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There is nothing poetic about the internet, but you sometimes stumble

on something that wakes the sleeping poet, terrifying him as he is roused.

One afternoon I found myself watching a silent film,

captivated by the idea that everybody in it was now dead.

Moscow Clad In Snow was shot in 1908 by Pathé Frères;

an ‘actuality’ illustrating facets of Moscow in four parts.

Its every man, woman, child, dog and dray horse is now no more.

 

We open on the frozen river

panning across the Kremlin from Marshal’s Bridge

to a procession of now-dead horses pulling sledges past the citadel.

From the first frame, a sense of history is as palpable as the place;

I have never been to Moscow but it is as clear as the cold that

if you let it, this film would transport you even further back than 1908—

to Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment, the 1860s,

eastwards to Siberia and beyond.

 

I do not want to go there, and so while I am watching on my computer screen,

as phantom cold bites impossibly into my face and fingers,

there is something incongruous and dislocating

about the stirring score, almost 100 years after it first accompanied the action.

Then, one minute and ten seconds into the film,

what is now a corpse but was once a boy enters jerkily from the left

stumbling, gracelessly—perhaps hypnotised by the lens—

zigzagging back across our field of vision to avoid its one-eyed stare.

 

A few seconds later a gust of wind sends some

now-decomposed civilian remains careening past a then-living sentry,

—each dwarfed by a colossal cannon outside the Kremlin walls—

towards the shelter of his pill-box on the other side.

And as the deceased guard maintains a beady eye on the camera,

he marches back the other way in heavy boots,

his collar turned up against the driving snow,

and is gone forever.

 

The ghostly manifestation of an army regiment, bayonets fixed,

is led towards the camera by its already bereaved commanding officer,

bound, perhaps, for the Kremlin’s vast armoury,

in front of a gigantic grounded bell

that could never again sound an alarm.

Goodbye, unknown soldiers!

How many more days and nights

did any of you have to live?

 

The bustling, uncaptioned street scene

might be in Victorian Whitechapel, were it not for the heavy snow;

a controlled chaos of people, sleighs and blinkered horses

(why do the horses seem so much more real and vital than the people?),

ghostlike traffic crosshatching the screen in defiance of collisions

and everything moving without the hindrance of traffic lights or roundabouts;

just one policeman; a lifeless sentinel on horseback looking on,

his mount’s head barely moving as the world navigates around them.

 

Men who may have been buried before I was born

tramp across the thoroughfare while others drag goods-laden toboggans like biers

and cadaverous women dodge the sleighs, their long dresses dragging in the snow.

Snow clings to hats and shoulders in what we would think of as a blizzard

but which for the dead citizens of Moscow is probably the business of just

                                                                                                                             another day;

They are familiar with the cold, they know how to live with it

and no astonishment haunts their faces

as the film cuts relentlessly to the next caption:

 

“TWO MONTHS OUT OF THE

YEAR A BIG TRADE IN

MUSHROOMS AND FISH

IS CARRIED ON.”

 

Out of nowhere a boy appears in the marketplace,

grimacing at the camera, his snowblind eyes creasing into the lens,

and is almost instantly shunted aside.

Is this deathly Muscovite Boy, so resigned to his fate,

the same one who stumbled into a previous scene?

I like to think so, however unlikely that may seem.

His submissiveness is luminous as he smiles—

so briefly and doubtfully—at what the man next to him is saying.

 

A contrite flick of the head and then a look of childlike panic

as a man in a white hat pushes into the frame behind him.

His part is over far too soon; perhaps the director really was more interested

in market-traders than some disembodied urchin in black, brightened by the pale

                                                                                                                                shroud of his scarf.

I wonder what became of him?

However much of a treat this day at the market might then have seemed,

the rifles of Destiny, their bayonets fixed,

would soon be drawn against this Muscovite Boy and his eager co-stars,

 

among whom there is stiff competition to get into the frame and ensure others

                                                                                                                                                 do not.

Around the great corrugated drums (containing God knows what),

the gormless man with the cheery smile is so taken with the camera

that he steps in smartly to conceal two other men and take centre-stage.

The fish that tooth-poor youth is hawking in the next scene

is not so much ‘stiff fresh’ as frozen solid,

but nothing can surmount the figure of the wraithlike boy

who will now always be there, like an vestigial question mark.

 

Following the market scenes, the narrative is lost in a snowdrift;

the character close-ups are all bunched together in the middle of the film.

The final few minutes—‘PETROVSKY PARK’ and

the dismissive-sounding ‘GENERAL VIEW OF MOSCOW’—

are but sweeping long shots with walk-on parts

in which the extras are silhouetted without personality,

as if the film-maker suddenly lost interest in Moscow

once the image of the boy was in the can.

 

And so it is not surprising that

the shape that persists against the blinding snow

has ears turned-down by a fur cap,

and is old before his time;

or that we are drawn back constantly

to the highlight of the seven minutes of this footage:

a crop-headed boy’s acquiescent face,

accepting suffering and pleasure with the same good grace.

 

The fragile celluloid proved more durable

than surely even Pathé Frères could have hoped

(a miracle the film survived, outlasting all its players).

We do not know the director or the cinematographer’s name;

they are lost on the far side of Marshal’s Bridge.

and so although like them the boy is anonymous,

his face at least is digitally preserved

as the star of a film he doubtless never saw.

 

The Muscovite Boy could never have known

that as nitrate film decays, the celluloid shrinks and buckles

and the volatile emulsion fixing the image disintegrates.

Neither could he have predicted that even when

the original negative has turned brown and rotted into acrid dust

he could live on in technologies yet to be invented

and be beamed across the globe and into outer space.

But far more terrifying than any of this

 

is that caught in the flickering of one-hundred-year-old light

is a glimpse of humanity, a précis of life;

wonder, humour, shock, shame and submission

all visible on one boy’s searching face.

Reflecting back at us from each of the frames

is most of what there is to say about the human condition

and the rest is to be found in what we feel for him.

 

And yet it takes but twenty-two seconds.

 

—0O0—