In any case, what was in essence your notion of intellectual editing? Let’s take for example one of the first opening scenes. The drum, the dancing, the sawing machine, the shoemakers, the laundry ladies, the umbrellas. If this was for you a train of associations, what was the principle behind that?
You see, all this we included with the last minute touch-ups. Before there was nothing like that. The first part of the film was the one which we changed the most. I don’t remember if the steam engine was there – I think so – and then a great part about the store. In practice the entire first part was dedicated to the store with people selling all kind of goods: everything was put together during editing, but all inside the store. No owner, no drum, no dance on the stage, there was nothing like that, but there was simply a scene with the store and the heroine received an invitation for a ball, soon followed by the grand scene of the ball with its own secondary story. Then we changed everything as follows: the train and after the train the garden. From the editing point of view we combined everything with the sign “We sell cheaply”: we sell cheaply the armed forces, we sell cheaply actresses, as well as the goods in the store. After that we had to show the owner as the “boss”, by underlining the importance of his entry with the booming of a drum. From the action perspective, no drum was supposed to be there, but as an accompaniment it worked well. An orchestra was meant to be there, but we did not trust it, and then we showed it with an image. Again, if we had a boss, then he must order around someone else, and at that point we showed the laundry ladies, the shoemakers and the seamstresses. The sawing machine, like the drum, we took it only because it had a good rhythm, and in fact someone complained: “So, the meaning of the Commune is just that machines worked faster than before?”. We had however made our minds: if everything started again in a happier mood, if they did not suffer, but on the contrary they were laughing, then all this spelt “Commune”. This is the most important thing and the second one is the music.

Did Shostakovich’s music enter also in the editing of the film?
From the point of view of the musical score for the film, Shostakovic’s music for Novyj Vavilon seemed out of place, and even a cacophony, because it was really music in its truest form. Audiences were used to lively and animated melodies, and the orchestra knew all of them, they had just to read their scores and start playing. Shostakovich prepared a new score and they had to learn it, but there was no time nor money to do so. The film with Shostakovich’s score was screened only in three theatres in Leningrad, while everywhere else, there was right away a neat separation between the two. You could see that: on the screen there was a funeral, and the music was a cancan, or on the contrary in the film there was a cancan and the orchestra played a dirge. Audiences as well felt out of place. How it came about that instead of The Virgin’s prayer or Grieg’s Solveig, there was this invention by an avant-garde composer? An important man told me that he saw personally on the walls of Aurora theatre this writing: “The orchestra director was drunk.” (Natalia Nussinova, Nuova Babilonia settant’anni dopo – Conversazione con Leonid Trauberg, Cinegrafie, n. 12, 1999