As the first modern proletarian revolution, the history of the Paris Commune was sacred to Soviet Communism – at his death Lenin was shrouded with a Commune flag – and the reasons for its failure remained an unending field of study. In 1871, discontented workers refused to recognize the Third Republic’s capitulation to the Prussians, following the siege of Paris, and formed a National Guard to defend the city. Municipal elections were held, and won by the insurgents, who assumed the name of the Paris Commune. Battle was drawn between the National Guard, centred in Montmartre, and Government troops in Versailles. After two months of fighting the Commune was brutally suppressed, and 25,000 Communards, many of them women and children, were executed in the Semaine sanglante.
Kozintsev and Trauberg were at first unenthusiastic when Sovkino proposed the subject, but then recognized a continuity with The Overcoat and S.V.D. As before, they were eager to avoid the conventions of Russian/Soviet costume films.
Their reading took in classic sources like Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France (1871) and the communard journalist Hippolyte Lissagaray’s Huit jours de mai derrière les barricades (1871), itself edited by Marx but also Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, La Débâcle, L’Argent). The script approved by Sovkino was “a real love story … an excellent melodrama scenario like S.V.D.” (Trauberg), but the appearance of Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg radically changed their approach: “A social generalization appeared across the multitude of faces, situations, and objects, a collective portrait of the epoch interested us infinitely more.” (Kozintsev)
In February 1928 the directors made a three-week trip to Paris along with Abram Room and the cinematographer Yevgeni Mikhailov, who shot 1,000 feet of images of the city, later incorporated into the film. The group were clearly influenced by Impressionist painting, and Moskvin developed a pictorial style unique to the picture, making particular use of a portrait lens which put the foreground into sharp focus in contrast to the background activity, seen in near-pointillist textures. Smoke and steam play a great role.
It is safe to assume that the final weeks of the production, from the meeting with Shostakovich, saw its radical transformation into its final and present state, the inseparable integration of music and image, a neo-operatic medium never paralleled, unique to this work. By a happy chance, Sovkino were currently concerned with the issue of improving musical accompaniment to films: Meisel’s German score for Potemkin had been a lesson. The 23-year-old Shostakovich was a choice that suited the FEKS unit: he had just made a name with his First Symphony, had written an opera on Gogol’s The Nose, and was composing music for Mayakovsky’s The Bed Bug. Kozintsev recalled, “We immediately came to an agreement with the composer that the music would be linked to the inner meaning and not to the external actions, that it should develop by cutting across events, and as the antithesis of the mood of a specific scene. Our general principle was not to illustrate, and not to complement or coincide on this point.” Shostakovich saw the film once, asked for a list of sequences and timings, and nine days later returned and accompanied the film from piano sketches. The full composition, scored, according to contract, for an ensemble of 14-20 players, was ready to rehearse by the beginning of March. However in the two weeks before the premiere, 19 March 1929, Kozintsev and Trauberg radically re-edited, to reduce the film from almost 2 hours to 90 minutes. Shostakovich, suffering from acute flu, struggled to cut the music to fit. Hardly surprisingly, the first performances were disastrous, with an unready score and conductors resentful that they were being denied their normal fee for arranging the musical accompaniment. After two shows in Leningrad and perhaps one or two more in Moscow, with audiences complaining that the conductor must be drunk, Shostakovich’s magnificent score was abandoned, and forgotten for the next half century.
Both the film and the score polarized critical debate. The magazine Kino praised the “profound historical generalizations and a direct Marxist analysis of history”, while Komsomolskaya Pravda said that the film and its authors, having “desecrated the heroic pages of the revolutionary history of the French proletariat, should be brought to trial”. Four decades later the French government evidently felt the same, and banned a screening of New Babylon planned to commemorate the centenary of the Commune. – David Robinson

The “long version” of New Babylon
In the early 1980s a print of New Babylon, titled in German and preserved in the Cinémathèque Suisse, came to light, and was screened in Hamburg. It proved to be one-third longer than the recognized Russian prints, with an additional 178 shots, totalling some 700 metres. Leonid Trauberg, then in Western Europe, instantly discredited and disowned this version, which contained, he said, “scenes I personally cut. Not lost material, but scenes Kozintsev and I deliberately removed … To me it is a great mystery how this film material, which we took out of our film, has survived. New Babylon does not need restoration. The generally available copies are of good quality and represent the version Kozintsev and I and our collective of artists – including Dmitri Shostakovich – authorized … I learned it may be possible that film material, be it negative or positive, exists which Kozintsev and I thought unnecessary or bad … If one has or finds parts which were obviously or apparently shot for New Babylon, but unknown to the final version (which was cut by Kozintsev and me), please, do not put them back in the film. Keep it if you like as a curiosity. But as far as the montage of New Babylon is concerned, cut it out. Like we did. Kozintsev, nor I, nor any of our collaborators, ever intended to make a tiresome film.”
In private, with friends, Trauberg maintained this position even more vehemently. After his death, however, would-be restorers speculated that he only wrote the letter out of political fear or discretion, trying to conceal the degree of official censorship that had taken place more than half a century before. This view becomes even more untenable when we examine the “replaced” shots, which are for the most part purely explanatory, without any possible censor-sensitive content. Conversely, it is certain that had 700 metres of film been disapproved on ideological grounds, the censorship process would not have been achieved within the period – little more than two weeks – in which Kozintsev and Trauberg completed their final editing.
Kozintsev recalled, “Little by little we lost our taste for the labyrinthine complexities of the plot … a social generalization appeared across the multitude of faces, situations, and objects; a collective portrait of the epoch interested us infinitely more. The pages of the scenario dwindled, to be replaced by the unique musical thrust of the era, a dynamic fresco.” Without doubt they had been stimulated by the unprecedented audio-visual dynamic generated by the combination of the images and Shostakovich’s music. Those last two weeks of editing must have been concentrated on the creation of that unique fusion. Of course it was done too fast. Shostakovich, with bad flu and a 40o C temperature, was given a nightmare task in changing and re- orchestrating at such short notice. Trauberg himself admitted, “At the last minute we experimented with the montage: the plot became too vague, secondary. Audiences were only able to follow our story with difficulty.”
It is in an effort to counter this that the extended, German-language version re-inserts shots in a pedantic effort to clarify the story. The editing of the added material is generally clumsy and unrhythmical, and was certainly not done by the filmmakers. The explanation is to be found in a footnote on page 13 of Correspondence of G.M. Kozintsev, 1922-1973: “Additional changes – inserts of ‘plot scenes’ which were missing in the version shown on the Soviet screens, were needed when sending the film to Germany.” The Cinémathèque Suisse print, then, is clearly one of these “export versions”. Confusion persists: even the most dedicated FEKS scholar, Marek Pytel, is on record as claiming this export print as the only authentic, unedited version of New Babylon; but it now seems safe to respect Trauberg’s wishes: “Keep it if you like as a curiosity.” – David Robinson

The Score
After a handful of disastrous performances, Shostakovich’s music for New Babylon was withdrawn, and appears to have been considered lost by the composer for the rest of his life. Within months of the composer’s death on 9 August 1975, however, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky found a complete set of parts at the Lenin Library in Moscow, and prepared a six-movement suite of highlights from the work – the first time the music had been heard for 45 years. Both the original score and Rozhdestvensky’s suite were published, but both share the inherited shortcomings of missing tempo-indications and instruments out of synchronization. Nevertheless, this score was adapted for a succession of live performances.
Subsequently the firm of Boosey & Hawkes in London acquired lithograph reproductions of the original (1929) orchestral parts and a manuscript score that seems to have been copied from them. This version had nearly 200 more bars than the previous version and contained all the missing tempo indications, as well as lining up the instruments correctly and solving many other problems. (I am grateful to the late Malcolm Smith for allowing me unlimited access to this material.)
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, a flood of hitherto unavailable material was to flow out of the former USSR. By the start of the present century the composer’s dedicated widow, Irina Antovnova, had established a centre in Paris for the study of her late husband’s life and work, as well as establishing a privately funded publishing house, DSCH, dedicated to the publication of a new complete edition of all the composer’s works in 150 volumes. The DSCH version of New Babylon was published in 2004 as Volume 122, and reveals how much music was missing from earlier editions. One of the first full-size colour facsimiles to be made available at the Shostakovich Centre in Paris was of the original (“lost”) manuscript full score of New Babylon, now housed in the Glinka Museum, Moscow. I am very grateful to Emmanuel Utwiller, current director of the Shostakovich Centre, for allowing me unlimited access to this score over a period of years, as well as his colleague Tatyana Maximova, who could confirm that all the corrections and cues added to the score were indeed in the composer’s own handwriting. The availability of this score was obviously of immense importance, as at long last we were now able to check the multitude of textual queries that had accumulated over many years. However, there were more unexpected surprises in store. For the first time we had some of the composer’s own indications as to how the music should synchronize with the film. One of the biggest mistakes we had made was to assume that the music started with the opening credits. In the manuscript it is clearly marked to start later, at the first intertitle, “Voina” (“War”), the opening credits being silent. The biggest surprise in this score was the ending. There were nearly 130 more bars after what we knew up to that time to be the final (and unresolved) chord! A preliminary script published in December 1928, before shooting began, tells us what shots were planned for this ending, but the passage must have been abandoned at an early stage, as it is not found in any known print of the film. This musical fragment will receive its belated premiere in a special performance, following the film.
The composer was proud to produce this score at great speed, but the re-editing of the film obliged him to rework some sections in an unreasonable hurry. This has left its mark in occasional illegibility of notes, ledger lines, and other signs. I am very grateful to Pierre-Alain Biget for his help in spending much time both visiting the score at the Shostakovich Centre in Paris and helping us with well-considered opinions in finding solutions with which we hope the composer would have been happy.
The score has sometimes been performed with large ensembles, but Shostakovich’s original contract specified that it should be for 14-20 players. In St. Petersburg, I visited all the surviving cinemas where New Babylon had been performed, and was surprised how small they were, with space only for a salon orchestra of 14 or 15 players – the size of the salon orchestra of Ferdinand Krish, which performed for the Moscow premiere. Moreover, the sets published for the first performances consisted of only 14 parts. Hence our decision – for the present performance as for the new recording for Naxos – to use solo players, which immediately gives both great clarity and character to the score. – Mark Fitz-Gerald

(Programme notes first published in the Giornate del Cinema Muto catalogue 2011)