The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (dir. Lev Kuleshov, 1924) **

If you’re an American, it’s rare and refreshing to watch a film featuring Russian communists mocking American capitalists. This silent slapstick comedy is about the misadventures in the newly formed Soviet Union of an American named J. West, “President of the YMCA,” who looks like a middle-aged, slightly demented Harold Lloyd. He’s read “certain New York magazines” before his trip and consequently brings with him a defensive American flag to wave plus a maniacal cowboy sidekick. Mr. West sees menacing “Bolshevik barbarians” behind every tree, all of them, in his fevered imagination, sporting hugely overgrown mustaches, ratty fur hats, and a lot of murderous weaponry. Though Mr. West does get menaced in Russia, it’s by impoverished aristocratic White Russians running long cons. Eventually Mr. West is rescued by kindly Reds.

Though the film drags on a bit and comedy doesn’t seem to be Kuleshov’s particular forte, it’s one of the first to emerge from the Moscow Film School he co-founded, where he taught basic film theory and practice to pioneers of Soviet montage cinema including Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Kuleshov demonstrated through experimentation that editing is central to cinematic art. If you’ve heard of Kuleshov, it’s because of his famous experiment revealing the “Kuleshov Effect.” The experiment showed that an audience would attribute the appropriate emotion to the actor whose face was intercut with shots of various stimuli such as a bowl of soup, a coffin, or an open prison door. Viewers praised the actor’s ability to convey hunger, sorrow, and joy. The punch line was that it was the same shot of the actor’s neutral face each time — a revelation that helped to squelch film theorists’ desire to study film performance seriously for decades to come.