Notes for Columbine’s Wedding Veil

From The Director's Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner

  • Rough notes for the first entrance of Pierrot’s friends in Columbine’s Wedding Veil. All the action for the scenes in Pierrot’s garret was to take place on the crossbars of an enormous vertical window. The first drawing in Eisenstein’s notes shows Pierrot’s four friends splitting into two pairs to enter from both below and above. The second drawing has all four of them instead enter from a trapdoor and cross over the top of the window frame.

    See book: p. 165

Creator(s)
Creator Role
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Subjects
  • Performing Arts
Date
  • May 1, 1922
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Citable Link
  • Sergei Eisenstein, preliminary notes for Columbine’s Wedding Veil (May 1, 1922), the pantomime that became Columbine's Garter. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 1923, op. 1, ed. khr. 815: 2.

Translation

  • NB. Friends of Pierrot: 4 men, somewhere between doctors and funeral torchbearers; black tailcoats, top hats, gloves. Two appear from above, two from below:

    [illustration]

        4 ravens on poles (could be a consultation of doctors, could be funeral parlor agents) – all are red-cheeked, fat, bursting with health. Their dance is to the music of a little gramophone.
    They enter from below from a trapdoor. M[aybe], like this:

    [illustration]

    Yes, that’s better.