On Pussy Riot and two censored films.

Writing in my last post about the absence of the two Pussy Riot films at Art Doc fest, I wrote:

The two films on Pussy Riot were conspicuous by their absence - both the Lerner and Pozdorovkin film which attempts to provide a certain 'objective' glance and the much more 'subjective' (but in my view more interesting) film produced by the film collective Gogol's Wives (the failure to show the Lerner and Pozdorovkin film probably reflects some circumstances beyond the control of the directors of the festival given that the film had been planned to appear at the festival). 

This evening the planned premiere at the Gogol Centre in Moscow of Michael Lerner's and Maxim Pozdorvkin's film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer has been openly blocked by Sergei Kapkov (who heads culture in Moscow and was seen as a bit of a liberal). In a letter printed on Kirill Serebrennikov's (who has been in conflict with the Culture bureaucrats before over the funding of his Tchaikovsky film) Facebook page, Kapkov writes that he was surprised to learn that the film had been announced along with the participation of the former Pussy Riot detainees. He stated that a government funded organization should not associate itself with people who have such an ambivalent reputation in society and whose activity is based on provoking society. He then went on to say that while he had no right to interfere in the repertoire of the centre this showing was not part of the agreed repertoire and so he demanded that this event be pulled. Finally he added a few words about the fact that their common purpose was one of mending the world and not that of "shocking the public with scandalous stories which have no relation to culture". Serebrennikov's facebook comment, filled with expletives - which should make it unprintable in the media under new anti-swearing laws- set out the situation as he sees it. A clear act of censorship and pointing his finger at those in the film world who have agreed to the 'Ethical Charter' (a kind of Hays Code) to be implemented in cinema. The comment began, as quoted in an article for Buzzfeed:

“Until recently, in all interviews, I would declare like a mantra: ‘There’s no censorship at the theater, there’s no censorship at the theater.’ That’s it, fuck, there’s censorship at the theater! Cynical, pointless and stupid,” 

He concluded with what appeared to be a resounding fuck you to the government and those people in the film world who have been supporting greater restrictions in film and those in society who favour a tightening of the screws:

“Now any freedom, any desire to find meaning, any desire to speak up disintegrates into hopeless gloom and darkness, which fills all the air around us and rules us. It seemed to us that somewhere — at the theater, in fashionable cafes, at home, with friends — there was still some free air…That’s it! Fuck! There’s no air!”

“It’s unfortunate we had to cancel this event. It’s really vile and gross to me. I never thought, to use the words of the classics, that I’d ‘fall into this shit.’ I call on all people, for whom still lives an understanding of honor and freedom, dignity and the right of an artist to create and speak freely, to unite and resist this darkness. With words, with art, in any way that helps.”

“And I hope that when all this shameful shit ends we, remembering it all, will laugh at ourselves and write the truth about this petty little time. Experienced people tell me that because of our cowardice and laziness, this shit will never end.”

It seems that the Russian culture wars that Natalia Antonova hoped would end are unlikely to go away. Even though, it is very true that in Russia liberals tend to let off a lot of steam, huff and haw, but show little backbone about really resisting the blows of the conservative onslaught.

Regarding the story since the release of Pussy Riot, delusion has set in among some of their former supporters upon hearing of Nadezhda's Tolokonnikova's apparent support for the formerly jailed oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkosvky, who was released almost at the same time as the Pussy Riot duo. There have always been critical voices even among artists of a seemingly similar political background to the Pussy Riot collective. The artist Avdei Ter-Oganian has had a more critical view of their action (even though he himself left Russia following the reaction to his anti-clerical art). Today another artist, Anatoly Osmolovsky, has written an Open Letter to the Pussy Riot duo that while not critical of them, has "put them on their guard" about the mistakes that he thinks they are making. A detailed letter of five points arguing where they have gone wrong (from the fact of being unaware that the mass media spotlight is as much a jail as a real, physical jail; the mistake of attempting to abjure the action itself, even of refusing the Pussy Riot brand (simply because other greedy capitalists will take it from them); he also warns them of taking up 'human rights activity' rather than continuing in the artistic sphere. He links this to the experience of 1968 in Western Europe where it was counter-cultural forces which won the day for re-founding Western European democracy. Believing that they need a more anarchic strategy and that Russia is standing on the threshold of a 'carnivalistic transition', in short, a Russian 1968 is on its way, according to Osmolovsky who worked with his wife, Svetlana Baskova on the film For Marx. In this sense, Osmolovsky believes that Pussy Riot should play a more integral role in this coming carnivalistic revolution (rather than setting up another NGO). 

So, Pussy Riot is already at the centre of another scandal and more arguments about its direction and use. It is still early to discover what the fallout (if any) of this more open attempt at censorship will be. Facebook and twitter are, alas, no indication of what will go on out of these spheres. Moreover as far as cinema is concerned, the silence about the other film Pussy versus Putin which has a much more inside look at the Pussy Riot actions as they took place is a shame for in a way its insights into the phenomenon of Pussy Riot is, in some ways, of more historical importance. What the story of Pussy Riot will look like in a number of years time is also, of course, an uncertainty given the tendency at least during the press conference of Tolokonnikova to half-abandon previous positions and even to try to take on a more explicit political role. Nonetheless, things are moving once again in uncertain directions.

   

Art Doc Fest 2013- A look at the Films Awarded.

To summarize a festival like Art Doc Fest is rather complicated. As one of the most important (if not the main) documentary film festival in Russia (and devoted almost entirely to the subject of Russian themes,or at least shot in Russia or in the Russian language) it is the main showcase of Russian documentary cinema. It is also a genuinely popular film festival with the Moscow film-going public (a number of films were packed full and in the case of some almost overfilling) and yet it receives far less public funds than certain film festivals where audiences are bussed in to fill up empty seats (known to happen at certain festivals where cinematic excellence is less important than ties to cultural and political bureaucrats). So in spite of the miserly financial support it receives from the authorities it punches well above its weight in film festival ratings. Its lack of public funding may be explained by the fact that it is willing to show films on more controversial subjects (so, for example, it has shown in the past controversial films on Khodorkovsky, on Politkovskaya and this year showed the Russian-German co-production Putin's Games on the preparations for the Sochi Winter Olympics , a film highlighting the almost unbelievable levels of corruption as well as the severe unease and disruption that the games have caused the local population. These controversial films are often the most fully-packed sessions in the festival, given the unlikelihood that other major movie theatres will show these films after the festival.

However, politically-controversial films at this festival prove to be more an exception than a rule. In fact, this year one was hard put to find any directly political film apart from the film just mentioned. The two films on Pussy Riot were conspicuous by their absence - both the Lerner and Pozdorovkin film which attempts to provide a certain 'objective' glance and the much more 'subjective' (but in my view more interesting) film produced by the film collective Gogol's Wives (the failure to show the Lerner and Pozdorovkin film probably reflects some circumstances beyond the control of the directors of the festival given that the film had been planned to appear at the festival). 

What are quite common, though, are socially-sharp commentaries on life in Russia and the Gran Prix award winner was no exception. Alina Rodnitskaya's film Кровь (Blood) tells the story of a mobile team of nurses who worked for the Russian blood donor service. Unlike in many other countries, in Russia giving blood comes with a monetary reward. While not large in many people's terms, in provincial Russia the 850 roubles doled out to donors (equivalent to about $26 US) may not be an insignificant sum. Rudnitskaya follows the team around exploring both their own lifestyle and observing the donors themselves as well as their interactions with the team. It is a strong film precisely because it serves as a metaphor for society at large. Watching it on the same day as Putin's Games one felt even more the scandalous inequalities between the corrupt businessmen defrauding billions and the desperate provincial inhabitants forced to sell their blood to survive. Rudnitskaya, moreover, is a superb observer of social institutions and the minutiae of everyday life embedded in people's interaction with them. Previously films of hers have been about a marriage and divorce registrar office in her film Гражданское Состояние (Civil Status) or her even bleaker masterpiece Я забуду этот день (I will forget this day) filmed in an institution that we only find out towards the end which institution it is being shot in. Again her filming of this abortion clinic and the social anxiety brings to the fore the realities of social and sexual inequalities. The award of the main prize to Rodnitskaya was a sign of confidence in her mastery of her surgically brilliant dissection of the social body of Russian society through these portraits of institutions and the individuals linked to them.

The best full-length film of the festival award as well as the best film of the year award went to a debutante. Daria Khlestkina's Последний лимузин (The Last Limousine) was a fine portrait of a once-elite car factory in decline. The factory,after  having received an order for three classic ZIL limousines for a Red Square parade at the Kremlin, appears to have been given a new lease of life. This, however, at the last moment proves illusory when a call from the Kremlin administration informs them that the Limousines that they have spent so much effort in building will not appear in the parade after all. This tragi-farcical finale serves as a Kotlovan-like tale of the absurdity of Russian life in general and that of the Russian working classes in particular. The film is a sincere and genuinely warm portrait of workers brought up in the Soviet epoch and genuinely dedicated to the factory and their work. It is also a portrait of the world of migrant workers in the factory and their relationship to the surrounding environment. Two worlds which according to the director practically don't communicate. Khlestkina explained how the subject matter was given as a task set by Marina Razbezhkina in her school for documentary film-making (a school which has engendered a whole generation of documentary film-makers) and, although the suggestion was that there was little point searching for this environment in Moscow itself, Khlestkina came across the Likhachev factory: one of the few examples left in the city of a still working factory. In many ways she has made an extraordinary portrait of this environment. The Post-Soviet return to the figure of the worker was anticipated in Svetlana Baskova's recent documentary and feature films and in this festival another film was devoted to the subject in Svetlana Bychenko's film Нити Никала (Lamp Filament) about the demise of a factory making the old 'Lenin lamp'. Once again one gets the same melancholic portrait of a workforce dedicated but doomed. 

A Special Jury Prize was awarded to the film by Inna Lesina Морфолгия (Morphology)  - one of those extraordinary explorations of the world of an individual. In this case the universe explored was that of a forensic pathologist and the world of the morgue. What makes this short 35 minute film special is that it is a portrait of someone whose philosophy about life has extraordinary depth. His citations of Chekhov, Tom Waits and interest in art along with a deep sense of humour makes this one of the uplifting films of the festival in spite of the subject matter.

  

A Jury special mention was given to Madina Mustafina's film Еще Чуток, Мрази (A Little More, Scumbags). This film about the life of a transsexual has come on the trail of her much discussed previous film Милана (Milana)- which had both its champions as well as detractors. The earlier film was shot with what, Masha Karp has called an 'invisible camera', contrasting it almost entirely with Liubov Arkus's activist intervention. In Mustafina's latest film she once again manages to enter almost entirely into the life of its protagonist in a fairly invisible way. The film is set in Kazakhstan but the protagonists are Russian speakers. Highlighting the LGBT community and the main protagonists, Zhenya's, decision to opt for a sex change, it is the kind of film that is likely to garner interest outside Russia for its subject matter alone (giving the new homophobic laws in place). Yet it is much more than a simple exploration of this environment. The film has a very different aesthetic to many of the others on show and many in the documentary community in Russia are skeptical and unaccepting of Mustafina's way of filming. It must also be said that even the protagonist of the film had issues with the director which led to the rift and the abandonment of the shooting after nine months. However, in many ways the award seemed more than justified in encouraging Mustafina's rather unique style of film-making in the Russian documentary world. Mustafina is yet one more of the former students of Razbezhkina who have been scooping up prizes here at Art Doc Fest as well as elsewhere.

Madina Mustafina with her tutor Marina Razbezhkina.

Other awards included the Лавровая Ветвь (Laurel Branch) awards. Of these were the film Катя (Katia) which was to win the Best Art Film award. A film on a journey to India by a marginalised Russian from the Moscow region, it has gained both critical plaudits as well as attention because of the later notoriety of its cameraman, Sergei Pchelintsev, suspected of murdering a dissident Russian priest Pavel Adelgheim. This gruesome fate of one of its team (and a very competent cameraman Pchelintsev was said to be) will obviously distract from a dispassionate review of the film itself. A fine Russian language review of the film has, however, been written by the film critic Zara Abdullaeva in a  blog for the journal Искусство Кино .

Other awards of note went to the cameraman for the best in his profession to Mikhail Gorobchuk for his part in two films - one by Rodion Ismailov entitled Моя Родня (My Kith and Kin), an intimate exploration of his daughter's journey to native Azerbaijan and the other a film entitled Дыхание Тундры (Breath of the Tundra). The film by Ismailov has won a number of international awards and I will write about it in a further post.

Daria Vedritskaite won a 'Laurel Branch' for best debut film for her За Рекой...Последние - her slow moving but at times highly poetic exploration of a community of Old Believers.

These prize winners were just a few of the many significant films shown at the festival. Over the comings weeks I'm hoping to add some more posts. Disputes over prizes never go away but, to my mind, the jury of Art Doc Fest did chose some of the stronger films in competition.

As a postscript to this post, the presence of so many award winners from Marina Razbezhkina's school of documentary film, it would be wrong not to mention that one of her own films was in the competition. Оптическая Ось (Optical Axis) gave a general overview of societal changes in its comparison between the photographs of a century ago taken by Maxim Dmitriev. A portrayal of societal groups, it doesn't go in for sharp social observation like many of her students but nonetheless one can only welcome a return by the pedagogical master of documentary to documentary practice.

Art Doc Fest 2013: the first days.

Well over a hundred films are being shown at this year's Art Doc Fest and the last for some time to be held in Moscow's Khudozhestvenni cinema (which after the festival will be closed for rebuilding). Art Doc Fest prides itself on getting even the politically controversial documentaries to the screen and this year it is Putin's Games which promises to be its flagship controversial film of the year) as well as Alina Rudnitskaya's socially sharp film Blood  (in which Rudnitskaya once again looks at a social institution - this time blood banks- with a critical eye) which will serve to bolster its reputation of it being one of the freer 'mainstream' festivals on Russian soil. However, neither of the two films on Pussy Riot (the Lerner and Pozdorovkin film which has just been shortlisted for an Oscar award and the film by the collective Gogol's Wives, Pussy versus Putin which won the IDFA Competition for Best Mid-Length Documentary) are getting a showing at the festival. I'll review these films in a separate post for their absence is significant (Lerner and Pozdorovkin's film had been expected at Art Doc Fest) even though one's reading of this absence can't be put down to a straight issue of censorship.

That which is on offer at Art Doc Fest is hard to categorise even though a number of themes have already crystallized. Of competition films shown so far revolt and revolution are on the agenda but not in the way one normally expects them. Here Kossakovsky (with 32 documentary students of  the IDEU Pompeu-Fabra University in Barcelona) have attempted a portrait of revolt as ballet in their film DEMONStration whereas Alyona Polunina in her film Nepal Forever has added clear farcical elements to her portrait of two St Petersburg revolutionaries on a trip to Nepal to conciliate between revolutionaries. (Her previous film also shown here The revolution that wasn't gave a more rather tragic portrait of Limonov's National Bolsheviks). Whereas Polunina's new film generated a lot of laughs among the audience last night it seemed to lack the gravitas of her earlier film.  Anna Moiseenko's S.P.A.R.T.A. Territory of Happiness, a portrait of a commune trying to rebuild local communism in the Post-Soviet space (and shown first at last year's festival but reshown again this year) gives a much more balanced view of utopian dreams and realities.

Marina Razhbezkina has made a return to directing after concentrating on her pedagogical career at her School of Documentary Films and Theatre with a new film Optical Axis which attempts to look at contemporary reality through a comparison with the photographs of Maxim Dmitriev taken a century ago. It is a gentle social portrait which includes an extraordinary moment of filming the process of a man carving out a wooden spoon in real time. Filmed in natural light, the film offers little sharp social commentary but regards its protagonists generally with a certain warmth.

Sergei Loznitsa's return to documentary with Letter after his two feature films is another look at the rural, peasant countryside. Shot through a pre-World War Two, the halo-like figures in the blurred film give appearances of almost ghost-like beauty. An extraordinary twenty minutes which makes much else watched on the same day seem far too conventional even when they recount exceptional stories of hardship.

Another competition film  Darya Verditskaite's The last one's ... beyond the river (За рекой... последние) also looks at rural Russia through an optic of a dying world. Not as radical as Loznitsa's poetic arthouse, the films feels overdone and doesn't quite know when to end. But as a debut film it still suggests that the director will have much to say in the future.

It was a great pleasure to watch Kossakovsky's early film The Belovs (Беловы) -a film that gets better at every viewing. A retrospective of festival director Vitaly Mansky has also been without doubt another important part of the festival (if one could have only drawn oneself away from the main location of the festival). Every now and again one stumbles into films that one didn't even suspect were on show such as the portrait of one of Russia's greatest untold secrets, Shavkat Abdusalamov: art director of Tarkovsky and Klimov, artist, author , actor, director in his own right and friend of Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and Yuri Norstein. The film portrait The Eternal Wanderer (Вечный Странник) may not, in itself have been innovative in technique, but it was a joy that someone has made a portrait of this unackowledged but great artist. A shame, though, that only three people came to view this film during its single showing at the festival.

Coming days promise much more including many of the long awaited competition films.   

On Magic - Gennady Shpalikov's letter to Vigo

A year ago I published a post entitled Gennadi Shpalikov- The Soviet Vigo?. I wrote "it is, perhaps, not too great an exaggeration to call him a kind of Russian Vigo ".
More recently I discovered a text in Shpalikov's volume of writings which includes his scripts, his letters, his poetry, stories and just one off diary pieces. One of these is written as though addressed to Vigo. In this piece (a kind of stream of consciousness piece with only dashes and no full stops) Shpalikov explains his debt to Vigo and poignantly speaks about Vigo's early death (a fate that Shpalikov would, unfortunately, share). This is one of the many small pieces from Shpalikov's writings - writings including some still unaccountably unadapted scenarios. All in all after reading Shpalikov one can only state, that like with Vigo, what a tragedy it was for cinema that his life was cut so short. Here, then is the text - it is, of course, impossible to imitate his style - but hopefully something will come across of the kind of figure that Vigo was for Shpalikov and the reverence that he had for Vigo (and that any contemporary filmmaker should have for the figure of Shpalikov). This is dedicated to the memory of Vigo, my teacher in film, and yes even in life, even though I can not imagine him alive.

Once some time ago, it was a very long time ago, when I had just started in film - and not even very much aware of the masters of film, since I was basically drinking in the morning, and falling in love with every girl I met- even those who thwarted my every advance - but - what can be done? - what? - if it's like that - and it was at that time when in someone's conversation I heard - about Atalante, I was afraid to watch it - for a long time I was afraid, because at that point I was writing things in the same vein- maybe worse, maybe better - that's not important - no - it's not important - I wept - later on, at that great picture- yes, and not even because of the film - but because you, Vigo, died so young - and no one made such films anymore, and I - in your memory- shot a long crazy final scene to my first film- in your memory,Vigo, in your memory, Vigo and once again in your memory - it's terrifying me that we are the same age now- yes - and we need each others friendship- but what could I do? - I could only shoot a long - crazily long shots- of a barge crossing the water, water, a girl with a harmonica - what more could I do? - this was my declaration of love to you, Vigo, - where are you now, Vigo? - where are you? - dear Vigo- where are you,Vigo? - I know where you are - but because I know - what anguish I feel!

James Steffen's Book on Parajanov

This year clearly has been a year of Parajanov revival. What with a major biopic on the man acted and directed by Serge Avedikian (and co-directed and scripted by Olena Fetisova) as well as a retrospective of Parajanov films shown at the Odessa Film festival this year along with an exhibition of his collages in both Moscow and Odessa. The topping on the cake seems to the year is the first English-language biography of Parajanov by James Steffen. I've been waiting for the publication of this book  for some time and it's great news that it has finally been published. I'm hoping to read it in the near future and plan to review it for a major online film journal (as well as add a smaller review on this blog). Here in the meantime is James Steffen explaining how his own interest in Parajanov has developed over the years:

“I first learned of Parajanov in 1987, when Alan Stanbrook published an article about The Legend of Suram Fortress for the magazine Sight & Sound. I was intrigued by his description of Parajanov’s films, especially their striking use of color. In 1988, during a course in film analysis at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas taught by Jean Decock, we watched excerpts from the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in class and I was completely stunned; it looked like nothing I had seen before, it opened up an entire world to me. That same semester, Yuri Illienko visited Las Vegas on his way to screen his long-banned film A Well for the Thirsty at the San Francisco Film Festival. He was friends with the composer Virko Baley, who was at time the Artistic Director of the Nevada Symphony Orchestra and composed the score for Illienko’s Swan Lake: the Zone. Illienko spoke to the film analysis class and Baley arranged a for a special screening of A Well for the Thirsty and the first few reels of The Eve of IvanKupalo at a theater in town. Those films likewise left a tremendous impression. Later, I saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in its entirety in a course on Soviet cinema, and I arranged for a special screening of the Armenian release version (the so-called "director's cut") of The Color of Pomegranates with the help of Hart Wegner, the Chair of the Film Department at UNLV. Even though Parajanov was recognized as a major figure in world cinema and obviously lived a colorful and dramatic life, at that time there was almost nothing published about him in English, so I decided to enroll in graduate school and devote myself to studying him and his work. It has been quite an adventure, learning multiple languages over the years, doing research in Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine and Russia, and meeting many fascinating people as a result.”

James Steffen has his own blog at this address: http://www.jamesmsteffen.net/

Alexei German's Hard to be a God, News from the Cinema Museum and other films.

The Cinema Museum.

Back in July, I reported on the situation around Musei Kino and Naum Kleiman. It seemed at that point that the whole project of restoring risked sinking. A few days ago this situation seems to have move in a slightly more positive direction. At least, a steering committee, a real building and some hope that quicker progress will be made than has been true in the past decade. The Cinema Scientific Research Institute (NII) is said to be the new home of the Cinema Museum for the first five years while a new building will be built for it. Naum Kleiman will be the President of the Museum although there will be someone else taking care of more practocal tasks. The steering committe of around 20 people will include directors such as Karen Shakhnazariv, Alexei German Jr, Vitaly Mansky, Stanislav Govorukhin, Renata Litvinova and film scholars such as Kirill Razlogov. Good news? Maybe, but anyone who remembers the destruction of the Musei Kino in the early years of this decades will remain sceptical to the end. As they say in Rome fidarsi e' bene, non fidarsi e' meglio  (It's good to trust but better not to).


The World Premiere of the late Alexei Germana's Hard to be a God.

This, of course, is the event of the year for enthusiasts of Russian film. Apart from Deborah Young's article in the Hollywood Reporter , assured that this film will only be shown at the special events of festivals like Rome's (maybe true owing the plain stupidity of cinema programming these days), she complains about its frustrating incomprehensibility and that it would have been cutting edge in the 1980s but now longer feels so avant garde. The film was shown in April (but not in its final version and an account by Ksenia Chudinova for Snob magazine suggested that the reaction was non too positive. Some of her review was translated thus in a blog for Russian Science Fiction:

Meanwhile, on screen an ambitious and primarily physiological bacchanal unwound: close-ups of mud, animal and human excrement, blood, guts, a donkey’s penis, a woman’s vagina, crumpled clothing, horses, dirty fingernails, animal corpses. The characters are constantly defecating, spitting, scratching themselves, beating each other, cutting stomachs and throats, copulating or killing each other. Without speaking’.


From April to November things have changed and most of the press in Italy and Russia have given wildly positive readings. The first review was, of course, written by Umberto Eco before the premiere. His small essay was printed in Novaya Gazeta and an admittedly rather poor English translation has appeared here. In a fine piece for the Calvert Journal, Andrei Kartashov states that Hard to be a Good goes further in the complexity of his earlier Khrustalev, My car!:

It would seem impossible to exceed Khrustalyov’s visual and aural complexity, but Hard to Be a God does just that, proving that 15 years in production weren’t spent in vain (the inordinate length of production time stems partly from financial difficulties, but the director’s perfectionism also played a role). Having achieved ultimate sophistication in resurrecting a world of memory, German took on the task of creating his own universe from scratch.

An article for Colta.ru gives some extracts from Italian critics response to the film. Many of the critics talked about this film being an entirely new chapter in cinema- contradicting the view of the journalist from Hollywood Reporter. Of the other reviews to read there are those by Larisa Maliukova for Novaya Gazeta , Andrei Plakhov's for Kommersant and there is also Anton Dolin on the radio talking about the film (above).

Other Russian Films at Rome.

Two other Russians made waves at the Rome Film Festival. One was the documentary by Alyona Polunina, Nepal Forever which will be shown again at the Art Doc Fest which I hope to report on. The other film was Birmingham Ornament-2, directed and produced by the head of Cine Fantom, Andrei Silvestrov. Some of the press reaction regarding this film has been reported here for the Kinote site.


A New Pussy Riot Film showing at IDFA in Amsterdam.

The Amsterdam documentary film festival IDFA is showing two films one of which is the Pussy versus Putin filmed from inside the Pussy Riot story (rather than the more 'objective' film by Michael Lerner and Maksim Pozdorovkin). The Gogol Wives group are an anonymous collective and there is, as yet, little hope of any public showing of this film in Russia so far.

An Independent article has some information on this and the other film showing at Amsterdam.

Other news and things to look out for are the Art Doc Fest (Moscow's main documentary film festival starting in less than a weeks time), a retrospective of Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko's films also shown in Moscow in the same period. That's not mentioning the popular end of Russian film: Fyodor Bondarchuk's Stalingrad as well as Veledinsky's winner at Kinotavr The Geographer Drunk the Globe away.  The comedy Gorko!  and a horror film Shopping Tour by Mikhail Brashinsky should also be covered.

The long-standing uncertainty about Russia's only LGBT film festival was eventually settled in the festivals favour. One will have to see how the festival goes (homophobes are unlikely to completely let it go on in total peace). The main news reported is that Gus von Sant will be attending to show his support. The festival will feature among other films Diederk Ebbinger's Matterhorn which was shown at the Moscow International Film Festival in late June and Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm (which was shown at the Zavtra/2morrow festival more recently).

The 7th Russian Film Festival in London. Some recommendations.

>Tomorrow the 7th Russian Film Festival will open in London. It is one of those showcase festivals aiming to show a representative sample of national cinema and includes a small selection of documentaries and animated films as well as feature films. Most of these films have been shown at different Russian and international film festivals in the past year or even longer and a number have been on general release. Looking at the films on show it appears that the selectors have tried to had a criteria of mixing popular Russian films while not excluding art house films altogether. The film festival has, thankfully, avoided showing the patriotic blockbusters including those which have gained some minimal critical acclaim such as Legend No. 17. Whether this choice of concentrating on popular middle brow films will satisfy a film buff looking for the next Tarkovsky is open to question, but at least it does give some indication of the range of films that are likely to appear in Russian cinemas (with the odd exception). 

Of the competition films, the film that most exemplifies this popular but middle-brow taste and what many Russian ex-pats in particularly may have long been looking for is Aleksander Veledinsky's The Geographer Drank Away His Globe. An adaptation of a work of literature which was originally set in the 1990s, Veledinsky's film is the kind of well-made 1970s lyric comedy mixed with a hint of drama. The film that it comes closest to in subject matter is Roman Balayan's 1984 film Flights in Dreams and Reality. Other critics have mentioned the Ryazanov or Danelija type of comedy as a reference. Yet it also may be compared to a kind of film more well-known in the west as the 'inspiring teacher' drama (a la Dead Poets Society) with the difference that the Russian doesn't come up with the inspirational tone but remains the tale of a loser, or of the typical 'useless man' of Russian letters. Whether it is far too steeped in Russian and Soviet tradition to reach a wider public is yet to be seen but it will surely please Russians who believe that the last golden age of Russian cinema were the 1970s and early 1980s and who believe that everything that has been made since is a lapse into bad taste and chernuka.

Natalia Merkulova and Alexei Chupov's Intimate Parts should be a treat in the terms that it is a truly novel film in a hitherto unheard of genre in Russia- the sex comedy genre. Causing quite a storm at Kinotavr, it had a more subdued reaction on general release. The character of a government bureaucrat played superlatively by Julia Aug seems to have an all too obvious counterpart in the Russian parliament today in the guise of the architect of the anti gay laws. Attacking middle class glamour (it was billed in the Kinotavr programme as an ironical melodrama about the contemporary Moscow middle class) and been compared to the work of Todd Solondz and John Cameron Mitchell. It is certainly one of the films that most deserves a viewing at the festival and I would put in the top three or four films shown this year at Kinotavr. Whether it will delight a general audience remains to be seen. 

Of the films that are more likely to play to the sentimental crowd, I'd put Ivan, son of Amir Maxim Panfilov's Soviet-style paean to tolerance. It really felt too forced when I watched it at Kinotavr and, if anything, the very weakest of the films that were shown there. It is really quite hard to gauge how the festival chose this film rather than others which have been left out.

Equally, the festivals opening film was not one that really lived up to the expectations placed in the director Taisia Igumentseva after she won an award at Cannes for her short film The Road to... Filmed in a naif style, a group of bucolic eccentrics await the end of the world. However, it is an apocalyptic comedy which makes one almost start to plead for the end of the film (and the over-egged gags). Igumentseva will have ample opportunity to prove herself in the future but it is a regret that it was this film which has been so hyoed as her entry into the full-length feature film. 

A Winter Path is the film that Kinotavr which to its shame seems not to have shown for fear of the political reaction of showing a film that may have fallen foul of its new anti-gay law. Not a gay film as such but with a character who is gay, it seems to have delighted those critics who have seen it and have won awards at smaller film festivals in Russia. The Kommersant critic, Lydia Maslova, was quoted as stating that it would "look great at any European festival" in an article by Anna Malpas on the film and the scandal surrounding it.

For me, the best choice of the festival is Yusup Razykov's Shame. This film about a community of families of submariners awaiting tragic news about their husbands will clearly take many people’s minds back to the Kursk submarine tragedy. It is not so much the relevance of the subject matter which strikes one but the extraordinary inner journey of the protagonist inside her personal shame and in her relation as outsider to the community as a whole. The extraordinarily ability to fix a landscape in this film as well as to explore the main characters inner world (and the actors performance has an almost haunting character to it) means that Razykov is one of the few contemporary directors able to generate a new cinematic language not tied to the Soviet past but still carrying on a significant dialogue with this past. Shame is a quiet rejection of much post-Soviet cinema and for the genuine film buff who wishes to see the very best of Russian cinema in terms of artistic excellence this would be the film I'd most recommend viewers to watch here. Unfortunately, it seems to have had a difficult post-festival destiny in Russia itself, in spite of gaining a number of prestigious awards at important European festivals such as Karlovy Vary.

Andrei Platonov as a script writer.

With the gradual publication of Andrei Platonov's published works in Russian, there is now finally a chance to view his work in film. It's true that the six screenplays published offer only a limited selection of what he actually wrote for film (many others may still be discarded in some obscure corner of a film archive). As far as I know one of these scripts, Father and Son has been translated into English. The review introduces it thus:



Father-Mother’ seems to have been written in parallel with Platonov’s unfinished novel Happy Moscow, whose protagonists yearn to transcend their existing selves while around them the Soviet capital is being physically remade. The upheaval of demolition and construction also forms part of the backdrop for ‘Father-Mother’. The screenplay’s main narrative strand is enclosed in one paragraph of the novel, but ‘Father-Mother’ otherwise stands further from Platonov’s prose than the rest of his film scripts—making it an even more unusual document of his response to the brutal reforging of the world going on around him. Littered with Socialist Realist tropes, it consistently subverts them with its humour, sadness and intense engagement with the fears and contradictions traversing its time.

Platonov was not unique in terms of writers turned script writers in the 1920s and 1930s- Mayakovsky, Shklovsky, Babel, Tynyanov, Sergei Tretyakov, Kirson, Shershenevich, Erdman Zazubrin, Mariengof and even Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (to name but a very few). Platonov, himself, replied to an appeal for screen writers after a 'script famine' in the mid 1920s. Platonov replied to this appeal and worked very enthusiastically. the enthusiasm was mutual. In letters to his wife he talked about the reaction of the film studio to his first script Песчаная учительница (The Sand Teacher). At one point, Pudovkin was expected to shoot the film and in another letter Platonov informs his wife that "I was told that I could become a great screenwriter and as soon as Eisenstein gets back from Leningrad then they'll introduce him to me." However, the work on the scenario during the second half of 1927 proved to be a long and unsuccessful one and he was called on to do many rewrites. Even though it was in keeping with the general line of proletarian the film wasn't released until it went under a completely reworking by another scriptwriter Maria Smirnova as Айна (Aina, 1930). The film theme was the transition of nomads in the peripheries and their transition to a more settled way of life. Alas, even in the film Aina (directed by Nikolai Tikhonov) has not been preserved.

Whether Platonov was introduced to the "maker of obscure films" (as Platonov had referred to Eisenstein in a short story) is uncertain but his enthusiasm did not dim immediately. Platonov sent in suggestions for turning practically all of his tales from 1927-28 into films. Some of the names of other scripts known about but not published or accepted for publication have come down to us. One of these was entitled Лампочка Ильича (The Lenin Lamp). In many ways Platonov's scripts represent documents through which we can interpret his prose given that so many of them as reworkings of some kind.

One such script is Машинист (The Engine Driver) is very much related to the tale of Котлован (The Foundation Pit). Because of the impossibility of staging this text, he was to reuse much of what he had written in new texts. This screenplay was, in many ways, an original development of the themes and heroes (especially in the Kolkhoz part) of Kotlovan. In 1930 Platonov was working on several scripts about the year of the Великий Перелом (The Turning Point or the Great Break) both related to village and city life. However, it was Platonov who in an unpublished article in 1931, was to call for a turning point in cinematography calling the Great Blind One. He was to write that "our cinema is blind, like a new-born creature; the majority of pictures say nothing at all to the pressured consciousness of contemporary man". This great ignorance of life could only continue under Stalin's socialist realism: art's role was to produce reality and not to reflect it by this time.

Platonov's break from script-writing and, it seems, his disillusionment would last a few years. But in the mid 1930s the film factories renew their work with Platonov. A contract is signed in May 1936 for a screenplay written in the framework of a state-inspired project to create works about railway heroes and entitled Воодушевление (Enthusiasm). Unlike his previous film this was written for sound cinema. It, too, had to be rewritten four times and while it gained a positive response from the film studios it wasn't sent into production even if Platonov continued to fight for it.

A similar fate was to await a screenplay originally written for Soyuzdetfilm (the film studio for children's films) and for which a contract was signed in 1938. The script eventually entitled Неродная Дочь (Step daughter) was never to see production in spite of rewritings and a change of genre which would be sent to Viktor Shklovsky at Mosfilm in 1941. Other scripts from Platonov were laying in the script studio, not one of which was accepted.

After the war, in December 1945 another script was contracted by Mosfilm, entitled Семья Иванова (The Ivanov Family) but once again, tragically, nothing come of this either.

The story of Andrei Platonov and film seems one of the many but most depressing stories to emerge in the history of Soviet cinema. One could only imagine what could have been and yet was not to be.
Films based on the imagination of one of the Soviet Union's most original writer whose works will live on while others are forgotten.
 

Chiaroscuro of the Revolution : The K Effect: Soviet Cinema Through Spanish Eyes

This is both a comment on a film which attempts to reimagine Soviet cinema and its role in the Twentieth Century as well as an interview/dialogue conducted with the director of the film. Being shown at many film festivals throughout the world but will soon be out on general release throughout Spain in early November. It is only to be hoped that as well as a Spanish release, it will gain an international release of some sort. Imagining Soviet cinema and the cultural and artistic revolution accompanying the Russian Revolution has rarely been attempted before by a non-Russian film. That Valenti Figueres has attempted this and found a way to reflect on the Twentieth Century merging cinema and utopia and brooding on the century’s light and shadows is an achievement that deserves to be celebrated.       

Being able to watch  El Efecto K (The K Effect) in Russia- a film that has been shown at over 50 film festivals worldwide and gained more than twenty festival awards- seemed like a special treat. For this is a film designed to evoke a Russia at the very centre of world cinema- a Russia that seems painfully distant from the present day Russia of religious conservative nationalism but not altogether forgotten. At the Moscow Film Festival it was presented by one of Russia’s foremost film critics as well as the Festival’s Programme Director, Kirill Razlogov, and shown as part of the ‘Russian trace’ programme (a programme of films related, at times tenuously, at times directly, to Russia).

The foreign film about Russia

Films about Russia or with Russian characters or set in Russia tend to get a rather rough ride with the Russian viewer. This may be because there are just too many implausibles or false notes which make the film unacceptable for a Russian audience and this was, for example, the case  with another film in the programme: A Siberian Education by Gabriele Salvatores. Yet El efecto K disoriented this type of easy dismissive reaction amongst the Russian audience because it had other claims, mainly that of representing a highly stylized, re-imagining of history. The 'implausibles' in this film are there for a reason (a stylistic one). In some ways it would be wrong to emphasize any comparison between Maxime Stransky and Forrest Gump (as one critic suggested) or with Zelig (as I was first inclined to think).  Rather, I would make some comparison to a Russian film which imagined an unknown Soviet space programme launching its first man on the moon in 1938. In Fedorchenko’s film First on the Moon the character returns to earth in Chile and travels back to the Soviet Union only to be captured by the NKVD and be interned in a psychiatric ward from which he escapes  and is forced to assume a series of different identities  in order to survive in the Soviet environment.  In Valenti’s film the mockumentary form allows us to follow the life of a childhood friend of Sergei Eisenstein recruited into the Soviet intelligent agencies as a spy acting as Stalin’s agent in decisively important moments of twentieth century history but also as his eventual unmasker. When given orders to make a film he decides to tell the tyrant the unpalatable truth.  In a way Valenti’s  film (like Fedorchenko’s) through the mockumentary form seeks a way to return to that moment when cinema had the ludic spirit it had in the Soviet 20s. 

One of the reasons why Figueres has avoided falling into the trap of trying to recreate Russia realistically is that he has had the opportunity of living in many of the cities of the former Soviet Union. He reels off the names of places he has been to or lived in: Moscow, Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Novgorod, Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, Almaty ... This acquaintance with these places didn't push him towards a greater realism but prompted him to try and recapture the dreams of a time and a place through stylization.

The dawn of Soviet Cinema

When I asked Valenti to comment on what attracted him to a story about Soviet cinema in the first place he had this to say:

The dawn of Soviet cinema[was a time] full of instinct, creativity, research, investigation… They had an eagerness to represent the reality they were living in a different way.

For me [early Soviet cinema] was an outbreak of creativity, intense, like a light that illuminates the shadows. This lasted only a few years, 7 or 8, but those years were a gift for humanity.

I see this cinema like a tool, like a fist, a plough, a finger that points out. Or just as mere eye that looks through the artists’ subjectivity, the creators that made it possible.

There was also a fusion and mixing of different arts: performing arts, painting, theatre, architecture, and the new art that started getting ground: the cinema, the seventh art-continent.

In the very moment where constructivism, Dadaism, surrealism, social utopia like anarchism, socialism and communism came together, an exceptional breeding ground was created: the years from 1921 till 1929. An exploding magma of creativity and social change that marked global cinema forever.

Valenti’s film wanted to show both the dreams and nightmares of the Soviet period and indeed the film starts with the protagonist Maxime Stransky on a mission in Madrid 1937 to assassinate the Spanish anarchist and civil war hero, Cipriano Mera (the protagonist of Figueres’s previous documentary film) Living on Your Feet. In many ways this is indcative of how the film aims to  set the scene of the Revolution plunging from light into darkness which is the central leitmotif of the film. Maxime Stransky’s odyssey through the twentieth century (from Russia to the US, China, Australia, Spain etc) is the odyssey of the Revolution itself. So that Maxime Stransky becomes a high Symbolic figure as well as a figure who portrays all the demons as well as the hopes of the Revolution. He is there, too, to give voice to the great debate in Soviet Cinema between the Cine Fist (of Eisenstein) and the Cine Eye of Vertov. The manipulator of images and attractions versus the searcher and manipulator of reality. Yet there is also a sense that they were finally searching for what the other represented.

Valenti Figueres: Cine-Eye (documentary) becomes Cine-finger (fiction). The film represents the moment in which these two paths separate, both in the personal friendship between Eisenstein and Stransky ( here representing Vertov) and in filmmaking. Both schools – documentary vs. fiction – will move apart to get to these days as a common field: storytelling through images which of course tell their meaning. This is the great discovery: how the meaning is built in the mind of the spectator. How it is possible to change that meaning and its consequences in the immediate future. Stalin knew that memory was fragile and the past is a gun loaded with future.


The Critical Roots of Transformative Cinema

Valenti Figueres and his co-scriptwriter Helena Sanchez are both philosophers by training and being close to critical theory for them cinema always aims at some kind of transformative effect. In this way it is not difficult to understand why the Soviet 20s were chosen being the time when cinema was at its most transformative. Moreover, the list of names that Figueres’ mentions when asked to comment on possible influences are not contemporary but show a broader historical sweep speaking to us of a time when cinema really did seem to be on a mission of some sort:

VF: Tarkovski, Eisenstein, German expressionism, a Brechtian approach to acting, epic cinema, adventures of solitary heroes, social cinema…

The fascination with the artistic explosion of the 1920s is palpable in the film and the fact that it was at this very moment that artistic transformation was to appear indivisible from a social (and civilisational) transformation of reality. So, in the words of the director, the Soviet Union becomes a unique breeding ground, where both artistic and social utopias live together; they interlink and feed each other. They will shape the way people look and see, which will then change their way of being.

It is what Figueres calls a blinding moment that will enlighten future generations of filmmakers and social change-makers… an endless moment where people believed that the future had yet to come. It is a pristine and eternal present with no past.


This is the moment of Vertov, Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Maiakovski, Lili Brik, Pasternak, Pudovkin, Meyerhold, of the Proletkult and so many others whose names deserve recording. That so many are forgotten or were eventually eliminated under Stalin makes the character of Maxime Stransky a kind of collective portrait of those hundreds and thousands of figures, that history has, in some way or other, consigned to oblivion being at the same time a portrait of those who consigned this dream to oblivion.   


Stransky as a collective hero

Stransky is, then, in the words  of Valenti: a fictional character that lives the life of hundreds, thousands of people who existed and were wiped away. People with no face and no memory. The forgotten of history, the ones who died in the transit camps of Valdivostok and Magadan. This is the hidden history. The consequences of the great social K effect.

What Figueres calls the social K effect is how the images were not simply merged amongst themselves on film but that life itself was contaminating (and contaminated by) these images. A K experiment was being carried on in both cinema and in society so that new worlds and new meanings were created. While in cinema this was a creative process, in social reality this had more sinister undertones given the character of the editor.

Stalin, the Cannibal-God, the Great Vulture of Memory, the creator of a vast social K Effect.

The Chiaroscuro of the Revolution, Memory and Resistance

It was the past which would soon become unpredictable and Comrade Stalin using the fragility of the past would drown the blinding light out with his own dark shadows. In many ways this is close to the central theme of this film: the chiaroscuro of the Revolution and the issue of how memories can be manipulated and distorted to give a new meaning to events lived along with the hope that there will arise some resistance against this.
Figueres gives what seems to be a rather optimistic vision of Stransky trying to resist Stalin at a final moment. Optimistic ? Or perhaps not- for wasn’t Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part Two just such a moment of resistance whereby cinema tried to resist and throw back everything that the arch manipulator had done to imprison the original dream? While Eisenstein’s meeting with Stalin about his incorrect picture was eventually to lead to Eisenstein’s premature death by heart attack (The K Effect has a scene where Eisenstein celebrates his 50^th and final birthday with Stransky), Stransky’s truth-telling film gets him sent to the camps from which (implausibly) he escapes and lives out
Maxime was to say at the beginning that: ‘Reality was our testing ground. Filled with a radiant spirit of justice and humanity, we were going to change the world. We were the innocence with no past.’ Yet years later Stransky by trying to alter reality under the order of the great Editor was to find that he had become the past with little innocence left.

The Making of The K Effect.

In terms of how the film was made, Valenti Figueres had this to say:

We made it was quite quickly: fundraising for one year (2010) our principal photography started in 2011. During the year we shot, edited and finalized post-production. It was quite a complex film to make in terms of shooting fragments of scenes with the actors which later would be included in a bigger editing.
The actors were prepared for each scene of with a different mind set and needed to perform a different kind of movement. Later we had to coordinate all the home movies in order to fit them within the story as a whole, so that they shared the overall aura and worldview adding to the sense of this story as a kind of wonderful fairytale, an epic odyssey and an historical road movie.

The editing was quite easy for me and the editor (Carles Candela) as we got to know each other in my last film, Living on your Feet. The Struggles of Cipriano Mera  where we edited 3 movies at the same time. Everybody thinks that it was hard, but it wasn’t. We acquired around 500 home movies in 16mm and 8mm a year before. We selected scenes with kids, planes, boats, tanks that we thought could be included. We had a list of different cars divided by years and makes, typical Hollywood and Moscow dressing codes. We 
managed to find amateur videos from Russia from the 20s and 30s, and with a great deal of visual memory and instinct we managed to square it.

I even edited an extra 30 minutes, but my friends and the film team rose up to put an end to the film. It was great fun to edit more than 5.000 shots and remember each and every one of the first and final takes of each shot. As well as the emotions that the shooting bring with it. Wonderful.

As well as a chronological editing evidenced in the films chronological movement, the film also tried to capture the successive styles of the periods in question. So while recounting the 1920s it was done in a Dadaist – Constructivist style. The shadowy spirit of Stalinism would be captured with an expressionist tinge that gives way to socialist realism. The 1940s would then be captured using film noir techniques with the 1950s portrayed in the more open shots of cinemascope. Equally the broken Black and White film of the 1920s shots would be turn to contrasted Black and White in the next decade with the first colour images being used at the time of the Spanish Civil War and World War Two.  In this way the interplay between styles, techniques and the vicissitudes of the social utopia comment upon each other.


The Significance of the Film

Valenti Figueres’s film is a rare attempt to return to that period of bright explosions of the mind and of victories over the sun when a whole generation seemed ready to storm paradise and remind us that, however, far it plunged into the darkness of disapparance and the nightmare of terror, the dreams of the utopians and the artists in their grandeur (those Eisenstein’s, Vertov’s, Dovzhenko’s and Meyerhold’s) seem like towering giants of a new Renaissaince and whose time seems irrevocably lost. That Valenti has attempted to recapture the best minds of another generation prefiguring and towering above others of the twentieth century, is testimony to the significance of this film. We should be even more grateful that he has done it so valiantly with such passion returning us with the memory of those dreams lost to that nightmarish machine symbolised by the Lyubyanka’s and Magadan’s of Stalin’s infernal gambit.
Valenti, himself, should be given the final word:

The Effect K is an odyssey of those who dared to dream and were swollen by their dreams. An adventure in the origins of cinema and utopias, but at the same time a story of adventures, a mythic tale about cinema, the legend of a friendship, the myth of an hero and his descent into hell…

It is a fiction film made of fragments of reality. With this film, we go through a tumultuous XX Century with beautiful utopias that engendered nice dreams and terrible nightmares. Lights and shadows. The great metaphor of Cinema.