From Dziga Vertov, who was already suspect on account of the formalism in his “Man with the Movie Camera,” Karmen kept personally clear, although he is known to have seen a number of the man’s newsreels. This scrupulous neutrality undoubtedly served him well in his later years, when he taught at the All-Union State College of Cinematography.
In the cutting room, even the scratches on film leaders enthralled him, wiggling past his eyes like the light-streaks of Moscow trams in the night. Soon we began to associate him with the neoclassical pillared facade of Lenfilm Studio in Leningrad. One catalogue gushes: Unusual angles, the most incredible positioning of the camera, the play of light and shade, compositions—it was all new, unheard of and unique. The curator had evidently never heard of Rodchenko.
In 1930, when his future with Elena was as tiny as a bomb which is still far overhead and he hadn’t even graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography, Vladimir Yerofeyev invited him to be assistant cameraman on our first Soviet sound film, “Far Away in Asia.” And so far away in Asia we find him, in collaboration with the renowned and slender Edward Tissé, recording the Kara-Kum expedition. Our new Soviet trucks will pass the test! The temperature reaches one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Karmen films the last drink of water. Here’s a photograph of Karmen on a camel’s back, with a turbaned guide behind him; he’s wasting no time; he’s filming!
In China, wading a river with his cine-camera lashed to another camel’s back; in the ice-covered rigging of the Sedov with his camera clutched against the breast of his parka; in besieged Leningrad, leaning over the hood of a ruined truck to establish his position; with his camera at his eye in a New York penthouse; panning the Kino-Eye across a long S-shaped column of captured French soldiers in Vietnam; that was how he would spend his life. A film every year and often more! Simonov remembers him as always working, even bandaged, sick or exhausted, no matter what his mood or how dangerous the conditions.
He sincerely tried to film not only the essence, but the hope. When he produced his sound newsreels about the exemplary shock workers Nikita Izotop and Ivan Gudov, Gudov he filmed at his lathe; Izotop he filmed trying to study geometry. Did Izotop become a geometer? Not exactly. But thanks to his dedicated productivity he’d won the chance to try, as he never would have under capitalism. Now any worker had that chance. This is what Karmen wished to show us. Can such a strategy be called “art”? Roman Karmen didn’t care. He was no formalist, not he!
In 1933 he made a film called “Parade on Red Square in Moscow.” In 1938, he made “Mayday.” In 1948 and 1952 he made two films each of which was called “Mayday on Red Square.” No one can say he neglected the home front.
In 1938-39 we find Karmen shooting the newsreel series “Embattled China,” his sheepskin collar opened, his sheepskin hat high on his forehead so as not to occlude visibility, aiming a cine camera which curiously resembled a metal butterfly or perhaps the wind-up key of a clock at a burning tower. He repeatedly advised his colleagues to link all points in any temporal order, a credo which he had long since forgotten that he’d derived from Vertov. But no harm done! After this bow to dynamism, Karmen invariably linked all points in the order A., B., C. More impressive than the arrangement of points is the undisputed fact that the film team traveled twenty-five thousand kilometers. Upon his return, he wrote A Year in China, which—measure of his industriousness—he both started and finished in November 1939. This book achieved immediate publication. Its author was accepted into the Soviet Writers’ Union.
In 1936 he lay flat on his back during an Italian air raid and filmed straight upwards, with Ethiopian women and children dying all around him. He was always lucky, if you want to call it that. The resulting documentary, “Abyssinia,” undercut and embarrassed the Fascists. Almost immediately he began to film the twenty-two installments of our newsreel “On the Events in Spain.”
I’ve been told that it happened like this: Karmen wrote a personal letter to Comrade Stalin, took it himself to the guards at the Kremlin gates, and waited a week—it’s like some old parable!—and then he and his fellow cameraman Boris Makaseyev got called to Central Board of Cinematography. Next morning they were both on a plane to Madrid. Roman Karmen had all the luck! On the same day, Shostakovich trembled at home in Leningrad, waiting to be arrested…
Two Panzertroopers with cocked berets roll toward Madrid, the great gun between them pointing up at the sky. Somehow, Roman Karmen is hiding in a trench and filming them! In the words of K. Simonov: As we watched the films sent in by Karmen from far off Spain, we young poets were consumed with a burning envy of that man we did not know, that man with the camera who was now on the front line of the fight against Fascism.
Street fighting in San Sebastián and Irún; women building fortifications on the outskirts of Madrid, as they would soon be doing on the outskirts of Moscow; a bullfight in Plaza de Torres of Barcelona, after which the bull-fighters and spectators went straight to the front—and here’s our clean young man, his dark beret not covering his ears, gripping the long lever of his cine-camera, leaning forward and down in the direction of its snout. (Dziga Vertov: The filmings in Spain represent an indisputable achievement of Soviet cinematography and reflect the great efforts of Makaseyev and Karmen. No matter that Makaseyev has been listed first. Their lens is now focused on the real, the direct and heroic aspect of the struggle.) In each of those twenty-two newsreels he warned us that this was merely the beginning of Fascist aggression, that another great war was coming.
The most dangerous and terrifying sequences of the documentary “Spain” were shot by him alone; for when it came time for Madrid’s fiery doom, even Makaseyev departed; Roman Karmen was the only cameraman brave enough to stay.
One of his newsreels from 1936 really got to her: the famous one with the closeup of the resolute young girl who raises her clenched fists; other youths behind her stand up for Spain with their hands and their rifles. And so Elena went to Spain. That was brave, absolutely. Of course I’ve also heard that she was experiencing some kind of love trouble at that time.
What was going on inside her? None of us will ever know Elena; she’s as closed to us as any German. But she must have been captivated not only by the brave passion of these films, but also by the man himself. Sergei Drobaschenko remembers him as a man filled with energy and elegance—the antithesis of the helpless, rumpled Shostakovich.
Back at home, Shostakovich and Glikman went to see every installment of “The Events in Spain,” watching the Loyalists smile proudly beneath their triangular caps which resembled folded cloth napkins. Shostakovich was anxious about something—oh, me, very anxious!—From the screen of the Kino Palace, the Loyalists stared out at them, gripping their rifles; and Shostakovich, whose smile was somehow as irregular as the icy streets of Leningrad would be during the siege, said that he was very, you know, happy for Elena.
No doubt he wasted many nights wondering how it must have been for Elena Konstantinovskaya and Roman Karmen in Spain. I know I have. Of course I’ve seen that photograph of Elena wearing her Order of the Red Star.25 She always achieved whatever she set out to do—except in one case, of course. So she got Karmen. It’s possible that she had set her sights on him years earlier, when he made that gripping newsreel of the Arctic pilot Farikh, shot at the snow-covered airport. Elena always liked fliers and rocket-men. All the same, anyone who writes about her quickly finds himself at a loss. She’s unknowable.
25
Simonov, whose testimony is unreliable since he seems to have also been in love with her, remembers seeing her going into the Palace Hotel in Madrid, now converted to an orphanage, and always bringing something for the children. On 24 October 1936, when the first Soviet tanks went into combat in the vicinity of Aranjuez, Elena was there in the midst of a detachment of Komsomol volunteers. Karmen saw her and was captivated. He believed her to be as attracted as he was to the Spanish carelessness for death. I’m informed that her Komsomol training stood her in good stead; the TASS journalist Mirova, who unfortunately