist. And was he? In the year 2002, when I telephoned the University of Chicago film expert Yuri Tsivian, the following verdict came down: He’s, well, let’s say he’s an official classic, but he’s not remembered as a great filmmaker. If he filmed the surrender at Stalingrad, that wasn’t because he was a great artist, but because he was a trusted official. He was brave and reliable, but not anyone I would admire.
Poor Karmen! And yet, what if Professor Tsivian were wrong? For that matter, even if he were right, how was Karmen supposed to act? All we can do in this life is our best. And if we believe in ourselves, if our best pleases us, haven’t we followed the correct line? And who’s to say that cinema isn’t gasoline? I know a lady who decides which movie to see as a result not of the subject matter but of which time is most convenient for her. Somebody’s got to pump her gas. Somebody’s got to defend her mind. We were soldiers, armed with a camera.
Aged not quite fifteen, he arrived in Moscow in the same year that Lenin suffered his first two strokes and Comrade Stalin became General Secretary of our Party. His most treasured possession was the camera bequeathed to him by his martyred father.
He sent photographs to Ogonyok magazine, and received his first press card in 1923, when we find him interviewing Vassil Kolarov, the Bulgarian hero. In his anxiety and inexperience he used too much magnesium oxide; the flash filled the room with black smoke. The negative was blank, so he went back to Kolarov’s hotel in the morning. Perhaps it was his smile, perhaps his honesty or simply his desperation. In any event, the young photojournalist succeeded in getting both picture and caption published. For years he was haunted by the ironic gentleness of Kolarov when he granted the youth another chance. With his customary readiness to reveal himself, he told this embarrassing story to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who laughed lightly. For some reason all his embarrassment flooded back; he couldn’t understand why; he’d issued this anecdote so many times that it was scarcely new-minted; it was not until he was old that he understood not only why the tale humiliated him before her, but also what had brought it out of him in the first place: her gentleness, oh, her gentleness.
He photographed Lenin’s corpse lying in state, and captured many emotion-laden scenes, but the full power of images first impressed itself upon the young Roman Karmen later on in that same year, 1924, when he passed by an exhibition of German art arranged by Otto Nagel. Amidst the other flotsam hung “The Sacrifice” by Käthe Kollwitz. How can I describe this woodcut? The mother’s black cloak is open to reveal her breasts as she offers up her baby to death.
In the same folio, which was called “War,” Karmen, stunned and riveted, saw “The Parents,” a black woodcut of a man mourning, supporting the hand in which his face is buried upon the back of his wife, who mourns in his lap; this couple comprise a dark mass of mourning, silhouetted against a white background and their outlines printed negatively in white.
These two prints moved him to tears. But when, now scanning the walls almost ferociously in his determination to find every scrap of paper by this artist, he discovered “Hunger,” which would become leaf number two of most versions of her great “Proletariat” folio of 1925, the emotion which overcame him was anger—anger against an order which made people suffer in this way. And how strange it was that he was moved! For he had known hunger himself; and his father had suffered at the hands of the White Guards. This was the moment when he understood that the representation of reality can be more real than reality itself.
I’ve seen a photograph of Karmen in a cocked sailor’s hat, smiling sweetly, his white teeth peeking up around one edge of that accordion-like instrument his father left him; it is 1926, and he stands before a banner for the cause of the German workers. A moment before the picture was taken, he had just praised Kollwitz’s “Hunger” once again.
In 1927, when an exhibition specifically of the works of K. Kollwitz took place in Moscow, Karmen succeeded in photographing the artist, but by then she excited him somewhat less. He was living across the street from a billboard designed by Rodchenko; it advertised macaroni for Mosselprom. He used to study this billboard every day. It seemed to him that in this image every element was perfectly synchronized. Rodchenko not only conveyed information, he also defamiliarized it in the manner of the Russian Formalists (who had not yet been ruled alien to our Soviet culture). Furthermore, without in any way distracting us from his mission of selling macaroni, Rodchenko added whimsicality, even humor—a quality which our dear friend K. Kollwitz lacked.
At the end of the decade we find him in every periodical from Prozhektor to Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia to Mayakovsky’s Lef. He’d begun with a still camera, but it was really motion which seduced him. Rodchenko would have been content to photograph a single shorthaired Moscow athlete whose Red Star badge proclaimed her READY FOR WORK AND DEFENSE; Roman Karmen showed us walls of athletes’ legs actually flashing beneath icons to Lenin and Stalin on Red Square!
He captured Dmitrov, Gorki, Alexei Tolstoy, the interplanetary enthusiast-theoretician Tsiolkovsky and even the first American Ambassador, William Bullitt. In his inspirational films of this period, long tables of children bow over their studies; smokestacks vomit blackness above banner-hung posters, Mongolian-looking men in their autonomous folk costumes blow abnormally long horns which resemble the smokestacks.
Thanks to the benevolence of our Soviet state, he’d succeeded in attending the State School of Photography in the malachite-columned hall of the former Yar Restaurant. Among his talents was the supernatural one of meeting all the people he needed to meet, and avoiding the unwholesome. Eisenstein himself is said to have gazed upon him brightly, all the while clutching a briefcase in his armpit. But a canniness entirely alien to, for instance, Shostakovich, kept the young man from accepting too many blessings from this god whom one would have thought to be eternally anchored to his pedestal. Instead, he became a protégé of the rival Pudovkin. He became friends with L. O. Arnshtam, who’d left Meyerhold’s theater at the last possible moment; in ’37, when Meyerhold and his wife disappeared, Arnshtam not only didn’t get taken but kept right on making movies for Lenfilm! He and Karmen were inseparable.