Boys from Brazil (1978) in 5 frames

 

 

 

 

director: Franklin J. Schaffner

A corporeal portrait

"In stature he was rather too tall, his voice was rather toneless, and there were shortcomings in his diction. He didn't even want to shave off his mustache because of a naive vanity. But all this was forgotten when he came out on the stage."

This is the way Meyerhold remembers Stanislavsky on stage.The two canonized Russian theatre makers shared much more than the theatre historians let us be aware of. Even if they are constantly presented as highly masculine, dictatorial, oppositional, always in conflict, contradicting each other and part of a mandatory Oedipal plot (where Stanislavsky is the corrupt father, while Meyerhold plays the rebellious and ungrateful son), there is a certain love and respect that they share, a sweet homoeroticism and emasculation in their fruitful exchange. There is so much material for a campy history of Russian theatre!

photo via