Giuviv Russian Film Blog

Alexandre Alexeieff - one of the great masters of world animation.

2011-10-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Moscow's Literature Museum have offered Moscovites a real treat with its exhibition presenting the art and animated films of Alexandre Alexeieff- a Russian artist who in spite of spending spent all of his creative life outside Russia can not really be seen as anything other than an artist deeply wedded to a Russian mentality and Russian themes. His illustrated art was concentrated on Russian literature and his animated art was equally Russian-centric - Mussorgsky and Gogol. Alexeieff's invention of a pin screen technique can be seen as a precursor of many contemporary animation techniques using computer software and yet it was Alexeieff's desire to animate his book engraving maintaining its texture and chiaroscuro effects that led him to animation. Moreover, he rejected any commercial techniques that were then in vogue. In fact, his invention -the pin screen- certainly brought no commercial benefits. The work on an animated film with this technique was laborious and the first film made by Alexeiff and Clair Parker - A Night on Bare Mountain - would take over a year and a half to make. Alexeieff managed to keep his art pure from commercial constraints by earning his living through advertising work where he would use more conventional animated technqiues. His pin screen films would make nothing (he refused to use them for commercial use) but they would leave an artistic legacy of enormous potential.

Nikolai Izvolov, in a fascinating essay printed in the catalogue to the exhibition, links Alexeiff's artistic research to a search for the fourth dimension linking his attempts to those of Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky in their meditation on rocket and space science while imprisoned (Kibalchich) or working as a provincial mathematics teacher (Tsiolkovsky), or to the revolutionary Morozov whose reflections on the fourth dimension were made in a dark cell in Scliesselburg and finally to Eisenstein's notion of harmonic montage as being the fourth dimension of film. Izvolov concludes his essay by stating that Alexeieff strove all his life to stray in a space where consciousness and unconsciousness are on an equal footing. One of the few artists who seems to have travelled on a journey akin to that of Alexeiff is Yuri Norstein, the author of another article in the catalogue. Norstein calls Alexeiff one the great makers of animated film, far superior to that of producers such as Disney and he goes on to state that "Alexeiff was the first animator to place animated film in the context of world culture, to have grapsed the musical essence of the art of animation." The works that he created "are neither caricatures nor cartoons, but works whose dramatic action constitute the very essence of figurative art".

The exhibition in Moscow promotes the work of an artist whose real contribution to animated film has yet to be fully understood. A truly original master.

Recent titles in Russian on Russian and Soviet Film

2011-10-09T03:58:00.000-07:00

Returning to Russia may have meant little opportunity to watch any great films here with the closure of the Eisenstein library, the discontinuation of the Meyerhold and cinema lectures and the relative dearth of any supremely interesting modern films (with the partial exception of Zviagintsev's 'Elena' and the expectation of being able to watch Sokurov's hopefully in the near future). However, a visit to Moscow's best bookshop 'Falanster' has made me aware that a lot of significant new writing has been published on Russian film and that this, at least, is a cause for some joy. Hopefully, I'll review some of these books in more depth in following months but here, for the time being, is an indication of the titles and the subjects of these books. One of the first joys was to find a biography of Paradjanov being printed in Molodaya Guardia's series 'The Life of Remarkable People'. I am half way through this title and although at times I would have liked the author to have been more of a film critic in speaking of some of the films and have said more in defence of some of Paradjanov's early films instead of insisting too heavily on the view of a total break at the age of fourty from mere executor of external pressures from the Soviet film bureaucrats to a wilful artist who did everything in his power to give life to his real artistic vision, this book contains nonetheless some fascinating accounts of Paradjanov the man and the artist from someone who knew him during different periods of the artist's life.

Other titles include a new book by the author of the splendid monograph on Kira Muratova, Zara Abdullaeva. Her new book published by НЛО in their Кинотексти series is entitled Постдок (Postdoc) and is devoted to the theme of the border between Narrative and Documentary films- as well as being a reflection on this important theme, Abdullaeva publishes a number of interviews with film-makers and other cultural figures such as Vitaly Mansky, Lev Rubinstein, Sergei Bratkov, Anatoly Vasiliev and Ulrich Zaidl.

In the same series a monograph on Aleksei German by Anton Dolin. A book which includes interviews and scripts as well as plenty of detail on German's biography at the heart of Leningrad's cultural elite this promises to be a fascianting read.

Two books of unpublished articles and occasional pieces by Russian film scholars whose untimely deaths were a severe loss to this field have also been published. Rashit Yangirov's great oeuvre on Russian filmmakers abroad in the late 1920s and early 1930s Рабы Немого ( 'The slaves of silence') has been supplemented by a new book of essays entitled Другое Кино ('Another cinema') and includes essays on the history of Russian cinema in the first third of the twentieth century including essays on Khanzhankov and Drankov, Jewish cinema in Russia from 1908-1919, an essay on the history of Kuleshov's 'Mr West...', another on LEF as well as a potentially fascinating essay on the reception of Soviet films by Russian emigre writers. These are only some of the essays of Yangirov and the book promises to be a fascinating read. The other book includes some biographical prose by the great Neya Zorkaya called Как я стала киноведом (How I became a film scholar) and as well as including some of her notes towrads an autobiography, includes her memoirs of other film scholars and directors including those of Ilya Averbach, Viktor Demin and Tolomush Okeyev. A section is also devoted to memories of Zorkaya by such names as Mikhail Ulyanov, Inna Vishnevskaya, Alla Demidova, Aleksei Levinson and Olga Surkova. Further unpublished pieces by Zorkaya are included including a piece on Fellini as are some writings by her younger brothers Andrei and Pyotr.

Finally, new issues of Киноведческие Записки and Сеанс are out. Сеанс devotes its latest issue to the theme Faust to coincide with Sokurov's new film and КЗ has an interview with Sokurov, some articles to mark Yuri Tsivian's sixtieth birthday and a whole host of articles dedicated to the theme of Cinema and Theatre including one on Chaplin, Biomechanics and Meyerhold. Time to find some spare time and get reading all this.

Necrorealism exhibition at Moscow's Museum of Contemporary Art

2011-10-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Moscow's Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is hosting a full-scale exhibition on Necrorealism. Not simply the films of Necrorealism but also the art work. Necrorealism has clearly come of age as far as the Moscow art establishment is concerned and this offering is a more than welcome one. The fact that some of the films are supplemented by texts (on necro dynamics, necro statistics and necro methodology), and some extraordinary art work and installations allows one to see the bigger picture of this movement.

Its appearance during the late Soviet stagnation period (the stagnation was to prefigure the appearance of a future corpse- the Soviet system) and its obsession with death was to lend itself to a certain reading which, although not necessarily mistaken, has arguably failed to account for the repeated significance of this movement. Once dubbed the Lenin of the Punk movement (Russian lead punk singer Svinya was said to have remarked that it was Iufit rather than Johnny Rotten who should be seen as the true leader of the world punk movement), Evgeny Iufit was clearly a much more significant figure than has hitherto been recognised by most contemporary film critics. The necroperformances in which passers by would be horified by the appearance of presumed corpses after a staged fight and the early films made in the early eighties would become part of the Leningrad underground scene.

Iufit's move into 35mm filmmaking was facilitated by Aleksandr Sokurov who allowed him to work within his new Independent Studio in 1988. Iufit made his Knights of Heaven (Рыцари поднебесья) film there but this film was to signal a break between Sokurov and Iufit. Nonetheless the presence of the theme of death (and an unconventional approach to this theme) unites Sokurov's and Iufit's cinematography. Equally there are many references in Necrorealist film to Lang's expressionism as well as to Vertov and Eisenstein and to 1920s eccentricism. Even Andy Warhol's interminable shots seem to be another influence.

The exhibition gives us a chance to see some of the extraordinary works of necrorealist painters - including Iufit's but also that of Sergei Serp, Vladimir Kustov and Andrey Mertvy. In the case of Iufit this chance to see both some of his films as well as his art work offers an opportunity to assert the continuity of his essential vision. In Iufit's own words "the irrational force of nature, the pathology of the human mind, black humour and social grotesque incombination with the traditions of silent film, define the originality and the paradoxical nature of this movement."

That Necrorealism as a movement requires rediscovery outside of Russia has been argued in a splendid essay by Thomas H. Campbell in which he asserts that Iufit's body work represents a thoroughgoing "allegory of the social, political, psychological, artistic, and critical dead ends of the present day". http://www.kinokultura.com/2006/11-campbell.shtml#27 Whether it be true or not that Iufit is the only decent filmmaker working in Russia today as one of his more enthusiastic advocates argued in 2005, it is certainly true that Necrorealism must be considered as one of the most fascinating trends with late Soviet and early post-Soviet cinematography and art and deserving of a major reappraisal by major film and art critics.

Recent news from the Russian film front.

2011-10-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

Back in Russia for little over a fortnight it appears that little has changed in Russian film given the fact that the main news story is over Mikhalkov's film Цитадель being sent as Russia's Foreign Language Oscar- hopeful. This fact didn't pass through without a scandal with the chairman of the Russian Oscar Committee, Vladimir Menshov -a former Oscar winner with his Москва, слезам не верит (Moscow doesn't believe in tears) -stating that the film wasn't the right one for the Oscars and that there was no real discussion of the film by the committee. His calls for Mikhalkov's film to be withdrawn were followed by calls for him to be sacked. That Mikhalkov's film is part three of a trilogy and that his second part was very coldly received at Cannes didn't seem to move the Oscar Committee in its promotion of this film. Anyway, it seems that the Mikhalkov saga still has steam in it yet to cover the gossip pages. It seems that there will be little hope of either Putin (in the political sphere) or Mikhalkov (in the cinematic sphere) losing their monopolies for the time being.

One of the few sites in Moscow to promote the very best of Russian and Soviet cinema - the Eisenstein library- (which last year had some excellent retrospectives) has yet to return with a programme for this year. It has been closed for building repairs during the summer and seems only slowly to be coming back to life. The excellent series of lectures and film showings at the Meyerhold Museum which took place during the past two years seems to have been discontinued. A great shame: some of the most interesting scholars of Soviet cinema were to be seen there giving some excellent talks on former Meyerhold students who were to become some of the greatest actors or directors of Soviet cinema. To hear a lecture by such scholars as Naum Kleiman, Evgeny Margolit, Irina Grashchenkova or Vladimir Zabrodin and others by the great animated film director - Andrey Khrzhanovsky- was a true delight. Alas, this year it seems that this consolation has been denied.

As yet, film going in Moscow has only offered two films of any note in this fortnight. Avdotia Smirnova's comedy on relations between the intellighentsia and the power elite was a well-made film starring Fyodor Bondarchuk and Ksenia Rappoport. A well-made film and a well-scripted film but which didn't quite convince. My first impression of Zviagintsev's 'Elena' was far stronger. Zviagintsev has proved not to be Russia's new Tarkovsky but in Elena he has, it seems, made something new. A new artistic vision is certainly present and this was acknowledged at Cannes where Zviagintsev's won the Special Jury Prize in the Un certain regard competition. Some commentators suggested that it would have given Malick's 'The Tree of Life' a run for its money had it been included in the main competition. It is a film that finally talks about class in Russia today- some critics have given it a reactionary slant highlighting a kind of lumpenphobia in its message (and Zviagintsev himself has spoken of wanting to call the film 'The Invasion of the Barbarians') but, nonetheless the film artistically is far beyond what is normally dished out by Russian film-makers and deserves its worldwide distribution.

Other news includes the recent death of Tatyana Lioznova (in the photo). She was best known for the spy series Семнадцать мгновений весны 'Seventeen Moments of Spring' (1973) and her film Три тополя на Плющихе 'Three Poplars at Plyushchikha' (1967). The spy series is probably the ultimate classic of Soviet spy thrillers (along with Barnet's much earlier Подвиг Разведчика ' Exploits of an Intelligence Agent'). Lioznova, like Muratova, studied under Sergei Gerasimov at VGIK and became alongside both Muratova and Shepitko one of the Soviet Union's most notable female film directors (Lioznova would go on to teach at VGIK). However, unlike them Muratova and Shepitko her sucess was one in the field of popular film rather than in that of creatng a whole new aesthetic direction to Russian film.

Some Russian/Soviet cinematic favourites

2011-08-06T02:56:00.000-07:00

Given that I've been rather a long time without having had the opportunity of watching Russian and Soviet films or even reading much on the subject I thought I'd write a slightly superficial blog. A kind of list of those films which have given me the most joy. I'm not sure if I can define joy- it is not entertainment, not (just) aesthetic pleasure but an almost erotic pleasure of stepping out of accepted boundaries. If for me the most joyful experiences of film is Jean Vigo's 'Atalante' then these are some Russian or Soviet moments of joy.

У самого синего моря (By the bluest of seas). A French critic is reported to have spoke of getting an erection watching the first ten minutes of the film (surely no British critic would be so directly and honestly personal in describing such a film!). For me the film represents one of those films which are closest in spirit to a Vigo spirit. Shipwrecked engineers who arrive at a fishing kolkhoz and do nothing but pine after the kolchoz chairwoman Mashenka. Their jealous rivalries and constant failures to seduce her (for she loves a third sailor present only in a photograph) take up all their productive energies. As this is 1936 in any other film these characters would be unmasked as saboteurs. Here they are free roaming troubadours- a miracle in the desert of the impoverished Stalinist imagination. Moreover, their official papers have been blanched and they come and go from the kolchoz as they please (suspicious characters indeed but not in this film). The scene of Masha's resurrection is as joyful and as moving as the moment where Atalante's sailor sees the image of his beloved under water.

Barnet, of course, was a tender and erotic filmmaker who freed himself from the imprisoning and lifeless ideology imposed at the time. If any of his films were to be ideological he made them so badly they would be useless (Ночь в сентябре 'A Night in September' springs to mind). Nonetheless there are many other joyous films, especially his Дом на Трубной (A House on Trubnaya Square) and Девушка с коробкой (A Girl with a hat-box) and his absolute masterpiece Окраина (The Outskirts).

Lutsik's Окраина is another of my great joys. About a quest for justice this post-soviet film drew all the best from the ideals of fighting for justice to make a film about a harsh revolt to reclaim land. Leaving out all the superfluous jargon and certainty of ultimate victory, Lutsik celebrates the momentary joy of an anarchic and hopeless revolt. An anti-capitalist film without the execrable thanatos-like grip of Soviet Marxist teleology, certainty and rhetoric.

Ioseliani's 'Listopad' (Falling Leaves) was one of those other films which utterly enchants. Just like Barnet's engineers Ioseliani's enologist behaves in a completely inconceivable way in his surroundings. If they ignore the order of the kolkhoz, Ioseliani's character subverts Soviet production by a revolt elevating the principle of true creativity. His revolt consists of pouring glue into a barrel of wine rather than letting it be bottled at the wrong time. His quasi insane sincerity when this is discovered makes him a joyous outsider. He also avoids the tricks that other men fall for escaping (unlike them) from the grips of a flirtatious woman winning, perhaps, her astonishment if not respect or love. A film showing the way to free oneself from the rhetoric and ways of the system, the tyranny of certain feminine whims or wiles and pointing towards an ideal of creation and autonomy. Ioseliani is a poet of joy and would have other films to add to this list. His most recent film Chantrapas returns to the Georgian language and the idea of autonomous creativity. In fact only a Chantrapas character would be able to create this joyful cinema (and Lutsik, Barnet and Ioseliani could all be defined as Chantrapas types).

Kanevsky's Замри, умри, воскресни! (Freeze, Die, Come to Life) would hardly be called by many a joyous film and yet it is an extraordinary tale of childhood love and friendship between the two characters Galia and Valerka (as much as anything else) in the harshest of environments. Their survival is miraculous in its way given the horrendous environment in which they find themselves but this was a strange joy to watch.

Other joyous jewels include Medvedkin's Счастье (Happiness), Kuleshov's Необычайные приключения мистера Веста в стране большевиков (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the land of the Bolsheviks)- the first film I saw at Moscow's legendary Musei Kino and which drew me to Soviet film. Elem Klimov's early comedies/ satires Добро пожаловать, или Посторонним вход воспрещен (Welcome, or no unauthorised entry)- almost a Soviet Zero de Conduite and his Похождения зубного врача (Adventures of a Dentist). Danelia's 'Mimino' (a Don Quijote based tale of a Georgian and an Armenian in Moscow) is incomparable as is his tale of a Soviet alcoholic plumber 'Afonija'. There is also joy in Папиросница от Моссельпрома (The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom) and Komarov's excellent Поцелуй Мэри Пикфорд (The Kiss of Mary Pickford)- pure reflective joy looking at cinema making and cinema stardom.

Odessa and Film

2011-07-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

To most people's minds to mention Odessa and cinema an image of the massacre at the Potemkin Steps in Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' comes to mind. Yet the history of cinema in Odessa is a long and fascinating one. In fact some Odessans like to claim that it was Josif Timchenko who shot the first cinematic film at Odessa's Hippodrome. His "Jumping Horseman" was to be shown on January 24th 1895 during a medical congress (weeks before the Lumiere brothers patented their cinematic machine in France). Whether Odessa is the real birthpace of world cinema or not, it is undoubtedly a city that has played a significant but often unacknowledged role in Russian and Soviet cinema history.

One of the few books available on this subjecy is Vadim Kostromenko's two-volume anecdotal history of the Odessa Film studios. In it he recounts his own memories of the studio after the Second World War and, in less detail, some of the original figures who built and developed cinema in Odessa including such figures as Peter Chardynin and the great silent move actress Vera Kholodnaya who died young in 1919 of the Spanish influenza and was buried accompanied by a large part of Odessa's population. The films scripted by Odessa's literary legend Isaac babel include the magnificent Benya Krik. Mayakovsky was also to write scripts for the Odessa Film Studio- seven in total (of which two were actually shot). Another name linked briefly to Odessa and cinema was Nikolai Erdman (one of the Soviet Union's greatest satirists). Among those who rebuilt cinema in Odessa in the post-revolutionary period of the 1920s was the legendary Mikhail Kapchinsky who although arrested three times during various waves of repression was to survive into the 1980s. It was Kapchinsky who brought Eisenstein's film 'Battleship Potemkin' to Odessa from Leningrad in order to save it from the autumnal climate of Leningrad which was to make shotting impossible and it was this fact that meant that the film was to be concentrated on the Odessa episode of the 1905 revolution. In the 1920s it was to be profits from Italian films starring Lina Cavvallieri and Francesco Bertini which would help restore film production in Odessa (rather than the American films which were to be popular elsewhere in the Soviet Union at that time).

A film about the Soviet-Polish War shot in Odessa was to star the legendary historical personage Kotovsky who had agreed to play himself. This Robin Hood bandit figure turned Bolshevik unfortunately was not to live to become a film star. He was assassinated just before the film was about to go into production and thus future generations have been denied this historical curiosity of watching the real Kotovsky act out his own life.

Alexander Dovzhenko was to begin his cinematic career in Odessa and although it was certainly not a successful beginning, it was here that he would develop his style of film-making to become one of the leading directors in the world.

Filmmaking in Odessa was to enter an uncertain period after 1929 which was to continue into the late Stalin period. In fact between 1929 and 1941 and between 1944 and 1952 the director of the Odessa Film Studios was to be changed almost annually. Many who worked here were to suffer repression and even execution (including many of Dovzhenko's former scriptwriters, co-directors and cameramen). The immediate post-war years main task in Odessa was to restore the film studio to its previous condition given the destruction and theft carried out by Rumanian occupying forces in the war years.

Cinema in Odessa in post-war years got off to a slow start and it was only with the advent of Alexander Gorsky as head of the film studio that in 1953 film production would be reset on an upward course. Under his and later Gennady Zbandit's directorship that Odessa could return to quality film-making. In 1956 one of the film most symbolic of the early Thaw period was to be made in Odessa - Marlen Khutsive( and Feliks Mironer's) Весна на Заречной Улице (Spring on Zarechnaya Street). A young cameraman would work with the two directors and have a long association with Odessa: Peter Todorovsky. The actor Shukshin would also debut in Odessa in Khutsiev's second film 'The two Fyodor's'.

One of film's most promising but unsuccessful figures Genrikh Gabay (in the photo above) was to have a career dogged by misfortune. His masterpiece Зеленвый Фургон (The Green Truck)shot in Odessa was to mauled by Kiev officials and to be made unrecognisable. After shooting films from completely unsuitable scripts, he was to emigrate to Israel invited by Golda Meir. Yet even here he was to be given roles and films that he could not accept - he turned down Golda Meir's offer of post as Minsiter for Cineamtography as he wanted to shoot films. Then he was given the script of a national patriotic film to shoot- he turned this offer down in disgust affirming that he had too much of fighting in war to incite his then countrymen to fight against their Arab enemies. Gabay would then leave for the United States and find him equally marginalised and unsuited to shoot commercialised cinema. Invited by a priest to shoot a long documentary on the life of Christ his Jewish roots and atheist leanings caused further problems with his producers. Maybe little remains to prove Gabay's talent but his journey through the cinema of three countries surely deserves to be told and belongs to the history of cinema's would have beens as well as serving as an exemplary tale of one of cinema's more admirable refuseniks.

Another of life's refuseniks - Joseph Brodsky - was to star in the unlikely role of an Odessa party secretary in Vadim Lysenko's Поезд в далекий август (Train for a distant August) in 1970. Lysenko's assistant Leonid Mak noted Brodksy's similarity to Naum Gurevich and given Brodsky's need to work the future Nobel Laureate jumped at the chance. Unfortunately brodsky's role in the film came to the notice of party officials in Kiev and all shots of Brodsky were ordered to be cut from the film. However, unknown to the authorities only the close-ups were reshot and medium and long shots of the character are still those acted by Brodsky himself.

Odessa's major contemporary name is, of course, Kira Muratova who has remained faithful to the city and still uses the studio. Another long-term association with Odessa and the studio was kept by Stanislav Govorukhin who shot many films here. The legendary Vladimir Vysotksy acted in Govorukhin's most popular film series Место Втречи изменить нельзя (the Meeting Place can not be altered)but also in other films shot in or about Odessa. a lesser-known but by no means minor director - Georgy Yungvald-Khilkevich - has shot a number of films here including the film 'The art of living in Odessa' based on Isaac Babel's short stories about Odessa.

In short, the history of film in Odessa is in no way a negligible one. If the Odessa Film Studios were not one of the Soviet Union's major film studios, cinematic history in Odessa is a fascinating and inspirational one deserving of a major historical work on this intriguing subject.

Russian Film festivals & a report on Odessa's Film Festival

2011-07-22T09:00:00.001-07:00

The season of major Russian film festivals- Sochi, Moscow and the new Saint-Petersburg International Cinema Forum is coming to an end. In a recent article for Moscow News Yuri Gladilshchikov argues that the St Petersburg festival is overtaking that of Moscow in terms of quality and significance. The Moscow Film festival seems to be a victim of Mikhalkov's overbearing need to live on the rhetoric of challenging Cannes and Venice without being able to match its prestige. The absurd inflation of self-importance attributed to it by the Russian cinema elite ignores the fact that it doesn't attract the international attention that other major European festivals do. At the same time it also manages to alientae its own local audience by its excessive ticket prices. The modest beginnings of St Petersburg's international film forum (now in its second edition) nonetheless has been based on a solid foundation- Alexei German shadows (or even overshadows) Nikita Mikhalkov while film critic Andrei Plakhov is chief selector of film - a heavyweight counterpart to Moscow's Kirill Razlogov. Moreover, the St petersburg festival with red carpet guests including Natasha Kinski and Ornella Muti is based on a more solid relationship to the public of St Petersburg given that ticket prices are half the price of those of Moscow.

This week another Russian-language festival of significance has taken place. Smaller in scale to St Petersburg and Moscow's film festivals, the Odessa International Film festival has nonetheless attracted the likes of John Malkovich to the red carpet and visiting directors include Valery Todorovsky, Otar Ioselliani, Sergei Soloviev and the, alas, rather ubiquitous Nikita Mikhalkov. Kira Muratova- an Odessan herself was also present both at the screening of her own film as well as among the audience of Soloviev's Anna Karenina at the Odessa Film Studios. One of the more spectacular events of the festival was the most well-attended as well as free. A large screen projected Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' with a live orchestra at the botoom of the Potemkin Steps to a crowd of thousands. At the first festival last year Battleship Potemkin was itself projected with live orchestra - a fascinating idea that brings back the magic of great silent cinema to a whole city. Each evening of the festival films are projected on to a screen on the other steps called Lanzheron Steps (not far from the Potemkin steps) for free thus giving at least a democratic veneer to this festival. Ticket prices are also not exhorbitant - at the Rodina cinema they are between $3 and $5, at the Odessa film studios between $1 and $3 - far below the Moscow prices of up to $15. The opening ceremony was preceded by the walk along the red carpet towards Odessa's opera house. Odessans are less star-struck than others and people turned up simply out of curiosity - even the stars such as John Malkovich were met with restrined applause at most. A number of single demonstrators turned up to shout 'Down with the Oligarchs' and hold placards but soon they left to have a laugh with the Odessan policemen (maybe their British policing colleagues should be sent to the Ukarine to learn restraint and good- humour).

For me the highlights of the festival have been the screenings of Ioselliani's 'Chantrapas', Kaurismaki's 'Le Havre', Loznitsa's 'My Joy' and of course Kira Muratova's 'Melody for a Barrel Organ'. Soloviev's Ukranian premiere of 'Anna Karenina' was equally significant (but for me somewhat a delusion) and an interesting tale of a mid-life crisis of three band members (a doctor, a policeman and a taxi driver) using Inarritu's narrative trio style to describe Russian realia. Another Ukrainian film called Dvoe (the Two) set in World War Two provided a reflection about friend and enemy not too far apart from Rogozhkin's Кукушка 'Cuckoo'. It also explored the inner dynamics of two groups of two people- one pair pursuing (two Germans one male and one female as well as an army dog and another pair pursued: a Soviet soldier and his captured German soldier who appears willing to change sides). Loznitsa's film was by far one of the darkest films of the festival about a man who finds himself lost in a territory from which there is no escape but death. This film had some critical acclaim at Cannes and Trieste. At one point the possibility that it might win a major award at Cannes Film Festival brought a howl of alarm by the Mikhalkovian national patriots who were to ready to argue that the film would have won because it denigrated Russia and painted it in overly black terms.

Soloviev's 'Anna Karenina' was its first Ukrainian premiere and well-attended by the Odessan public: yet for me it suffered too much from many drawbacks and in spite of some superb acting by the likes of Drubich, Yankovsky, Abdullov and Garmash, it was rather a deluding film even though it attempted to do something new in the genre of literary adaptations. A good piece of criticism has been written by Anindita Banerjee in Kino Kultura here: http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/26r-karenina.shtml
Watching Anna Karenina at the Odessa Film studios was Odessa's director Kira Muratova. Her short question and answer session after the showing of her film 'Melody for a barrel organ' was welcome but far too short. However, it was interesting to know that the war veteran excluded from the de luxe waiting room was actualy reciting his own personal history. In an answer to the question as to whether she thought there may be light at the end of the tunnel she cut the questioner short by saying that the light had completely gone out. She then defined herself as a happy pessimist and described the work of a film director to that of a surgeon. Although the surgeon cuts open the human body s/he still thinks of his/her own profession as something of beauty. Muratova insisted on the joy of her own profession defending the necessity of such films. In fact this dialectic between the sheer aesthetic beauty of the film and the absolute horror of the actual subject- a kind of contemporary fairy tale about the Slaughter of the Innocents in which the male orphan freezes to death with a handful of balloons in his hands (a nod to Fritz Lang's 'M') while a group of gastarbeiter's stand around in Gogolian awe while one of their member hiccoughs uncontrollably. The unbearableness of the ending, the sheer beauty of the film, the fairy tale form make this film Muratova's most shocking statement but perhaps also one of her most accessible. Yet she brings us to a point of aesthetic joy and utter madness that Mayakovsky reached with his line about loving watching children die. It is not as first appears a film about our indifference and cruelty to children but something far more uncanny and terrible than that. Its radical scope in going beyond what most directors are capable of made this film the most significant one of the festival. A shame that the film festival organisers cowardly failed to show this film at last year's festival. They, in the words of Muratova, were too concerned at its dark vision and too afraid of its pessimism. European and US distributors probably won't touch it with a barge pole which means that one of the truly great films of the past decade will go unseen until some rediscovery is made some years along the line. During the showing someone had brought their child along with them to watch the film, the child repeated a number of times during the seance "как красиво, как красиво" (how beautiful).

One more film that should be mentioned was Iurii Kara's 'Hamlet of the twenty-first century' - an eclectic film setting the story amongst car races and night club- Hamlet and his rivals between twenty-somethings. The emphasis that Kara gives to the figure of the Osric (played by Sukhorukov) as the venemous benefactor of the chaos and the brilliant acting of Diuzhev, the spectacular Crimea setting of the film (filming was done at the Vorontsov palace, the Sparrows Nest palace and near Balaclava)make it a visually unusual film. However, arguably the stylization goes too far and the eclecticism is too extreme with many roles apart from those of Diuzhev's and Sukhorukov's being less than memorable.

A number of Ukrainian comedies were also shown at the festival including Paradzanov's 'First Lad' and 'The art of living in Odessa' based on Babel's Odessa stories (and included the actor Viktor Avilov). A sparsely attended event but an interesting one nonetheless. Given that Dovzhenko began his career as a director of comedies in Odessa (Love's Berry), the Ukrainian film comedy section merited its place at the film festival.

All in all, a festival which hopefully will grow in future years. A small festival but one which has learnt to balance its obligations to the locals with an attempt to put this festival on the map.

Sokurov on Eisenstein, Literature and Cinema

2011-05-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

At Turin's 'Salone del Libro' (Book Fair) the one guest from Russia representing cinema was Aleksandr Sokurov who presented a book of essays which haven't been published in Russian. In fact, as far as I know, the only edition yet to come out is the Italian edition. The title of the collection is 'In the centre of the Ocean' (Nel Centro dell'Oceano). The essays are varied- from the film script of his film on the war in Chechnya 'Alexandra', to various work diaries and a selection of his Japanese diaries, from an essay on philosophy and Martin Heidegger to what for me was the most interesting text in the collection: a re-evaluation of the role of Sergei Eisenstein in cinema. An essay that needs to be read more than once given that it is very rich in observations. Sokurov, like Tarkovsky before him, have both tried to find an escape route from the influence that Eisenstein undoubtedly has in Russian and world cinema. Sokurov's placing of sailors in his film 'Russian Ark' was no casual choice: they were undoubtedly an allusion to Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' and not an allusion that had much of the positive about it. Sokurov's call is a call for a return to a pre-revolutionary ethos and whatever his respect for Eisenstein his is a call for pressing the delete button. Yet he knows, too, that this attitude is impossible. This, for Sokurov, is the dialectic of his dilemma.

Like Tarkovsky, Sokurov champions Dovzhenko over Eisenstein. The Dovzhenko who acknowledged the importance of atmosphere in the construction of a frame and who knew how to render human suffering and pain on the screen bringing cinema closer than anyone else to art and literature. Yet in the essay this is all he has to say about Dovzhenko. It is, nonetheless, Eisenstein with whom Sokurov wants to confront himself with, to clash with.

Sokurov's speech at the 'Salone del Libro' took the form almost of an anti-cinema diatribe. He stated that if humankind were left without electricity and there were no possibility of watching films any longer nothing much would happen, but if humankind were to be left without the book that, for Sokurov, would signify the end of the world. An extreme position but a fundamental one to understand Sokurov's place in cinema. For Sokurov, cinema is an imperfect and much too young art that doesn't have the weight of literature (and for Sokurov Nineteenth Century literature is central to civilisation as is Faust which he is filming for his tetralogy on Power (Moloch, Taurus and Sun being the three others taking a look at Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito).

What Sokurov sees as Eisenstein's negative influence is his extreme masculinity, his destructive energy (leading to a lapse into a cinema of unheard of cruelty- the child suspended from the staircase in Strike), that cinema has transformed the mysetry of death into a visual commodity and he even comes to the conclusion that this trend in cinema has led to the clash of civilisations.

Sokurov's critique (one might almost call it an attempted demolition) of Eisenstein is based on the premise that Eisenstein set cinema on the wrong track and that it is necessary to return and start on entirely new foundations. For Sokurov the return is to Nineteenth Century literature. He often exhibits a kind of nihilistic despair over the possibility of cinema. In Turin he stated that "cinema is where I work" but he had no fundamental interest in discussing this area. In his essay the only suggestion that cinema might find a new path is in a note explaining Mikhail Romm's return to a kind of Pushkinian montage. Sokurov suggests that Eisenstein could only really explore his artistic freedom in his drawings which illuminated both his thirst for freedom and his solitude. In spite of the enormous artistic resources of Eisenstein's cinema, Sokurov concludes that one discovers in Eisesntein the footnotes th the bottom of a page in which nothing is written.

Sokurov is one of the few to have put into words this total denial of Eisenstein which is common both to him and Tarkovsky. His is almost a Dantesque judgement- mixing compassion with condemnation and certainly is a judgement full of nuance. Both one of the most negative judgements on Eisenstein but also one of the most pregnant with insights into Eisenstein.

Italians in Soviet Cinema : Gino de Marchi.

2011-05-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

One of the lesser known stories , as far as I know, is the presence of many foreigners in the history of Soviet cinema. Of course, the Herbert Marshall's, the Jay Leyda's and the Willy Munzenberg's have had their tales told. In Italy a number of books have come out on the life of Francesco Misiano- a character I mentioned in a previous blog. Another book recounts the tragic life of an Italian documentary filmmaker - Gino de Marchi - as well as the struggle of his daughter to fight for his memory. The account by Gabriele nassim is written in the context of a tale about the behaviour of Italian communist emigres towards each other. It damns many of them but holds up the moral stature of Antonio Gramsci who was one of the few to help De marchi out of genuine difficulties upon his arrival in the Soviet Union. There developed a genuine tie bewteen De Marchi and the Gramsci family from generation to generation. De Marchi's subsequent fate in the Soviet Union was to be a bitter one: in Italy in a moment of weakness he had confessed to the existence (and pointed out the whereabouts) of a cache of arms to be used for the revolutionary struggle against fascism (he did so to save his own mother from arrest). He was sent by his comrades to the Soviet Union as much as a form of punishment as to save him from a three and a half year jail sentence. In fact he was to begin his Soviet odyssey in prison (and it was Gramsci who was to save him from this initial fate). He then was to work on collective farms. It was to be Francesco Misiano who would employ him at Mezhrabpom and Gino would eventually become director of a number of documentary films, mainly on the Kolkhoz and Stakhanovite themes. De Marchi himself would gain the reputation of a Stakhanovite director, managing to organise a work method allowing him to cut production times.
The book by Nissim says little about his actual films- just that they were "documentary films dedicated to the 'great successes' of Stalinist agricultural collectivisation" (p 184)- although he gives little more detail. The book also concentrates little on the detail of his cinematic work - the few details he gives are to delineate the just (some of his cameramen) from the unjust (a certain Britikov who would denounce De marchi and go on to make a successful career in the Soviet cinema world as well as to block the career of De Marchi's daughter as actress). Nonetheless, she (Luciana De Marchi) was to work with Giuseppe de Santis on his filmabout Italian soldiers in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, entitled 'Italiani brava gente'. Nissim also speaks of a Russian film scripted by Lev Roshal on the life of De Marchi made in 1992. Another Italian in cinema who was to share De Marchi's eventual fate (that of execution) was Aldo Gorelli who was better known as Gheffi Torre and would work as a sound technician from 1932 at Soyuzdetfilm. Whether there were other Italians working in the Soviet cinematic studios is a field that deserves some reserach.

Lattuada's Overcoat and Visconti's White Nights and Italian-Russian Cinematographic ( & Cultural) Influences

2011-03-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

A recent viewing of Alberto Lattuada's 'Il Cappotto' (The Overcoat) and Luchino Visconti's 'Le notti bianche' (White Nights)- two films owing their plots to Gogol's and Dostoyevsky's well-known short stories have convinced me of a number of things: that the 'adaptation' of Russian classics is not a hopeless enterprise (the failures of Lean's 'Doctor Zhivago', Fiennes's Onegin or the Taviani brothers 'Resurrection' which, nonetheless, was to win the 2002 Moscow Film Festivals main prize to the utter astonishment of many, nothwithstanding). However, the strength of Lattuada's and Visconti's films have, perhaps, a lot to do with the fact that they do not attempt to be adaptations and transpose the action not to an imagined Russia but to a phantasmagoric Italy (Visconti keeps the female character as slavic but not Russian). The fact that they do not attempt to be faithful to the originals and both sprung from stylistic developments inherent to Italian cinema at the time make these films successful fusions of two cultures (the same one may say of Kurosawa's frequent tranpsoitions of Russian and Western literary classics or Kozintsev's superlative trio of Shakespeare- King Lear and Hamlet- and Cervantes' Don Quijote.

Lattuada's film was certainly significant in its attempt to break free from the grasp that a narrow conception of neorealism was holding Italian cinema at the time- a neorealism that wanted simply to record everyday reality in its most minimal details, to trail or shadow (pedinare) human reality as Cesare Zavattini put it. The transformation of Akaky Akakievich into Carmine de Carmine and nineteenth century Saint Petersburg into 1930s Pavia brought something new to Post-War Italian cinema instilling a certain fantastic, quasi-surreal tone to the film which was to be one of a bunch of great films from 1951-2 (including Antonioni's 'Cronaca di un amore', De Sica's 'Umberto D', Fellini's ''Lo sceicco bianco', Lizzani's 'Achtung Banditi' and Rossellini's 'Europa '51' to name but a few).

Visconti's adaptation of the Dostoyevsky tale five years later already having left neorealism far behind is fascinating in its search for a kind of theatricalised cinema (and was a tale that Robert Bresson would try to transpose to cinema years later).

Lattuada was to return to Russian literature in later films - to Pushkin in 'La Tempesta' (a reworking of Pushkin's 'The captain's Daughter'), to Chekhov in 'La Steppa' and to Bulgakov in 'La cuore d'un cane' (The Heart of a Dog). None of these films obtained the critical acclaim of his 'Cappotto' however.

The cinematographic trace of Russia in Italian cinema (as well as of Russian literature and art thoughout Italian culture) and vice versa is one of those subjects that require years of investigation. What would appear a reasonable supposition - that this mutual influence was to be partially closed in the 1920s and 1930s - is certainly fales. The success of Soviet films in the Italian ventennio, especially, for example (but not only) Ekk's 'Putyovka k zhizhn' (Road to Life) at the first Venice Film Festival is one of the many interactions that occurred during this period. The post-war years are so full of contacts and mutual influences that hopefully at one point this area will be fully explored in a monograph.

The influence of Soviet montage cinema on Italy's interwar director Alessandro Blasetti, the quasi-subversive expounding of Soviet montage theory in Italy's 'Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia' by the Marxist critic Umberto Barbaro, the critical and theoretical work of Guido Aristrarco, Glauco Viazzi, Giovanni Buttafava (three oustanding Italian critics of Soviet cinema), the influence of Italian neorealims in turn on a whole generation of Soviet directors of the Thaw, fascinating individual stories of exiles - whether Italian exiles in Soviet Russia like that of Francesco Misiano or the story of Shaliapin's daughter (Marina) and her role in Italian cinema under fascism, the filming of Russian-themed films such as La Principessa Tarakanova directed by the Russian exile Fyodor Otsep and Mario Soldati and the numerous Soviet films with Italian themes (and vice versa), the Italian-Soviet co-productions from the light-hearted Ryazanov comedy to the Tarkovsky 'Nostalghia' and the many festivals of Italian cinema in the Soviet Union and Soviet cinema in Itay during the Cold War period point to numerous links.

Lattuada and Visconti (Tarkovsky and Ryazanov) are only two pointers to contact between Italian and Russian cultural worlds and sensitivities - one can add bernardo Bertolucci's 'Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man', Bellocchio's Il Gabbiano (The Seagull), Mikhalkov's (Oci Chyornie) as less convincing but, nonetheless, curious transpositions. In the world of animation the trio of Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra and Andrei Khrzhanovsky have produced a fascinating film based on Fellini's erotic drawings 'Il lungo viaggio' (The Long Voyage) and deserving of a whole article of its own. The link between Russian and Italian culture in general is, of course, not limited to film- the reception of Russian literature has been mediated by figures who made a significant contribution to culture in their own right - such as the poet Slavist Angelo Maria Ripellino or one of the greatest twentieth century Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi who translated Pushkin and Lermontov. What would Russian art be without the image and presence of Italy (it would be almost as easy to list the Russian artists who hadn't been to Italy than those who had). The heroic attempt of the recently departed Boris Tishchenko to create symphonies based on Dante's Divine Comedy makes it clear that in Russian music, too, is a sphere in which Italian themes abound. The subject is clearly infinite.

Otar Ioseliani, Inkizhnikov and the schism of emigration

2011-01-31T22:38:00.000-08:00

The place of the emmigrant in Russian/ Soviet cinema (and Russian culture as a whole) is one of these painful subjects that seems rarely to go away. The schism between those who left and those who stayed is one that seems to repeat itself each generation. Perhaps one illustration of this is Ioseliani's recent critique of the state of Russian cinema published in Noviye Izsvetiye http://www.newizv.ru/news/2011-02-01/140199/ The showing of his latest film Chantrapas was the occasion for him to suggest that there is little point in working in Russian cinema nowadays. His critique of Russia's filmakers included both Konchalovsky and Sokurov (who he deemed commercialistic) as well as criticising the late Sergei Bondarchuk. He remarked that intellectuals had given up going to the cinema.Fortunately Ioseliani (in photo above) is one of those directors who has managed to reinvent himself and become an even more universal author after emigration (something that,arguably, Konchalovsky hasn't suceeded in).
Ioseliani's melancholic description of contemporary Russian cinema doesn't seem too far from the truth at times. The greats of late Soviet cinema like Norstein and German and others like Abdrashitov have been almost reduced to silence and it is a rare thing indeed to find a film that convinces one that Russian cinema is renewing itself.

Another visit to the excellent series of lectures at the Meyerhold Museum convinced me that this theme of emigration is no minor one for an understanding of Russian cinema. The lecture was not devoted to this but the presence of members of Valeri Inkizhnikov's family let in a new light on what emigration signified for Soviet cinema. The history of Soviet cinema can hardly be understood without a history of those who either emigrated or were exiled in the camps. The slow rediscovery of Fedor Otsep (and I really recommend an excellent post on the site NitrateVille http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?t=7438 about this director) is one of many stories to be told. Inkizhnikov is another- Inkizhinov was to star in one of Otsep's film 'Amok' and any accounts of their collaboration would, I'm sure, be a fascinating tale to hear. Mikhail Romm was to suggest that the emigration of Inkizhnikov was to mark his death as an actor- alas, this too suggests the inadequacy of vision that the subject of emigration caused even for attentive commentators like Romm.

Recognition of all the many talents that were lost to emigration (Anna Sten is another name that immediately springs to mind as well as that of Mozzhukin) and those exiled in labour camps (like Koval'-Samborsky and Zhzhenov) has been given some consideration in recent years in a number of studies. However, these studies are yet to have any full-English language accounts in their number.

The subject of emigration and immigration is one treated relatively little in Soviet cinema. Panfilov's 'Tema' comes to mind as being a rare exception. The 90s saw a return of the theme. However, contemporary Russia also has the new theme of immigration to deal with - a film like Gastarbeiter showing us that the social film in contemporary Russia is not altogether absent.

A segment of Larisa Shepitko's TV programme 'In the Thirteenth Hour of Night'

2011-01-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

I thought I would post this curious sequence that Larisa Shepitko made for television as it is rarely mentioned in her works and yet it holds some interest of its own.

Mikhail Romm

2011-01-27T03:03:00.000-08:00

The place of Mikhail Romm in Soviet cinema is hard to exaggerate and yet neither he nor any of his films have found quite the reception that they deserve outside of Russia. The day of the recent Domededovo bombing (24th January) marked the 110th anniversary of his birth and this year also marks the 40th anniversary of his death. Romm's reputation has perhaps been damaged by David Caute's deeply negative portrayal of him in his study of Cold War and intellectuals 'The Dancer Defects'. Even though most of Romm's films were made during the Stalinist period (and even during the period of late Stalinism's 'film famine' he was not inactive) it would be not just wrong but wholly injust to write him off as 'fundamentally Stalinist'. This depiction by Caute of his Thaw period film 'Ordinary Fascism' highlights a terrible blindness that Western critics have been not uncommonly guilty of in their descriptions of Soviet film art. (Interestingly Maya Turovskaya author of one of the best studies of Tarkovsky came to a diametrically opposite conclusion stating that Romm's film was, in essence, an anti-Stalinist film).

A retrospective of Romm's films may indeed show up many flaws- his two Lenin films (in the late Thirties) and Cold War tracts (in the late Forties) were made during periods when dissidence proved unthinkable. Yet his Lenin films didn't sink the moral depths that Chiaureli does with his Stalin films. By presenting a human, almost anonymous Lenin, Romm spares us monumentalism and mummification: the habitual Stalinist projection of Soviet power. His films in the early to mid Fifties may also prove to be rather unsalvageable - his artistic low point was reached by his 'Admiral Ushakov' and its sequel 'Ships storm the Bastions'. That which is left, however, is not inconsiderable. His debut- an early adaptation of Maupassant's 'Boule de Suif' is a fascinating piece of late silent filmmaking whereas his 'remake' of John Ford's 'The Lost Patrol' was the first example of the Soviet Eastern later to be developed by Motyl in his 'White sun of the Desert' and then to become a Soviet genre in its own right. Whether Babluani's recent classic going by the same name was inspired by Romm's film is a matter for speculation, Romm's film certainly deserves a showing. Some believe his 1940 film 'Mechta' (Dream) to be the apogee of his work. The influential Russian film producer Armen Medvedev has named it as his favourite film on one occasion.

Romm's post-Stalinist period was marked by his interest in historical documentary films as well as his 'Nine Days of One Year' (a tale of nuclear physicists) which the senior film critic of the Village Voice J. Hoberman called a 'revelation'. The film proved that Romm, unlike others who were associated with the Stalinist period, had the power to reinvent himself. Perhaps Kalatozov was the other main director who although having worked within the Stalinist paradigm managed not to be broken by it and re-emerged during the Thaw with renewed energy (Boris Barnet was, perhaps, too peripheral a figure during Stalinism to have been forced into the compromises that Romm was - if Barnet was called upon to direct a propgandistic film such as the Stakhanovite 'Night in September' he would subvert it through apathy).

Nonetheless Romm's legacy should not be searched for solely in his films. Romm's significance for Soviet cinema arguably should be sought in another sphere: in his pedagogy. While Eisenstein may have been VGIK's most prestigious teacher it was arguably Romm who inspired a whole generation (arguably two generations) of some of the greatest film directors of the 1960s. 1970s and beyond. Without Romm's teaching we may well never have known of Andrey Tarkovsky, Elem Klimov, Vasily Shukshin, Gleb Panfilov, Andrey Konchalovsky, Grigori Chukhrai, Aleksandr Mitte, Sergei Soloviev, Tenghiz Abuladze, Nikita Mikhalkov and Vadim Abdrashitov amongst others. It is, perhaps here, that Romm's role will never be challenged and the words of many of his former students have shown how much they felt that they owed to Mikhail Romm. Mikhail Romm was not merely an individual film-maker of considerable talent: his place in Soviet cinematic history can hardly ever be over-estimated. A whole constellation of talents and geniuses who have made world cinematic history owe Romm a great deal. Without Mikhail Romm Russian and Soviet cinema in the past five decades would have been much poorer.

Four months without cinema, the trials and tribulations of cinema going in the Russian provinces and Neya Zorkaya's essays

2011-01-12T07:31:00.000-08:00

I've been such a long time tied up in (or should I say tied down to, given an almost pre-Emancipation labour code) a rather surreal school so that I've remained rather silent for months on end at this blog. Four months in Russia haven't meant four months of film-going and I haven't managed to keep abreast with much of Russia's cinematic news. The odd film here and there and a promise to myself that I'll return to this subject as soon as I can. My experience has been the realia of everyday life in a small town outside Moscow called Zheleznodorozhny. It has no cinema - students of mine told me that one was planned five or six years ago and a crane stands in the spot where the cinema has been proposed to be built but no sign of building work is visible (and what films would the cinema show anyway apart from Hollywood blockbusters with an equal splash of mind-numbing national-patriotic tosh). My attempt to start up a film club in this English-language school in the town was equally doomed to failure- a proposed showing of British and American films was to begin with Lindsay Anderson's 'If....'. During the morning while preparing the introduction to the film, the town was hit by electricity cuts. I walked to work in the hope that the electricity would be back by the time the film was scheduled to begin. It was- fifteen minutes before the film was scheduled. Alas apart from a fellow teacher the film had an audience of one (and the secretary's young child who had to be told that this wasn't quite a suitable film for him). However although I had insisted that the film should be shown with English subtitles it was set by the engineer to Russian dubbing mode (and I being hopeless with technical equipment couldn't find a way to change to subtitles). The spectator then suggested I change the film to 'Polar Express' with Tom Hanks. Well that was the end of my dream of bringing good quality cinema to the provincial town of Moscow Region where in fiction Anna Karenina threw herself under a train but nothing else of real note seems to have happened. A morose picture of cultural life in the provinces. I have kept a rather nice poster of this non-event which I hope to keep as a souvenir of this four-month debacle.

The absence of cinema in this town however pales besides the background of what happened in Novosibirsk . There cinema going was to prove a dangerous act requiring some considerable courage. In Novosibirsk in early November a group of 15-20 students gathered to watch Valery Balayan's film about the murdered journalist and anti-fascist Anastasia Baburova when they were attacked by a group of 20-30 Nazis shouting "who doesn't love fascism here? Who loves watching cinema?" and began to attack them. While most of the cinema goers managed to escape one was injured in the face while leaving the university building. The film had been scheduled to show at a number of festivals in Moscow but organisers were afraid of attacks on spectators and cancelled the showings. An earlier version of the film is available on youtube (only in Russian) for anyone interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWOwkpfl6wI

My few visits to cinema in Moscow have been to see Fedorchenko's Ovsyanki (Silent Souls), Balabanov's 'Kochegar' (The Stoker), Dvortsevoy's 'Tulpan' and Aleksandr Kott's 'Bretskaya krepost' (The Brest Fortress) as well as less felicitously Andrei Konchalovsky's 'Shchelkunchik' (The Nutcracker). I'm not sure if the Balabanov 'Kochegar' reached the heights (or the depths) of some of his more recent films. Dvortsevoy's film was a delight, Fedorchenko was even after two visits something of an enigma (but at times a fascinating one)and Kott's war film was not as bad as some patriotically inclined films. I'll have to give some more detialed account of these films at another time. At least the Ovsyanki merits some more detailed account of its strange poetic realism opening as the critic Andrei Plakhov put it "a small window in the claustrophobia of (Russian), enclosed by a limited orbit of themes and subjects".

Regarding new publications, a collection of the late Neya Zorkaya's essays has been published by Agraf publishers. Not devoted solely to cinema it has some fascinating sounding essays on the anonynmous and authorial character in the system of culture, period stylistics in art, cinematography in literary work including what promises to be a fascinating account of cinematography in the work of Mandelshtam. Other essays and section are devoted to the 'New Man' in Soviet cinema and to authours such as Shukshin, Abuladze as well as Muratova. The book ends with essays on Akunin, Pasternak and Blok. I remember Neya Zorkaya at a couple of festivals devoted to cinema from former Soviet satellite states. Her battles with the okhranik to let simple film buffs without passes like myself into what was a government building showed the dedication she had in insisting on the right of all to enjoy films. One could never be too grateful to a person like her- a genuine heroine who would go to battle with officialdom for the sake of an unknown spectator. The diaries of Rolan Bykov have also recently been printed and they will surely prove to be a fascinating insight into the life and times of one of Soviet cinema's greatest actors (but there were so many greats).

Hopefully having worn off the madness of Zhelezky and its rapacious capitalist English language school directors I'll be posting about these and other subjects more regularly.

Boris Barnet & By the Bluest of Seas

2010-09-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I talked about Abram Room's 'A Severe Youth' as displaying an alternative route towards which Soviet cinema never went. Yet there are many such films- Eggert's 'Bear Wedding' in the mid 1920s suggested a possible path into horror and fantasy which would become non-existent for decades until the late 1960s with the film Vij. One of the most difficult to categorise figures in Soviet cinema is ,of course, Boris Barnet. It wasn't only Jacques Rivette who thought of Barnet so highly to see him as a kind of alternative pole to Eisenstein in Soviet cinema. Many comments by Naum Kleiman suggest an equally elevated view of Barnet's genius. It is, of course, hard to pick one of Barnet's masterpieces. There are many outstanding films although 'Okraina' or 'Outskirts' has generally thought to have been his greatest success. Nonetheless, now with the release of 'Miss Mend' on DVD and a reappraisal of Soviet classics of the silent period, 'The House on Trubnaya Square' has also had its champions. Nonetheless, I want to concentrate in this post on another film that has both its champions and its detractors 'By the Bluest of Seas'.

In fact this film has almost had no serious champions outside southern Europe. Henri Langlois was an early fan as were some of directors of the French New Wave, it has been shown occasionally on Italian TV (under the rubric of Ghezzi's 'Fuori Orario') and recently was shown in the Spanish Filmoteca in Madrid. Yet Barnet in spite of his English ancestry has not had the kind of reception that he deserves in the anglo-saxon world.

'By the Bluest of Seas' appears almost as a miracle given that it was made around the time of the preparation for the Great Terror. If it is, as one critic has argued, a film about desire and fidelity its oniric advocacy for yearning and desire makes it one of the most incongruous films of the period. Barnet was deemed the 'Peter Pan' of Soviet cinema and thankfully for future generations this was true. His inability to shoot an ideologically serious film means that there is almost no bombast and all ideologically correct scenes collapse in a kind of absurd gag-like denouement. In 'By the Bluest of Seas' there is barely any single ideologically correct pointer (let alone whole scene). If the Kolkhoz is called 'The Flames of Communism', communism has been tranformed into a island in which production targets and Stakhanovite enthusiasm are absent. The two outsiders - Alyosha and Yusouf - seem to arrive from nowhere and the wording on their documents have been wiped out owing to their shipwreck. No suspicion here of potential saboteurs. Moreover, Alyosha's day off work (owing to lovesickness) provokes Yussouf into a overtly jealous-ridden denunciation of his friend in front of the Kolkhoz members. Yet no one is listening. Desire is given precedence over duty in this film.

The gags come thick and fast and each time they undermine any serious intent. Even the shipwreck and resurrection of Masha soon becomes the excuse for another gag in which Youssouf is being ditanced from his love. The two main characters who arrive in this matriarchal utopia have neither origin nor destination, nor any particular goal or mission. Their blanked out documents only emphasises, their absolute alienness to the Stalinist reality.

Soviet critics at the time were more critical of the scriptwriter, Klimenti Mints. His 'emotional scenario' (like those of Rzhevesky) was a strange interlude of evasion from the ironclad script of the Soviet era. Nonetheless, many showed impatience at Barnet for taking up this 'empty' script. Naive, futile, simplistic, deprived of motivation, empty were all judgements that critics used for the film. The most damning criticism was made by Nikolai Otten who stated that the characters in the film appeared from 'outside the concrete circumstances of our country and our epoch'. He went on to complain that Barnet relied on traditional imagery typical of western cinematography, fatally slipping into ideological sources of American cinema and gives James Cruze's film 'Clipped Wings' (1930) as precursor.

Rather a more recent interpretation of the film by Nicole Brenez links it to Jean Vigo's 'Atalante' and Buster Keaton's 'College' and sees it as a study in the cinegenesis of desire which returns cinema to its origins in 'live performance, circus, acrobatics, vaudeville, gymnastics'. The presence of Meyerhold actor Sverdlin emphasises this gestural performance bringing out burlesque tones at their most sublime.

Barnet's future work would include many (as yet) undiscovered masterpieces- his work with Volpin and Erdman on 'The Old Jockey', the superb 'Alyonka' were actors like Shukshin and Garin display their skill at its best as well as some fascinating films made during the second World War with very few resources. Even his look back at the early years of the Revolution in his 'The Poet' is a far more interesting than is usually given credit for. Nonetheless, 'By the Bluest of Seas' remains, in many ways, the greatest miracle. Imagining utopia in Stalin's Soviet Union was an unusually subversive act.

Summer break, Danelija and new themes on this film blog (Danelia at 80)

2010-08-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Having been almost computer-less for the past two months and even having been away from almost any technology has meant that I haven't posted on this blog and my 'Soviet cinema thinking hat' has become rather rusty. I haven't managed to search through the Russian papers or listen to broadcasts of 'Kulturni Shock' on Ekho. No trawling, precious little reading and no films. Intead, any reading has been literary (an attempt at reading Velimir Khlebnikov in Ripellino's Italian translations ended in incomprehension but momentary joy at isolated images- reading him in Russian will have to wait for more courageous and dedicated moments) and I have lapsed into a mood in which my previous enthusiams have reasserted themselves. Re-reading Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (an Argentinian writing in Italian) with his marvelous grotesque portraits has no equivalence in Russian cinema (maybe there is a Wilcockian fantasy running riot in Muratova or perhaps Khrzhanovsky or maybe not). The recent death of another Argentinian author, the legendary Rodolfo Fogwill, has reminded me that it is time to read his 'A Film Script for Artkino' in which an Argentinian scriptwriter writes a script imagining a Soviet Argentina in the year 2018. Fogwill's parodic vision of a Soviet Argentina though having nothing to do with Soviet cinema itself intrigues me (Fogwill is the name of both the author as well, apparently, as the main character-the script-writer- and narrator of the novel).

Georgiy Danelija has recently celebrated his 80th birthday. Danelija is one of those masters of cinema who manage to bridge the gap between popular cinema and more elite forms of cinema. His career has been more prolific than many directors of his weight and some marvelous comedies have been made. Alas, the Soviet comedy has never travelled far: Protazanov, Barnet, Ryazanov, Gaidai, the early Klimov and Danelija are all too rarely mentioned outside Russia or the former Soviet lands. Medevedkin's 'Happiness' is, perhaps, the only major Soviet comedy which has achieved broad critical reappraisal abroad alongside the musical comedies of Grigory Alexandrov. Danelija, though, is deserving of more serious reappraisal. His truly absurd sci-fi dystopia 'Kin-dza-dza' is, perhaps, his only film that has recently travelled a little and gained some recognition. His superb 'Autumn Marathon' deserves more widespread recognition as one of the very best films of the late Stagnation period (his tale of the alcoholic plumber 'Afoniya' is also a truly superb account of certain unglamorous aspects contemporary life in late seventies Russia and his 'Mimino' in the same period attempts to reconjure for us the Don Quijote and Sancho Panchez story by replacing them by a Georgian and Armenian in their quest through seventies Moscow). The earlier 'I stroll through Moscow' was a popular success and portrayed a lighter-hearted look at contemporary youth than Khutsiev's 'I am twenty' (or 'Lenin's Gate' as it was originally known). His satire 'Thirty Three', with the truly magnificent actor Evgeny Leonov who starred in many of Danelija's films, ran into censorship difficulties. Strangely enough like Klimov's 'Adventures of Dentist' it uses teeth to describe the difficulty of individuality in Soviet society.

Danelija is a superb storyteller when it comes to his own life too. His two volumes of autobiography are full of some very splendid and hilarious tales. Were they all true? As with fellow Georgian Iraklii Kvirikadze one doesn't really care in the end. As they say in Italy "Se non e' vero, e' ben trovato" (paraphrasing rather broadly 'If it's not true, it's a great story anyway').

I am hoping to be back to my usual three to four blogs a month (if not more). As my longer term ambition is to write some large piece on Boris Barnet I imagine I'll be looking at his ouevre more closely in this blog too. I also am beginning an attempt to look for literary works that are inspired by Russian and Soviet cinema. Feuchtwanger's chapter on reactions to watching the 'Battleship Potemkin' (in one of his novels) is one example and Mandelshtam's poems on Chapayev is another but I am sure there are many more fascinating literary reactions to Soviet cinematic masterpieces. Otherwise I'll try to give more accounts of films, directors, actors and aspects of Russian and Soviet cinema as well as of significant publications dedicated to Russian and Soviet cinema.

On Music in Russian and Soviet Film

2010-06-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

In an excellent monograph on Shostakovich's career in film ('Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film' published by I.B.Tauris), John Riley states that "film critics often seem oblivious to the soundtrack". A statement that is without and shadow of a doubt very true. I have spent maybe ten or more times watching Klimov's 'Sport,Sport,Sport' in order to subtitle it (& produce annotated notes on the film) and although I knew that the film was made in collaboration with Schnittke it is only now that I am beginning to see how the soundtrack contributes to the film as a whole. I am no musicologist and am rather uncertain as to how one can write about this aspect of the film. Yet there seems no end to the amount of Soviet films in which the soundtrack is vital to an understanding of the film itself.

John Riley's book on Shostakovich's work has some fascinating accounts of his work on almost fourty films. Even though Shostakovich's contribution varied in terms of quality according to the period in which he worked and the people with whom he collaborated on a film, for many of these films the music contributes to an understanding of the very meaning of the film. Examples of great films he contributed to were many films by Kozintsev and Trauberg (New Babylon, Alone, The Youth of Maksim, Simple People and then with Kozintsev alone in Pirogov and then in the masterpieces Hamlet and King Lear) Yutkevich's The Golden Mountains and Man with a Gun as well as The Counterplan co-directed with Ermler), Gendelshtein's Love and Hate, and then various films with Arnshtam (including Girlfriends and Zoya), with Faintsimmer (The Gadfly) and with other great directors such as Kalatozov, Dovzhenko, Roshal and Joris Ivens. He also worked on the soundtrack of Chiaureli's films during the most dangerous period for Shostakovich after the denunciation of him at the 1948 Congress of Musicians, though obviously in this case it was a question of physical survival which led him rather reluctantly to this work.

Of course, great film music was also to be contributed by the likes of Prokofiev (in his work with Eisenstein and Faintsimmer's 'Lieutenant Kizhe') and the trio of Schnittke, Gubaildulina and Artemyev were to provide some of the greatest soundtracks in world cinema. Moreover, often music which was surpressed or discouragd as music could turn up in the films where its radical innovation would be less likely to be noted. Film was an area where composers not conforming to Socialist Realist musical canons were still able to work. And thankfully. Cinema in the Seventies, for example, would be immensely enriched by the contributions of Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Ganelin, Kupriavicius who were practically banished from other musical arenas just as film music was the shelter for Shostakovich decades previously.

Soviet cinema would develop new forms of sound-visual interaction. The 'song film', the symphonic type of dramaturgy, the musical comedy, Eisenstein and Prokofiev's experiments in sound-visual counterpoint, polystylism in the late thaw. Popular film would also have its Dunaevsky's and Kancheli's who would add to the extraordinary quantity and quality of popular tunes and songs.

I recognise my own woeful obliviousness in the past of the place of music in films but this neglect of the past will hopefully be rectified by much more attention in the future. Apart from Riley's superb account of Shostakovich's work in cinema, Tatiana Egorova's hostorical survey is a fine introduction to this subject in a historical perspective. However, the book is appallingly translated and edited (at least my 1997 edition of it is). A pity because the book seems the only general history in this field and has some fascinating accounts of many films from a musicological perspective.

Soviet Cinema of the Twenties

2010-06-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

While Russian and Soviet cinema is acknowledged in world cinema studies mainly due to the works of directors established in the 1920s (Dovzhenko, Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov and Pudovkin) as well as the Poetic directors of the late thaw and stagnation period (Tarkovsky and Paradjanov) it is clear that the 1920s was such an incredibly rich period with a host of other names who were no less interesting than those commonly cited. Room, Barnet, Ermler, Protazanov, the FEKS collective and then the Kozintsev and Trauberg duo as well as the more neglected Yutkevich (who I have written briefly about in this blog) etc. The question of how to describe the 1920s as a whole is a complex one and the solution that scholars have often found is to band directors into two schools. Nikolai Lebedev in the late fourties was the first to do this with his argument that there was a group of innovators and a group of traditionalists. While the very fact of writing a history of Soviet cinema in the late fourties was full of risks (and in fact Lebedev's was a radical venture for its time) this division was way too schematic.

The rediscovery of the revolutionary twenties in the Europe of the 1960s focused mainly on those Lebedev deemed 'innovators' and in the Anglo-Saxon world at least it was the American scholar Diane Youngblood who would first concentrate on the more neglected names such as Ermler, Barnet and Protazanov in her study 'Movies for the Masses'. However, while excellent research was carried out in the archives and especial attention was given to the critical reception of many of the films by these directors, less attention was paid to the stylistics of the films themselves and Youngblood's didn't fundamentally challenge the Lebedev myth of the two strands of twenties cinema. Her subject were still, by and large, the 'traditionalists' (or rather in her terminology the 'populists') and no attempt was made to question the very concept of the division that isolated them from the Eisenstein's and Dovzhenko's. Since Youngblood's two books there have been few other attempts to look at the twenties from a perspective that didn't base themselves on a view of an individual filmmaker.

This lack of a renewed look at the twenties and the standard dichotomy view was slightly more nuanced in Birgit Beumers chapter on the twenties in her recent study of Russian cinema history but nonetheless aspects of it remained. Although at least accepting that there were more than two strands she posits a period of 'Americanitis' and then has subchapters on Vertov, another on Eisenstein and Pudovkin, another on entertainment where she talks about the FEKS of Kozintsev and Trauberg and the KEM of Ermler, Ioganson and Nikitin as well as the other names that a Lebedevian reading would term as traditionalists. Finally before moving on to the Cultural Revolution at the end of the decade she talks about Dovzhenko as the herald of Poetic Cinema. Nonetheless little effort is made to describe the commonalities that these various strands of cinematography may have had.

However, a small and fascinating study by Philip Cavendish mainly devoted to the cameraman in Soviet cinema in the twenties has, thankfully, opened up new vistas on this extrordinary time. He concentrates on what he terms 'mainstream' cinema (and thus excludes the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko) but he shows us that these films were extraordinarily visually innovative. Instead of concentrating on the work of the directors, though, he talks about that neglected breed: the camera operator. This small, but exceedingly well-informed volume, restores to history the names of those like Forestier, Levitskii, Ermolov, Zheliabushki, Giber, Shneider, Mikhailov and Feldman. Cavendish's desciptions of films that have almost been ignored in many accounts of world cinema (as well as marginalised in Soviet accounts) display the extraordinary advances made by these characters forgotten by history and woefully neglected by cinematic historians. Moreover, the value of this slim volume lies in deconstructing the Lebedevan myth more cogently and convincingly than previously attempted.

It also gives a reading and description of these films which was missing in Youngblood's account and restores the wish to watch these films so as to enjoy every shot. I recently managed to watch a copy of Otsep and Forestier's 'Zemlia v plenu' (Earth in Chains) and was astounded by its lyrical and visual beauty. I couldn't quite believe that it has been so rarely flagged as a masterpiece. Phil Cavendish's account and his superlative description of its use of 'paysage' in the film linking it to general Western artistic trends and to stating the case for this and many other films (including, for example, the extraordinary film by Eggert and Gardin 'Medvedia Svadba' (Bear Wedding) which signalled the single exemplar of the Soviet vampire genre which was not to have any successors until Post-Soviet times) is, in its way, a tour-de-force in opening up the Twenties to a new historical treatment and to a new rediscovery of this era that was never to be matched.

In the conclusion Cavendish talks about the legacy of the visual revolution that these cameramen were responsible for. While the Stalin period meant that scriptwriters and directors were confined by ever tightening constraints, there was some leeway for the cameramen to produce visually stunning masterpieces. Fortunately, their role was rarely understood and so, Cavendish concludes, "paradoxically, the ignorance of which camera operators had complained so vociferously during the late 1920s and early 1930s had become their saving grace" in the Stalin years.

Another fascinating study which I have read recently and which relates to this period is Lynn Mally's book on Amateur Theater and the Soviet State entitled 'Revolutionary Acts'. The cultural vibrancy of the 1920s is in full evidence here and once again there is an emphasis on the interlocking trends of experimental art and the explosion of the 'amateur' as opposed to the professional. New forms would spring up given the wide extent of this phenomenon and Mally contends that these new forms had their roots in the relation between mass amateur theatre and the more experimental radicalism of Meyerhold which creatively fed on each other. Interestingly this world of theatrical experimentation drew in names that would later become part of cinematic history like Nikolai Ekk, Ivan Pyriev and Sergei Yutkevich. Another rather neglected but fascinating field.

Some Russian Cinema Journals

2010-06-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the newspaper 'Novaya Gazeta' mentioned the fact that the journal 'Seance' is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. An anniversary to celebrate as this is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding journals devoted both the contemporary and to the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. However, the article also notes that the journal is under threat of closure due to financial reasons. Financial reasons that appear inextricably linked to recent trends in Russian cinematography which seem to strangle any independent thought and action in favour of a ahistorical myhtology. Seance's incredible legacy over the past twenty years is associated with two names that represent the best of criticism and scholarship: those of the late Sergei Dobrotvorsky and Liubov Arkus. The Seance team have not merely worked on the journal but have published books on contemporary Russian film and have worked on the very best source of information for contemporary Russian film - the Encyclopedia of Russian Film (a massive seven volumes which is the most vital resource for all Russian film scholars who are working on the period from the fall of the Soviet Union). The internet site http://russiancinema.ru/ gives informtion regarding the whole history of Russian and Soviet film and is one of the best sources of information on the web in its field. The loss of this Petersburg journal would be a tragedy for the whole of Russian cinema just as the loss of Moscow's Museum of Cinema was five years ago.

Another journal in difficulty is the Moscow-based 'Iskkustvo Kino' (Art of Cinema) which has been going for decades. Providing some excellent reviews, scripts, roundtable discussions and articles on general intellectual trends it also has contributed to keeping alive intellectual discussion on cinema. Its director Daniil Dondurei (a media sociologist by training) has been a critical voice with regard to the Mikhalkov project and, unsurpisingly, the journal was soon to have the threat of eviction hanging over it by the Mikhalkov-run administration of the Filmmakers Union.

The most outstanding scholarly journal with regards to Soviet (and world) cinematic history is Kinovedcheskie Zapisky. This journal keeps alive the highest standards of film scholarship and has contributions from the giants of film scholarship in Russia: Naum Kleiman, Evgeny Margolit, Oleg Aronson, Maya Turovskaya, Irina Grashchenkova and many more. For those interested in film scripts there is also an excellent journal 'Kinostsenari' which includes interviews and critical articles. Recent editions of the journal have been devoted to the work and scripts of Paradjanov, Peter Lutsik and Otar Ioseliani. For anyone interested in contemporary cinematography of former soviet states there is the journal 'Kinoforum'.

These journals have kept alive the intellectual reception of both contemporary film in Russia and the former Soviet Union as well as providing a historical link. The existence of such a community of scholars and attentive critics means that all is not lost but the precarious financial and institutional state of many of these journals is, nonetheless, a worrying sign.

Some Film Venues in Moscow

2010-05-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Coming back from my ten week stay in Russia I am beginning to reflect on the ways that the historical memory of Soviet film culture is being kept alive in some form or other. This is a painful subject in many ways. The gutless sale of the Cinema Museum by the Filmmakers Union a few years ago was the single biggest blow to any project of keeping alive the historical memory of Russian and Soviet film culture. I wrote about this place in a former post of mine: http://giuvivrussianfilm.blogspot.com/2009/11/musei-kino.html and won't repeat my words here. For those who may be interested in the occasional activities that it carries on at a variety of venues may go to their website : http://www.museikino.ru/announce/ Most recently it has been showing an excellent retrospective of Czech films from various historical periods.

Much of the Cinema Museum's hundreds of thousands of exhibits have been stored at the Mosfilm Studios (pictured above). Their site in English is http://eng.mosfilm.ru/ Twice a week it is possible to turn up for an excursion round their site, although few of the Cinema Museum's store of exhibits are available on public view. A tour is given in which many of the motor cars, the sets and the props, makeups and decorations as well as the Old Moscow set that was specifically built for a film by the present Mosfilm director, Karen Shakhnazarov are on view. The excursion, however, gives only a rather superficial look at the 'attractions' of the Studio and is not a serious exploration of the history of the Studios. It would be nice if the Mosfilm Studios would take a more active role in explaining its own fascinating history.

With the disappearance of the Cinema Museum, they are only one or two cinemas that will show old soviet films. Perhaps the most established one is the Iluzion cinema which, however, caters mainly to older and more populist tastes and rarely shows films that have true aesthetic brilliance. In the past two months there was only the odd film that really made a trip to this cinema worthwhile (a showing of Khutsiev's 'July Rain' was the only film standing out in recent showings) with the exception of its films dedicated to the Chekhov film adaptation season that it ran in honour of the recent 150 anniversary celebrations of this classic author. Nonetheless, there is sometimes a rare treat and it is after all the only cinema left of its kind. One other cinema in the centre of Moscow, the Khudozhestveni cinema near the Arbat, does have a weekly showing of old Soviet documentaries normally followed by an audience discussion with the presenter. Also in some of its smaller halls it does occasionally show some Russian and Soviet as well as foreign classics. In one day I managed to watch Bauer's 'Twilight of a Woman's Soul' and Murnau's 'Tabou', though both, alas, were DVD projections and not from 35mm copies.

A more recent venue has sprung in the guise of the Eisenstein Library in Karetny Riad. If one forgives the fact that it, too, shows its films from DVD projections it has some excellent retrospectives. I missed the earlier Chekhov film festival and also the more recent films dedicated to filmmakers born in the year 1945 from Abdrashitov to Fassbiner but saw many of the films of its excellent retrospective of films related to the three German generations which I commented on earlier http://giuvivrussianfilm.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-generations-of-german.html The presence of actors such as Batalov and Filipenko, directors like the Germans, Abdrashitov and Bobrova as well as many cinema scholars introducing the films themselves make this an excellent venue for those who may want to learn more about Russian cinematic history. The site address is http://www.eisenstein.ru/

Another place which has tried to keep alive the historical memory of Russian film is, interestingly, the Meyerhold Museum. An excellent series of lectures and film showings have tried to show the impact that the great theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold had on Soviet film. Many film actors begun their careers under Meyerhold and even many directors had very strong links to this cultural giant. The debt that Eisenstein had to him was always acknowledged and impossible to underestimate but the story of Meyerhold and cinema is one that would fill volumes. The site of the Museum in English is available here http://www.meyerhold.org/

One other venue of some interest for cultural lectures is the recently opened Garazh Centre of Contemporary Culture. Lectures there are very regular and on many different subjects relating in some way to culture. Talks on architecture, Soviet fashion and the flappers of the 1920s as well as an excellent talk on the crisis by one of Russia's foremost independent Marxist thinker, Boris Kagarlitsky, were the three events that I managed to attend after having only belatedly found out about the lecture series in this new museum space.

These are a few of the venues which attempt to keep the flame of cultural historical memory alive in Moscow. Not enough given the huge hole that the loss of the Cinema Museum's Krasnopresnenskaya venue has caused. Yet along with the presence of Russia's television Kultura channel these are some of the few places where the looming twin shadows of commercialised pap and Mikhalkovian kitsch don't loom too large and where something, however minor, seems to be pulled from the wreckage that commercialisation and 'patriotisation' is causing.

As far as St Petersburg is concerned I have little knowledge. However, the recent attempt to set up a new festival under the guidance of Alexei German Senior seems to bode well.

Abram Room - A Strict Young Man (Strogy Yunosha)

2010-05-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

Among the many films that merit rescuing from near oblivion, Abram Room's 'Strogy Yunosha' (A Strict Young Man) is surely one of the most fascinating examples of what was still being made (if not shown) in the 1930s. This is a film that was not shown publicly until the seventies at a cinema dedicated to the reshowing of earlier films (Kino povtornogo filma) in Moscow but was to astound the likes of Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni who were to discover in Room's film of 1935 something that they were trying to acheive more than three decades later.

This is a fantastic example of Soviet Neo-Classicism the like of which was not seen again. The aesthetic might lead one to make references to Leni Riefenstahl, yet this is only true to some extent. This film is not just one of Room's best (argaubly as interesting in its own way as his earlier 'Tretia Meshchanskaya' or 'Bed and Sofa' which has been justifiably championed in an excellent book by Julian Graffy) but it also shows an attempt to put into film the themes of Yuri Olesha's novel 'Zavist' (Envy) who was the scriptwriter. The music for the film is composed by Gavril Popov whose talent some have compared to that of Shostakovich and there are fantastic performances by Yuri Yuriev,Maxim Straukh, Room's wife Olga Zizhneva and a young and brunette Valentina Serova. There is a unique atmosphere in the film in which the wife of an older and successful doctor is sought after by a young and poor Komsomolets. The 'liubov v troem' theme is played out once again but in this case there is a barrier and the idea of envy and unequalness is explored. This film in which Room arguably explored real philosphical issues surrounding equality in the new Soviet system is a film set. nonetheless, in a strange dream-like reality with a hint of the fantastic. Equally present in the film are Olympian ideals and ancient Greek myths. The notion lurking is that the present had somehow brought to life this ideal. Perhaps, the most surprising shot in the film is the first one in which the naked heroine comes out of the water (this is, probably, the only erotically shot nude - although no close up and from the back - in Stalinist cinema).

The Olympian ideal, the philosophical text, the dream-like and out of time atmosphere, the Neo-Classical architecture and style of the film makes it something unique in Soviet cinema. Having the aspect of a dream within a dream, it has hints of an early 'Last Year in Marienbad'. Its disco-throwing scene of custard pies is one of two or three moments in which it has a definitely Bunuelesque feel. Yet, just as Olesha's 'Envy' was a book which had no follow-up in Soviet literature, so Room's film is a unique moment in Soviet film history. A path that was not taken but an extraordinary example of a unique masterpiece that would only decades later be fully appreciated by some of the world's most masterful film directors.

Great Films about a Great War

2010-05-10T01:59:00.000-07:00

Given the slogan that Mikhalkov wanted to 'sell' his sequel to 'Burnt by the Sun' "a great film about a great war", I have been thinking about the really great films that have been made in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Soviet film really is full of such films and I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that a number of them would be included in the list of the greatest war films of all time. Klimov's 'Come and See' is, without doubt, one of the most powerful and haunting war films made in the history of cinema. It marked Klimov's final transition from satirist (in his early films) to a filmmaker who would describe the absolute horror of war. It was, alas, Klimov's last film to be made - the late Klimov was never to make his long planned 'Master and Margherita' which may have shown us an absolutely new Klimov. Klimov's wife, Larisa Shepitko, was also to mae great films about the war.Her 'Ascension' was, in part, a polemical response to Alexei German's 'Proverka na dorogakh' (A Check-up on the road'). The point of contention between the two great filmmakers was the question of choice, betrayal and atonement. For Shepitko betrayal was a final betrayal and she couldn't bring herself to accept a character like Lazarev who had betrayed and then atoned for his betrayal. Shepitko's portrayal of the female air pilot in 'Krylia' (Wings) is a memorable portrayal of the generation gap between those who fought in the Second World War and those who grew up in the Thaw period. A film of lesser artistic quality but with a scene that never fails to bring one to tears- Belorussky Vokzal (Belorussia Station)- by Andrei Smirnov also attempts to talk about the fading reality of the war and the problems of the war generation in the early stagnation period. Both Smirnov and Shepitko were to contribute short films to the trilogy of 'Nachalo Nevedemogo Veka' (the beginnings of an Unknown Era) in 1967 with short films based on the Civil War period.

The early Thaw period also can be said to be full of masterpieces exploring the Great Patriotic War. Tarkovsky's 'Ivan's Childhood' was, perhaps, one of the first films to fully explore the experience of a child in wartime and clearly it has themes that would be reworked by Klimov a quarter of a century later. Some still continue to believe Kalatozov's and Urusevsky's 'Letiat Zhuravli' ('The Cranes are Flying') as the best war film. It is as much Urusevsky's camerawork that works on us as the dramaturgy and the new attitude to betrayal which german would rework in his 'Proverka...'. The humanist theme is continued by Chukhrai's 'Ballad of a Soldier' which also gained a very positive reception when it was made. Another director whose work explores war - sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely -is Marlen Khutsiev. It was the scene of the visit of the ghost of a dead soldier to the main character (his father) in 'I am Twenty' that was to draw Khruschev's ire (for the young soldier replies to his son that he can not tell him how to live and Khruschev found this an outrageous supposition) but also the scene at the party (and the toast to potatoes that Sergei proposes and the discovery by his mother of lost ration vouchers) is significant in exploring the shadow that war still throws upon the Thaw generation. Khutsiev was to more directly explore the Great Patriotic War in his films 'The Two Fyodors' and in his much underrated 'In the Month of May' (this was a film made for television but it touched on questions that had been rarely touched upon in Soviet films about the war, including the discovery of the concentration camps).

Recently I have managed to rewatch Alov and Naumov's 'Peace to him who enters' (Mir Vkhodyashchemu) - a superb humanistic portrayal of a trip by Soviet soldiers with a pregnant German woman to a hospital at the end of the war. The theme of muteness (a thread in sixties Soviet cinema) is encapsulated by the dumb soldier who has been shell-shocked by the horrors of the war but who provides the moral leadership of the group. Other powerful explorations of the Soviet experience of war is the Gerogian director Rezo Chkheizde's 'Father of a Soldier'- a film about a father searching for his son during the war.

Films made during the war itself are many and although there were many technical deficiencies, this period was marked by a relaxation of tight censorship. Films like 'Nashestvie' (Invasion) by Abram Room were even to give an ex-prisoner (quite clearly a political prisoner) the status of a hero. Another significant film is Barnet's 'Odnazhdi Nochiu' (Once at Night) which depicts the films heroine in a unique way reminiscent of the Lilian Gish heroines in D.W. Griffiths films and quite unlike the Donskoy heroine of 'Rainbow'. One may see in Barnet's film a precursor of the Samoilova character in 'Letiat Zhuiravli'.

The late Stalinist period rewriting of the war with Stalin as a demi-god like figure directing all operations from his office in films by Savchenko and Ermler and almost religious-like saviour descending from the skies in Chiaureli's 'The Fall of Berlin' was, arguably, only saved by Barnet's excellent Hitchcockian spy-thriller 'Podvig Radvedchika' (Exploits of a Scout)- a genre that would then become immortalised in the Stagnation period in the television series 'Semnadtsat Mgnovenie Vesni' (Seventeen Moments of Spring) and the less well-known but excellent 'Myortvy Sezon' by Savva Kulish and starring Donatis Bannionis (of Solaris fame) and Rolan Bykov.

These are only a few of the masterpieces on World War Two. The list would go on for a very long time.

Khrzhanovsky's 'A Room and a Half' in the UK

2010-05-10T01:45:00.000-07:00

There have been two short reviews in the Guardian by Peter Bradshaw and in the Observer by Philip French of 'A room and a half' in connection with the excellent news that the film is coming to UK screens. The Philip French review can be quoted in full (as it is a very small review):

This touching and amusing movie is a biography, both imaginative and imaginary, of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), the self-taught poet, critic and translator, raised in Leningrad, the son of a Soviet naval photographer, and persecuted by the state for his independence of mind. In 1972 he was driven into American exile where he achieved intellectual eminence, and he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987. Brodsky never returned to Russia and apparently once said that "such a journey could only take place anonymously". Khrzhanovsky takes Brodsky on a journey back to Leningrad, dreaming about his youth, upbringing and early life as he takes the ferry from Helsinki to Leningrad before being reunited with his elderly parents. The director uses animated sequences to elegant effect, and his affectionate, nostalgic movie brings to mind the autobiographical works of those other exiles, Vladimir Nabokov and Andrei Tarkovsky.

This hardly gives a full picture of the brilliance of this film. I added my commentary to the review which I reproduce here:

This is a truly wonderful film and it really deserves immense praise. The way that Andrey Khrzhanovsky handles the mixture of animated, narrative, quasi-documentary footage is superb. I watched the film over a year ago in Moscow and was immediatley captivated by it and have since watched it on DVD- it is the kind of film that can only improve after each viewing because there is so much in the film.
Yursky and Friendlikh (Brodsky's parents in the film) are two of Russia's most superb actors. Khrzhanovsky is undoubtedly one of the most splendid animated film directors not just in Russia but in world cinema and the animated sequences are absolutely splendid.

This is a portrait of Brodsky which doesn't set him up on a pedestal as some sort of martyred genius. Moreover there are no idle speculations on the Jewish theme. No, instead this is one of the best films about the sense of time and exile available. Khrzhanovsky uses an assortment of filmic devices but in such a way that one feels that nothing is forced.

This is one of the films that I wished that people would judge Russian cinema by because it puts on show exactly what Russian cinema is capable of (Khrzhanovsky shows that Russian cinema is truly capable of miracles even nowadays).

Alas, when I saw the film it was being put on at only one cinema in central Moscow and even after being awarded three Nikas (the major Russian film awards) this spring, it still is only being repeated in one cinema (the same one that showed the film last year). A real shame- Russia showers the mediocre likes of Mikhalkov, Khotinenko and Fedor Bondarchuk with millions to film trash and ignores the fact that real contemporary geniuses live in its midst.

A few points about the short reviews by Philip French and Peter Bradshaw: saying that Yursky has the look of a Pasternak is a rather comical overexaggeration - I read this to a Russian and they burst out laughing (Pasternak had such a striking and unique appearance that it is an exaggeration to compare just about anyone to him) and while, in this respect, the Tarkovsky and Nabokov comaprisons by French may not be quite so far out, I still don't think they are not necessarily the best references to make for this film. This film reflects a polystylism that is, arguably, closer in some ways to Paradjanov than to Tarkovsky (although again Paradjanov wouldn't be the major reference to make)- I think, if one were to search influences on the style of Khrzhanovsky the barely known film Cain XVIII may be said to have a large but indirect influence on Khrzhanovsky. It would be wonderful if the BFI could put on a retrospective of Khrzhanovsky's animated films- then we would know that Khrzhanovsky is not someone who can be compared to others but that he is a truly great master - maybe one day we'll be talking about him in the same breath as we talk about Fellini (by the way his animated film 'Long Voyage' based on Fellini's is superb).

Alas, newspaper reviewers are very rarely great conoisseurs of Russian film and the attempt to compare new Russian films constantly with Tarkovsky is something that gets carried to the point of absurdity. Nonetheless, thanks for small mercies (I suppose) that the film was actually reviewed at all.

A Look at Contemporary Russian Theatre by Anna Vislova

2010-05-03T04:25:00.000-07:00

The fact that little of that much interest seems to be showing at the cinemas in the past week and not having any real desire to watch Mikhalkov's film a second time, I've been reading a little. One of the books that caught my eye was the book by theatre critic Anna Vislova on contemporary Russian theatre since the fall of the Soviet Union. An author of books on the legendary Soviet actor Andrey Mironov and on the Silver Age, she has recently published her take on more contemporary drama.

The position that she takes is that theatre in contemporary Russia has taken a wrong turning and instead of returning to a modernist path in which theatre could be a force looking at contemporary society, it has become trapped in a neoliberal worldview and has simply allowed itself to be trapped in a vicious circle of post-modernist irony and black humour. Her relationship to Soviet theatre is not uncritical and her book is not a nostalgic look at what was but a hard look at the wasted opportunities of the possibilities that theatre could have been used for in a free and more democratic space. Vislova notes some of the aspects of how theatre has failed its role in contemporary Russia by being the cynical voice of the moneyed elite. Her complaints include those of it relying too much on 'styob' and completely losing any tragic voice (relying instead on a cynical black comedy), of simply echoing western trends and not forging theatre from its own strong traditions of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. Meyerhold for her has been misunderstood by those trying to mimic his original view of the theatre.

Vislova's book is a powerfully argued and detailed exposition of trends in contemporary theatre and although it is polemical it gives a good account of many theatrical productions explaining why they fail in being a significant voice in intellectual life and playing a critical role in contemporary Russian society. The strong points of her book includes her description of the social context of theatre and although her positions emphasise the negative aspect of contemporary theatre her viewpoint never lapses either into rose-tinted nostalgia for the past or into facile criticism of contemporary trends.

Her account is one of the few which take a broad look at trends in contemporary Russian theatre and one can only hope for a similar book to be written on contemporary Russian cinema from a Russian viewpoint. One may argue that the situation in Russian cinema is not as black as Vislova suggests with regard to theatre but her overview of the recent two decades of cultural life has much to recommend it.

Burnt by the Sun 2 or Cranberry Soup. An early reaction.

2010-04-22T10:06:00.001-07:00

This morning I finally had the chance to watch the sequel to Mikhalkov's 'Burnt by the Sun'. Apparently the relative dearth of reviews of this film in the printed press up until now has something to do with the fact that, according to theatre and film critic Ksenia Larina, a number of illustrious critics out of Nikita Sergeyevich's favour (Victor Matizen, Lidia Maslova, Iurii Bogomolov, Larisa Maliukova, Leonid Pavliuchik)were not invited to the pompous premiere at the Kremlin on the 17th April. Well, there is a lot to be said about the film (but little of it for the film) but after my first viewing there was little doubt that this film is represented perfectly well by the poster above. If Russians love to discover the 'cranberries' (absurd myths and obvious inaccuracies) in foreign films about Russia, here they have the head cranberry sower right in their midst.

This was no 'Great Film about the Great War' (as the pre-film publicity and official poster argued) but a film so full of cringe-inducing moments that Larina was spot on to call it a' great deception'. The budget of $65 million (the highest ever spent on a Russian film) must be seen in the context of a country which sells off its Cinema Museums to strip club and casino owners and denies some excellent art house film producers any hope of state funding.

The three-hour sequel was a morass of episodes without structure. There were salvagable scenes (the battle scene with the young elite corps and the penal battalio was not wholly without merit and the acting of Evgeny Mironov was generally fine)but those moments where one actually wished to follow the events were probably outweighed by moments of outrage. Outrage at the misuse of German and Klimov quotes, outrage at the scenes where one was being overtly indoctrinated with religious twaddle, outrage at historical and narrative inaccuracies which were not subtle but continuous to the point of nausea, outrage at the attempt to copy Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan' when it was Spielberg himself who was imitating Klimov's 'Come and See'- the best film about World War Two (and the best film about this subject that will probably ever be made). Outrage that Mikhalkov's film drags Klimov's scene of a burning hut into a sickening (and Trofimenkov is right to use the term) an almost 'pornographic' parody. Well the criticisms that one may make about the film are pretty endless (the very resurrection of the characters in the first place is, of course, a further complaint that one may have about tampering with narrative continuity).

The film fails on many levels: it fails as myth, it fails as historical reconstruction, it fails as sequel, it fails as war film and as some commentators have pointed out it almost only succeeds as a loose string of comic-like episodes but the element of 'lubochnost' is only really there as a sum of the negative connotations of the word in Russian: after all, Mikhalkov is no Medvedkin.

Who indeed has Mikhalkov become? The Mikhalkov of 'An Unfinished Piece ...', of 'Five Evenings'? Mikhalkov has, it seems, progressively become an unhappy melange: Americanitis (or Hollywooditis) without the Kuleshov touch. It justifiably will all end in tears and in this film there is nothing more irritating than the fake tears that Mikhalkov and his daughter endlessly dish up for us. It reaches the point where it is not even bad sentimentalism but a clueless regurgitation of cliches from other works including his own (the gypsy scene is truly awful- what gypsy would start dancing after witnessing her whole family being gunned down?).

It is not just that there is no belief amongst the acting troupe (as Andrey Arkhangelsky notes) but that this film really has been encapsulated perfectly by the critic Mikhail Trofimenkov - this is pornography in the widest sense of the word and of the worst kind. A national patriotic pornography that even Khotinenko couldn't quite manage in his 'Pop' and which is a final insult to the brave veterans of the Soviet army (for reducing the courage of a whole generation to this pulp fiction). In fact the comments of veterans invited to the launch were often damning- one complained that Mikhalkov had spat in their faces with this dire film.

Reviews in Russian:
http://www.vz.ru/columns/2010/4/18/394125.print.html
http://www.fontanka.ru/2010/04/18/038/
http://xlarina.livejournal.com/153939.html

P.S. (23/4/10) Apart from one's first reaction of sheer horror of what Mikhalkov has done with $65 million and how a war film has been reduced to a film-comic there are probably a whole new series of considerations. It would be interesting to find out what two hours of this film were preserved for the Cannes festival and how Cannes actually accepted it for the main competition. Interesting to see the reaction of some of Mikhalkov's allies like Nikolai Burlyayev (a national patriot like Mikhalkov but the film can hardly be to his taste). But then there have been people speaking up for the film - Tatiana Moskvina has been one of them. She emphasised that Mikhalkov was a 'synthetic' artist and on the day of the showing Shakhnazarov also talked of it being a 'great film' but then he is the one who suggested to Mikhalkov at last years farcical Cinematographers' Congress at Gostinny Dvor to return to the Presidency of the Cinematographers' Union. Another article has appeared in today's Moscow Times suggesting that the reception at the Kremlin showing was pretty muted:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/in-the-spotlight-nikita-mikhalkov/404597.html
It highlights the Trofimenkov review which really manages to be both funny and a brilliant and well-directed rant.

P.P.S Lidia Maslova's (one of the critics banned from the Kremlin showing) is finally out in today's 'Kommersant'. She suggests that the film is a version of the after-life of the characters in hell. Here's the review in Russian:
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=1358104&NodesID=8

Mikhalkov in an interview in Izvestia last week stated that the style of the film was hyper-realist. As this denomination usually pertains to the films of Alexei German Snr., this appears to be one of the biggest mistatements of all.

Here is the article in the Independent which rehashes much of the original Moscow Times article:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/grandiose-burnt-sequel-divides-critics-at-russian-premiere-1949547.html

Schism in the Cinematographers' Union?

2010-04-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

The spectacle of the Kremlin showing of the sequel to Mikhlakov's 'Burnt by the Sun' has been dampened by the exit of Russia's most brilliant group of directors, critics and scholars from the organisation that Mikhalkov has reduced to his private fiefdom in the past decade and more (the Cinematographers' Union). In recent weeks a collective letter signed by directors and film critics and scholars such as Eldar Riazanov, Alexei German Senior and Junior, Vladimir Dostal, Vitaly Mansky, Boris Khlebnikov, Andrey Proshkin, Andrey Smirnov, Naum Kleiman, Pavel and Gary Bardin, Daniil Dondurey, Victor Matizen, Otar Ioseliani and many others have finally brought to a head (yet again) the conflict in the Russian film world. Mikhalkov's dictatorial style and his immense ego have had disastrous consequences for the Russian film world. The loss of the excellent Museum of Cinema in the early part of this decade was perhaps the most grave blow and the possible demise of Dom Kino would be another body blow to any who want to preserve the memory of twentieth century Soviet cinema. The details of the conflict are long and rather tedious to go into but some of the effects have been truly shameful. The disgusting treatment of Marlen Khutsiev (in the photo) and the farce of the Mikhalkov-staged 'congress of revanchists' in February last year at the Gostinny Dvor had unpleasant echoes of post-war Zhdanovschina. Mikhlakov's suggestions that his opponents were part of some 'Atlantic' plot was absurd but his recent interview with the fawning Elena Yampolskaya in Izvestia really managed to plumb new depths. The two 'national patriots' managed to work each other up into a spiral of of spleen and fury against the opponents of Nikita Sergeyevich. The mention of Ioseliani's signature drove Mikhalkov into a denunciation of the Gerorgian filmmaker living in France as a russophobe and then Yampolskaya suggested that the whole band of opponents were a group of anti-Russian filmmakers. Suggesting that Riazanov, the Germans, Smirnov et al are all russophobes gives one an indication of how bitter this schism is and yet also to what absurd lengths Mikhalkov will go in battling his opponents.

The pomp of the Kremlin showing of the sequel to 'Burnt by the Sun' is, of course, the main news in the press but it is unlikely that Mikhalkov can gain any respect from the world film community when denouncing the greatest directors of contemporary Russian film as campaigning against Russia. Russian cinema without the Germans, Dostal, Proshkin, Riazanov, Abdrashitov, Khutsiev, Danelia, Smirnov, Sokurov, Bardin, Mansky would be the kind of cinema produced in the last fourties and early fifties (the time of the so-called film famine). This would be the face of Mikhalkov's call for a return to the 'high style'. It is a sign of hope, however, that his opponents are moving and organising collectively.

Melody for a barrel organ - Kira Muratova

2010-04-16T03:33:00.000-07:00

My mind can't help turning to Fernando de Rojas when I think of Kira Muratova. A nagging but a risky parallel of two 'radical pessimists' who are practitioners of two of the most thoroughgoing critiques of 'human nature'. De Rojas's vision in the 'Celestina' - probably the greatest product of Spanish literature in the period after the Reconquista- demolishes Catholic purism which is ruthlessly undermined by the mentality and the life of the eponymous procuress. The imposition of the Catholic Reconquest and 'purification' of Spanish civilisation is here defeated and demolished if only in a work of literature. Muratova accomplishes this feat of forging a radically new and similar sensibility five centuries later in some of her seminal films. If 'Asthenic Syndrome' was one of her major opuses in the demolition of the stifling conservatism of the late Soviet period, this feat is repeated once again in her most recent film ' Melody for a Barrel Organ'. Muratova's vision dates back to the Thaw period and her rare films back then already underlie the grievious challenge that her vision and sensibility would throw up against the conventions and stylistics of Soviet cinema. She was to be one of the few directors to have been expelled almost entirely from the Soviet cinema system ( and it is interesting that another of these expelees- Vitaly Kanevsky- would echo the theme of Muratova's latest film, of runaway children in his masterpiece 'Freeze, Die, Come back to Life'). Jane Taubmann in her seminal study of Muratova describes how Muratova was about to accept the position of cleaning lady in one of the Soviet studios.

Many of Muratova's films have apparently unwieldy forms: her dialogues are often exercises in formalistic 'absurdism', lengthy scenes owe their skill to a sense of parallel boredom of the characters in the scenes and the hypothetical spectator in the cinema (in both Chekhov Motifs and The Asthenic Syndrome), the 'in your face' mannerism of the acting and yet somehow this too is a parallel with de Rojas's 'Celestina'. The play, ironically, is both unstageable in Spanish and yet a classic piece of literature that has survived for five centuries. Both are a triumph of sensibility over style and roundedness. Muratova's achievement is ground-breaking and Ian Christie is surely correct to argue (in March's 'Sight and Sound') that Muratova is the best women film director in the world today and there are moments when one feels the need to say that the word woman is superfluous in this sentence. Her films are often as great as those of Lars von Trier although she is more uneven than him.

For all this 'uneveness' there are films that must surely remain as part of world cinema history for decades to come. Her previous film 'Two in One' may not come into that category but her last one definitely does. 'Melody for a barrel organ' (finally out on general release in Russia after its first showing at the Moscow International Film festival) is arguably one of her greatest films since The Asthenic Syndrome. The unique moments of the latter film - the scenes from the dog compound, the woman's volley of swear words on the metro, the widow who brings back a tramp home and then insults him and sends him away, the hounding of the English teacher played by Popov and so on)- are matched in Muratova's recent film- the scene in the elektrichka, the circle of adults talking into their mobile phones ignoring the orphans request to change their money, the arranged shoplifting by the guilded youth led by Jan Daniel as well as Litvinova's fairy tale costume.

This and The Asthenic Syndrome is no comformist 'chernuka' nor does it lapse into the apocalyptic vision of Lopushansky or Aristakisian. Instead Muratova's game is another one and here she subverts the genre of the fairy tale just as Hans Christian Anderson (and here in the film the quotation of Anderson's 'The Little Match Girl' is made explicit in the most famous and stylised scene of the film) had in the nineteenth century. Yet Muratova can't leave things at that and her Andersonian sad fairy tale is subverted by the recurrent hiccoughing of a gastarbeiter. In her inimitable finale Muratova manages to extrange us even from our sadness and tragic comfort. This is not the faux radical pessimism of Lukas Moodysson of his 'Lilya 4-ever' but courage indeed. A courage resembling the courage of Pasolini's 'Salo'', a less hysterical but, arguably, a more thoroughgoing courage.

In this film, Muratova's hallmarks - her doubles and twins, her insistence on actors performing in an estranged, mannersitic way, her repetitions - are more tightly integrated into this film than most of the others of the past two decade in her filmmaking career. Her sudden use of silence in some scenes- especially the scene of Alyona looking in at the curly-haired angelic figure (the scene where the reference to Anderson becomes manifest)stuns us almost as much as the swearing woman on the metro. Muratova's regulars- Nina Ruslanova, Georgiy Deliev, Renata Litvinova, Jan Daniel, Natalia Buzko as well as possibly Russia's most established theatre director Oleg Tabakov (who played in Muratova's Three Stories) are all present in this film and create some brilliant episodic jewels.

This particular 'road movie' cum comfortless Christmas fairy tale moves from 'elektrichka' (local electric train) to Kiev's main station to casino to supermarket to its final denouement in a renovated loft furnishes us with a tale of two rounded but not particularly pleasant or angelic orphans (and here Muratova spares us even the minimal drops of sentimentalism that even an extremely talented director would have trouble in avoiding). Yet as Nancy Condee argues in her article for Kino Kultura these are fully cohesive human beings and are stunningly acted by Olena Kostiuk and Roma Burlaka- something that was rarely a hallmark in Muratova's more recent post-Soviet films. Condee argues convincingly that is a new development:

It is customary in Muratova's work for these "simulated humans," as one scholar has aptly dubbed them (Berry), to dominate the screen, leaving the viewer no diegetic respite, no recognizable human coherence. Here, by contrast, the two young siblings hold their own in the center of the film, operating as a sense-making instrument through which to watch the sequential, performative episodes. The young pair organizes the film's structure both as a linear mission (the search for the fathers) and as a comprehensive registry of delusional behavior.

Finally it is a point of note that Muratova forges a vision that is radically necessary in today's Russia. With the flood of religious sentimentalism (Khotinenko's truly awful 'Pop' exemplifying how far this has gone) in Russian-language cinema, Muratova's vision is one truly averse to this trend as was her cinema in Soviet times truly averse to the stifling conformism of its day.

I hope to comment on other recent films on release here in Russia but, alas, none of them have quite the punch of Muratova's offering from Odessa and I don't feel they are worthy of being mentioned in the same post dedicated to this materpiece.

The full text of Nancy Condee's article on the film is available at this address:
http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/26r-sharmanka.shtml

P.S (added 21/4/10). That there will always be more to discover in this film as one returns to it is given. A fascinating new reading of the film is given by Nikita Eliseev in Seance magazine in an article entitled 'Red Christmas'. Beginning from the stance that there the closest 'twin' of Muratova in Russian cinematography today is Balabanov although they are diametrally opposed ideologically. (Balabanov for Eliseev is the conservative revolutionary and military 'pochvennik' and Muratova is the communist, the red). Eliseev speaks about the absence of redemption (iskuplenie) in both their films, contrasting the ending of Muratova's film with that of Fellini's 'Night of Cabiria'. Eliseev sees Muratova as the anti-Hollywood director in the same way that Kafka was the anti-fairy tale (their attitude to both was one of hatred) and argues that Muratova is closer to Gorky than anyone else. Her 'manifesto piece' for art is the smelly tramp in the Kiev railway waiting room singing wonderfully a Ukrainian song. The author of the piece also highlights the atheistic core of the film's ideology pointing out the significance of the picture sold in the local train of the 'Slaughter of the Innocents' but giving it a radically anti-religious meaning during the final scene. The hiccoughing scene, as Eliseev points out, is where Muratova beats the viewer to near senselessness. The article in Russian is available here:
http://seance.ru/blog/melodia-sharmanka/

Three generations of the German family- Yuri and the two Alexei's

2010-04-08T05:08:00.000-07:00

At Moscow's 'Eisenstein Library' a retrospective of films by three generations of the German family or linked to them is being shown. The first German was Yuri German, a novelist and script writer for a number of classic films like 'Dorogoy moj chelovek' directed by Kheifits, 'Doctor Kaliuzhny' one of Erast Garin's (see previous post) only experiments in film direction and Kozintsev's 'Pirogov'. Yuri German was also the author of the novel on which arguably Aleksei German's best film was based upon 'My Friend Ivan Lapshin'. Aleksei German Sr. has made few films in his career and few of these had an easy fate: his 'Proverka na dorogakh' was shelved for over a decade). The film had a hard time not just amongst the cinema bureaucrats but also part of the Soviet intellighentsia took a dislike to this film- in fact, Larisa Shepitko's 'Voskhozhdenie' (Ascension) was shot in a polemical response to this film. Shepitko and German had a very different attitude to the themes of betrayal and atonement but this was a polemic of the highest order.

German's last film 'Khrustalev, my Car!' requires several viewings but each viewing strengthens the view that German is an absolute master of detail. Martin Scorsese who was presiding in the jury at Cannes when the film was shown was said to have remarked that German obviously deserved the Palme d'Or but how could Scorsese give the main prize to a film that he simply couldn't make head or tail of himself.

Perhaps the central strand that one can find in German's is his persistent and stubborn search for historical truth. Something of German Sr's reconstruction of historical truth is to be found in his son's work which was shown on Sunday along with a Master Class. German Jr has made some fascinating films reconstructing different periods of twentieth century history (his 'Last Train' was set during World war Two, his 'Garpastum' on the eve of World War One and, most recently, his 'Paper Soldier' which is set at the time of the space exploration programmes). A discussion of this film at the London Film Festival is visble on youtube- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQPiTNLHb-Q )

The retrospective of films also includes some Lenfilm classics as well as films made by filmmakers who had worked with Aleksei german (including Barabanov, Bobrova, Sergei Popov).

Erast Garin & recent news on Russian Film

2010-04-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

It is hard not to start a blog from Moscow not mentioning the recent explosions in the Moscow metro- it seems to colour everything one does for days after. Strangely enough on Monday morning the image of Lubianka was already in my mind. On Sunday I had been to a lecture by the filmmaker Andrei Khrzhanovsky on the actor Erast Garin. Garin was probably one of the greatest actors in the history of Soviet cinema and like Ilinsky was sometimes referred to as a 'Soviet Chaplin'. Like Illinsky, Garin was an actor who had been trained by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Garin was probably the most devoted of all Meyerhold's actors and even when he had left Meyerhold he would never work under any other theatre director. Khrzhanovsky recalled how in the last years of his life Garin would constantly ask people 'Tell me, why they did kill the old man (starik)'?. As Khrzhanovsky stated it is impossible to read Meyerhold's written testament of his beatings in the Lubianka without tears swelling up in your eyes(and Garin was probably fortunate not to have lived to have read them himself).

Khrzhanovsky in his talk gave a picture of Garin the man - a man who while very tacitrun was also extremely brave. He was one of the only friends of Erdmann to risk making a visit to the exiled writer in the Enisei (leaving after fourty minutes because he saw that Erdman had a pen and paper at his desk and did not wish to bother him) as well as being the first to dedicate a theatrical production to the name of Meyerhold in the early Thaw. During Khrzhanovsky's talk some clips of films were shown (from 'Poruchik Kizhe' and from Cain XVII - a political satire based on the script of Evgenii Shvarts and Nikolai Erdman) as well as hearing a recording of the voice of Garin reciting a piece from Erdman's 'Mandat' (The Warrant).

Khrzhanovsky was also in the news this week after winning the main NIKA prize for best film (the film received also prizes for best director and best script). An excellent choice as far as I'm concerned- Khrzhanovsky's film should be considered one of the very best films to come from Russia in recent years. It will be premiered in the UK in early May & Andrei Khrzhanovsky will be coming to present the film.

There is plenty to write about as far as cinematic events are concerned. A retrospective of Chekhov adaptations is showing at Illusion cinema and a festival of films linked with three generations of the German family (Yuri, Alexei and Alexei Junior) is showing at the Eisenstein Library with introductions to the films by film scholars as well as by actors and a master class by Alexei German himself.

The concentration of state funding to five large producers threatens, according to some commentators and directors like Konstantin Lopushansky, the existence of art house cinema in Russia and is arguably another sign of the ill-effects of the dominant 'Mikhalkovshchina' paradigm. Meanwhile Nikita Mikhalkov is involved in a new scandal over his sequel to 'Burnt by the Sun' set in World War Two. His poster has been the object of some hilarious 'photozhaby' (creative 'photoshopping') on the internet in which Mikhalkov appears not in the most heroic of lights. He seems to have taken this rather too personally and is reported to be taking these 'wisecrackers' to court. This year marks the 85th birthday of his rival for the post of head of the Cinematographers Union, Marlen Khutsiev and Illusion will be showing his excellent 'July Rain' later this month. Finally, a possible sign of a mini thaw is evident in the decision of the TV channel, Kultura, to finally show Andrej Wajda's 'Katyn'. However, this was tempered by the news that after the film a discussion will be arranged with the overwhelming (overbearing?) presence of who else but the principal 'national patriot' after God, Gospodin Mikhalkov himself. Plus ca change...

Here are links to the latest Mikhalkov scandal as well as a link where you can still see the Photoshopping work that Artem Lebedev has done to the original film poster:
http://officialrussia.com/?p=18581
http://tema.livejournal.com/602247.html

Sergei Yutkevich - A Soviet Dandy

2010-03-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

There is one name in Soviet cinema who is mentioned very rarely it seems even amongst Russian film scholars & it puzzles me as to why. That name is Sergei Yutkevich. As far as I know no monograph on his has been published in English and rare even is the academic article dedicated to this director. Perhaps one can only give one reason but surely this is an unsatisfactory reason- Yutkevich was politically orthodox and was mainly associated with Leniniana films (The Man with a Weapon, Lenin in Poland, Lenin in Paris etc). During a recent Symposium on Paradjanov, Ian Christie suggested that there was a rumour spread at one time that Yutkevich was a colonel in the KGB. A completely absurd rumour Balaian replied and, in fact, it was generally agreed by panelists of the Symposium that it was Yutkevich who saved Paradjanov's 'Sayat Nova' and was its fiercest defender. Yutkevich may have been politically orthodox but he was an aesthetic radical and, perhaps, one of the directors from the twenties who tried to stay truest to the 'formalist' roots of that period. I have only managed to see a small portion of his films but my recent viewings of his 'Mayakovsky Laughs' and 'Lenin in Paris' (not even his most well-known or best considered of films) have convinced me that this is a film director of whom more needs to be known and a major retrospective would be most welcome. His use of animation in Mayakovsky and even his eclecticism in the rather more conventional 'Lenin in Paris' (which nonetheless has echoes of Klimov's 'Sport, Sport, Sport' and even to my mind small glimpses of Paradjanov's 'Sayat Nova')are crying out for a rediscovery and arguably a whole new interpretation of this director.

The only recent article that seems to do him justice is in Russian published in the review Seans: for Russian speakers here is the link http://seance.ru/n/21-22/yubiley-sergey-yutkevich/yutkevich/ Perhaps the conclusion of the authors is the correct one - Yutkevich was that most unimaginable of creatures for the Western mind: A Soviet Dandy. A creature that would overturn all the myths that have been created about Soviet culture and one too difficult to square with the simple narrative that has been told about Soviet cinema during and even after the Cold War. A formalist who survived and whose least known film 'The Youth of our Country' was praised by Matisse as a masterpiece but has been completely buried & forgotten in any history of Soviet cinema. He also made an adaptation of Othello which won a Directors Prize and was nominated for the Palme D'or in the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. He was also awarded a Golden Lion for his career in the 1982 Venice Film Festival.

The drawing is a portrait of Yutkevich by Matisse.

Valeska Gert

2010-03-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

In Naum Kleiman's lecture yesterday (summarised in the last blog) he mentioned a meeting of his with the eccentric German Jewish dancer and film actress Valeska Gert (she was to play in Pabst 'Diary of a Lost Girl' and be rediscovered by Fellini who found her a role in his 'Giuletta of the Spirits' she would, then, also act in films by Schlondorf and Fassbinder). She told Kleiman that Eisenstein was one of only five people she had ever loved in her life. Although she played no part in the history of Soviet cinema apart from her liasion with Eisenstein, it is curious to discover how extraneous influences can be significant in trying to understand early Soviet cinema. Kleiman explained that little has been noted of the influence of German eccentric dance on such actors like Igor Ilinsky. He has always been seen as an example of 'americanitis' in 1920s Soviet cinema and yet there seems to be a whole new avenue of research opening up in discovering whether the style of acting that Ilinsky symbolised (one of Meyerhold's greatest student actors who was to play an essential role in Soviet cinema)did not owe a significant debt to German eccentrism.

A short piece on Valeska Gert can be found here on another blog for those who would like to learn a little more about this fascinating character http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/the-grotesque-burlesque-of-valeska-gert/
The wikipedia entry on her is available here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeska_Gert
A wonderful series of photographs of Gert by Mark B. Astendig is available to look at here (the smaller photograph under the title is one of these outstanding photographs by Mark B. Astendig) http://anstendig.com/Valeska%20Gert/gert_page.html

Naum Kleiman's Talk at the Meyerhold Museum on Ivan the Terrible

2010-03-22T04:54:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite places in Moscow is the Meyerhold Museum. It's rather rare to feel at home in the houses of famous writers and artists but for some reason Russia is an exception. Chekhov's houses in Taganrog and Yalta, Tolstoy's estate in Yasnaya Polyana and the Mayakovsky and Meyerhold museums here in Moscow are places which I would happily revisit.

Returning to Moscow last week I realized that I will come to visit the Meyerhold Museum regularly this time. A series of lectures on Meyerhold's actors and film showings with introductory lectures are each held once a month. To my great regret I have missed those lectures held earlier in the year on Lev Sverdlin and the film 'By the Bluest of Seas' by Evgeny Margolit and other lectures by cinema scholars such as Andrey Shemiakin and Irina Grashchenkova (who, however, will return for another lecture next month on the film A Severe Young Man by Abraam Room) but yesterdays lecture on Eisenstein's 'Ivan the Terrible' by Naum Kleiman was so brilliant that I forgot what I had missed and just savoured the opportunity to hear the world's foremost Eisenstein scholar captivate the audience with a talk so wide-ranging that even Podmoscovia's lakes of melted snow, oil and dirt that greeted me on my walk home couldn't dim my spirits.

It is almost impossible to summarise a lecture by Naum Kleiman. It ranged from the importance of the frescoes, the quotes of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in the Eisenstein film, the difficulties of those actors who were trained by Stanislavsky had in playing in this film shot by Meyerhold's star pupil, the terrible curse that Ivan the Terrible would have on those who tried to turn the story into art (Kleiman suggested that Eisenstein knew that making Ivan the Terrible would become a fateful decision in his life), Eisenstein's use of colour, the siginificance of the gestures and the fact that this film was in many ways Eisenstein's homage to Meyerhold. Eisenstein never forgot his debt to Meyerhold - it was Meyerhold's archive that he took to Alma Ata for safekeeping during the war. Also, everywhere he went he would take a photograph of Meyerhold with him even though he would certainly be arrested had the authorities found about about this. Kleiman argued that Part Three of Ivan the Terrible could have lead to Eisenstein's arrest and possible execution given his determination to portray Ivan the Terrible (and hence Stalin) as a Lucifer-type figure. Unfortunately that which remains of Part Three is a very small segment. The culprit who destroyed those sequences of the third part of Ivan the Terrible is Ivan Pyriev who decided that Eisenstein had shot Ivan the Terrible 'incorrectly' and that Pyriev himself would show the real Ivan the Terrible to the world. (A crime against cinema similar to those of our contemporary, Mikhalkov?)

Kleiman is a scholar who inspires a fresh love for Soviet cinema and a realization that it is part of the universal history of cinema and art. The references in Ivan the Terrible to Michelangelo, the Japanese Kabuki theatre, to the opera Rigoletto show what a universal artist Eisenstein really was (as was his master Meyerhold). When he introduced the talk, Kleiman reminded the audience of a photograph of Eisenstein shot on the day of Meyerhold's murder (February 2nd 1940). Eisenstein in the photograph wears an expression of absolute gloom on his face as though he somehow had some intuition that this was the day in which his beloved master Meyerhold was to be cruelly executed. It is an irony of sorts that the only section that remains of Ivan the Terrible Part Three is a scene in which a German is being interrogated by a crazed Ivan the Terrible and his oprichniky. A scene which obliquely alludes to the Stalinist camps where one of the greatest theatre directors the world has ever known lost his life.

The photograph accompanying this article is one of Meyerhold playing Ivan the Terrible.

Victor Avilov and The Moscow Theatre of the South West

2010-03-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

Just back in Moscow I headed for my favourite bookshop in town. Falanster, an anarchist, leftist bookshop with the lowest prices and best variety of books in Moscow. I immediately searched in the cinema section and found a new book of Yuri Tsivian's articles, and nearby I discovered a biography of the actor Victor Avilov. This took me back to 2001-2002 when I spent my first year in Moscow studying Russian at the Moscow State Pedagogical University with a small group of Chinese and South Korean students. This university was located not far from the Theatre Studio of the South-West and although I soon moved to the North West of the City in Kuntsevo there was a collective taxi (marshrutka) which would take me both to the theatre and to university. In spite of knowing little Russian, I went three or four times a week to the theatre and this particular theatre was my particular favourite. There were a number of plays I would watch spellbound even though not understanding much of the nuance of the narrative - sometimes I would return two or three times to the same play (theatre prices were extremely low at that time - two to four UK Pounds). The style of acting was so unlike other theatres in Moscow. Being such a small theatre it had an intimate feel. I now consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to witness what in retrospect some consider one of the most extraordinary Russian theatre and film actors of the late twentieth century, Victor Avilov.

Unfortunately, little of Avilov's brilliance as an actor comes across in his cinematic roles. Perhaps only the flawed but interesting Gospodin Oformitel' (translated clumsily as Mister Designer) manages to portray the extraordinary qualities of the actor Avilov through which he realized hiimself and his roles in this theatre. The biography of Avilov by Natalia Staroselskaya is an interesting account of how he became such a spellbinding actor. The Theatre Studio of the South-West was a theatre which existed almost outside of the Soviet theatre system. More than Liubimov's Theatre on the Taganka (perhaps the theatre symbol of the generation of the 'shiestdesiatniki' (the sixties generation of the Thaw), it was a theatre of non-professional actors and managed to express (more than most other theatres) the ethos of a later generation in which the illusions of the Thaw had all died.

Victor Avilov was a lorry driver who had known the theatre director Valery Belyakovich's brother in his school years and had no professional training in acting whatsoever. The development of this actor from starring roles in light comedies and farces in the early years of the theatre to some great roles of absurd theatre(such as Ionesco's 'Rhinoceros') to tragic roles (including a splendid performance of Hamlet which was wildly received at the Edinburgh festival and was deemed by Japanese theatre goers to have been the very best Hamlet they had seen performed)is exceptionally well recounted by the author of this biography. Other great roles he was to play included that of Voland in Master and Margerita as well as Caligula in Camus's play of the same title. He, also, arguably helped to create one of the better recent productions of Gorky's 'The Lower Depths'.

Apparently the first mention of this theatre abroad was provoked by a visit to the theatre by a British photo-journalist who was to witness a fight outside the theatre. Former owners of the building were beating the theatre director Valery Belyakovich due to a dispute over the ownership of the building when out stepped two actors in female dress rehearsing for a farce(one of these 'transvestites' was Victor Avilov)and proceded to defend their owner with their fists. Apparently according to Staroselskaya this theatre then gained a small reputation in Britain as the theatre of Moscow's riff-raff.

One of the few mentions I have been able to find in the British press is an article by John Fowler in the Glasgow Herald from August 25th 1987 comparing it to Grotowski's Poor Theatre. Fowler describes the founding of the theatre, Belyakovich's insistence on using non-trained actors who had not moved through the Soviet theatrical schools and the collective and egalitarian ethos of the theatre but he was signally unable to quite understand much more of the principles behind the theatre - he calls Belyakovich a 'terse communicator' and said that Avilov was reluctant to discuss the subject of his transformation from lorry driver to becoming a world-class actor. The theatre found greater success in Japan where they would return to for many repeat tours.

My own memory of Avilov was his ability to completely hynoptise the audience and I remember that on my later trips (when Avilov acted more rarely) I was often disappointed that some of the plays lost their force without his entrancing presence- the Master & Margerita which I saw without him was, alas, a definite flop (although I have heard that most recently their production of this seminal work has improved). His greatest roles were arguably those of Voland, Hamlet, Caligula, and Berenger in Rhinoceros by Ionesco. I myself have memories of his unforgettable performances in Walpurgis Night by Venedikt Yerofeyev and in Dostoyevsky Trip by Vladimir Sorokin. His last cinema role was, apparently, that of Meyerkhold in a film by Semyon Ryabikov called 'Zolotaya golova na plakhe'.

Sergei Paradjanov

2010-03-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

The BFI should be warmly congratulated for their excellent Paradjanov (or Paradzhanov) retrospective. Saturday an excellent symposium was held at the NFT with a whole list of guests including the Ukrainian-Armenian director and friend of Paradjanov Roman Balayan, the film historian and curator Ian Christie, the film-maker and producer Patrick Cazals, the Georgian photographer Yuri Mechitov, the writer, lecturer and broadcaster John Riley and others. The Symposium was full of different 'takes on Paradjanov from the scholarly to the often hilarious personal recollections of Roman Balayan. Ian Christie entitled his introductory piece A Fortunate Man which is a rather strange thing to say about a film director who spent years in the prisons of the Soviet Union. He went on, however, to justify his argument by saying how this might be true. Fortunate to belong to a generation of directors and to have such great opportunities at studying under the great masters in the Soviet Union's State Cinematography Institute (in the workshop of Savchenko where Marlen Khutsiev also studied), fortunate in being the recipient of a powerful international solidarity campaign when he was jailed and being eventually granted his release, fortunate in the ability to create such unique masterpieces which in the conditions of the Soviet Union could still be made if left on the shelf (and would probably never get the funding in the West for such esoteric films). Ian Christie explained how he had begun his filmmaking career in the deadening atmosphere of the late Stalin period. VGIK was at that time a refuge for the greats of Soviet cinema who had been left almost unemployed by the film famine years at the end of Stalin's life.

The consensus is that there was two periods in Paradjanov's film career. He himself would have pointed to his viewing of Tarkovsky's 'Ivan's Childhood' as the dividing point. For Christie the earlier film by Kalatozov 'The Cranes are Flying' was also a significant moment. Yet a viewing even of some of his early films suggest that Paradjanov was able to express stunning visual effects in his films with their rather conventional Socialist Realist plot lines (my viewing of Flower on the Stone convinced me of his superb ability to deal even with black and white and his use of chiaroscuro to maximum effect). His Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors had a fantastically wide distribution and success both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Its use of folklore, its stunning use of colour and his unique way of using music and dance (which was his original orientation, Ian Christie reminds us) makes the viewing of this film a rare and unforgettable experience. Yet in 1965 he was to move even further along the route of being a uniquely visual filmmaker and the remaining rushes of Kiev Frescoes (totalling about 13 minutes) indicate that narrative was to be subordinate to the need to make every frame painterly and artistic.

Layla Alexander-Garrett who was the initiator and organiser of this festival and who had worked with Tarkovsky, contrasted the two artists who had become such close friends. It was, according both to her and Ian Christie, a meeting of opposites. Tarkovsky personified almost absolute restraint and Paradjanov a heady exhuberance. What some believe to be Paradjanov's masterpiece - Sayat Nova (aka The Colour of Pomegranates) was to be made in the most difficult period to work in- the late sixties when so many films were banned. Ian Christie stated that it is a mystery how he actually came to make a film like this at all. The answer, it seems, is that it was made in Armenia (the more distant from the centre one was, the less the iron-grip of control by film bureaucrats) and although it was reedited by Yutkevich most participants agreed that Yutkevich simply wished to preserve the film and was a strong champion of the film (who was according to one speaker the film's only champion at the time). Ian Christie spent some time talking about the international campaign in Paradjanov's defence (after being jailed on a veritable cocktail of charges) by filmmakers and argued that a lot of the campaign came through western Communist Parties and Louis Aragon's intervention with Brezhnev as well as the involvement of those film-makers such as Fellini and Bunuel who played a significant part in his final release from prison. The world cinema tradition that speakers placed Paradjanov in were alongside film-makers such as Pasolini and Jarman in terms of a queer sensibility, but Fellini was also mentioned.

Nouritza Matossian argued powerfully to place Paradjanov within an Armenian perspective (and she posited similarities with Arshile Gorky). His belonging to the Armenian community of Tbilisi also influenced him as did the naif art of Pirosmani (although it was hotly disputed whether one could call Paradjanov a naif or primitive artist). She also emphasised how his idea of epic narrative was what distinguished his style from any remnant of socialist realism. She argued that there were always elements of surrealism in medieval Armenian art and that the major aspect of Armenian art that distinguished Paradjanov from other film directors was his frontality (something that also linked him to Cezanne as well as the reliefs of the Armenian churches). He also used a double language of symbols and builds up a kind of ark of symbols in his work which makes his films so rich in meaning.

For Yuri Mechitov Paradjanov was the first successful post-modernist. Roman Balayan was a great racconteur of Paradjanov tales. Balayan as he said wanted to prove that a genius was also a human being. He explained Paradjanov's love of inventing stories (believing that the truth was too boring), his absolute need for spectators and suggested that he would have made a wonderful circus clown. He told the story of how when Tonino Guerra visited Paradjanov and told him that he was a genius, Paradjanov replied that there was no need to tell him because he already knew and that Tonino Guerra should shout out loud in Italian to his neighbours from the balcony that Paradjanov was a genius. Paradjanov was not satisfied with Tonino Guerra's first attempt and told him to shout louder which poor Tonino Guerra consented to do. Balayan emphasised Paradjanov's love of company. He stated that Paradjanov had not a book in his house but loved going to the opera and although he never generally watched films he went to see a film by Pasolini (Oedipus Rex, I believe) 17 times. Yet Paradjanov's lack of books ignored the fact that he had written 20 wonderful scripts that it was hoped would be translated into English one day.

Elisabetta Fabrizi noted that Paradjanov's central goal was to achieve in film what visual artists had achieved with the flat surface of canvas. She points out his links to both Pasolini and Fellini and argued that Paradjanov was the most complete example of art giving shape in filmic language. She also explained how he created a different kind of temporality in his films and his use of the visual allowed him to transcend reality. She also tried to place the influence of the Russian icon on the film. How icon art was about abstraction and frontal and not like Renaissance Art an imitation of life. In Paradjanov's films each object brings its own reality to the film and is a protagonist for what it represents. She also tried to show how it reflected Persian miniatures in his construction of space in the film. Actors in his films represent type and not real characters. It was emphasised how Paradjanov worked consistently with Sofiko Chiaureli who might play up to six roles in the same film.

John Riley showed Paradjanov in the context of the collage art of Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art and the use of found materials. He also relates this to musical influences (of a mainly western orientation) but emphasises the notion of polystylism which was, for Riley, a part of the aesthetic style of the time. He gives the examples of collage films like Romm's 'And nevertheless I believe' with its found footage as well as Khrzhanovsky's 'Glass Harmonica'. He then talks about how Paradjanov uses the idea of asynchronicity that was first trumpeted in the joint statement on sound by Pudovkin, Eisenstein and others. The influence of Eisenstein the participants argued was a very important but undocumented influence.

Other interventions by Patrick Cazals on the bestiary of Paradjanov and Daniel Bird on the state of copies of Paradjanov's films. Alas, Bird's contribution highlighted some worrying facts about how badly preserved these copies are and how little cooperation there has been between film archives and studios in different parts of the former Soviet Union. Paradjanov's dispersal was illustrated in the form of a joke about why he was imprisoned. He stated that he was an Armenian born in Georgian who was jailed by the Russians for being a Ukrainian nationalist!

Kozintsev's Korol Lir (King Lear)

2010-02-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

Last weeks Times Literary Supplement came out with an article praising Kozintsev's Korol Lir (or King Lear) as the adaptation on stage and screen "closest, not just to the radical energies of Shakespeare's play, which interrogates the political uses of land, but also to our own twenty-first century fears and preocupations about what we do to the land - and what it does to us". An interesting article which calls for the reappraisal of this fascinating film that was made on the cusp of the period between the end of the thaw and the setting in of Brezhnevian stagnation.

The article by a trio of authors (Richard Margraf Turley, Howard Thomas and Jayne Elisabeth Archer) argues that the vision of Kozintsev was much closer to Shakespeare than that of Peter Brooks due to its acknowledgment that Shakespeare's play is an arable play. A powerful argument is made by the authors but this is marred by some really silly lapses of judgement and factual howlers. Stating that "situating some of the play in a plain by the Caspian Sea ... (Kozintsev) brings to play his own childhood memories of disease and famine under Stalin" is alas a real howler - Kozintsev was a well-established film director under Stalin and no child! Equally calling Kozintsev a dissident film-maker is giving a whole new meaning to the word dissident which it simply doesn't have. Kozintsev definitely wasn't a mouthpiece for state ideology and managed to carve out his own autonomous space but no, he wasn't a convinced disident a la Solzhenitsyn either. In spite of these qualms it is nice to read an article evaluating a Soviet film so highly as being the closest adaptation of Shakespeare.

A clip from the end of the film is shown. The script of the play is from Pasternak's translation and the soundtrack is Shostakovich's. Can't get much better than that.

Two paintings by Telemaco Signorini & Ilya Repin

2010-02-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

Not a cinematic post but during a visit to an exhibition at the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua I was struck by a painting which would immediately bring to mind a classic Russian painting. The Italian painting L'alzaia (upper painting)is by the Italian 'Macchiaiolo' painter Telemaco Signorini and the classic Russian painting (lower painting) is, of course, by Ilya Repin and one of Russia's most famous paintings 'Barge Haulers on the Volga'. The Italian painting dates back to 1864 and Repin's was carried out between 1870-1873. Telemaco Signorini is considered the most European of the Macchiaiolo school. He also lived some time in the Cinque Terre village of Riomaggiore.

Vladimir Motyl

2010-02-25T15:32:00.000-08:00

Vladimir Motyl died recently at the age of 83. Known above all for his classic Eastern 'White sun of the desert' (denounced at the time as a counter-revolutionary film) and his bitter war comedy 'Zhenia, Zhenechka and Katiusha' (also running into problems with the censors) he gained a truly popular success. Andrey Shemyakin has written an interesting article on his blog linking Motyl to the eccentric tradition in Russian film (from Barnet to the FEKS circle of Kozintsev and Trauberg) as well as situating him in a trio of directors - Savva Kulish & Gennadi Poloka being the other two - who managed to break out of the sixties reigning aesthetic.

Motyl made a mere ten films in his fourty year career but he is known by the public for those two mentioned above and in more recent years has had little popular success. The youtube clip shows the beginning of his film 'Zhenia, Zhenechka and Katiusha'with English subtitles.

Soviet Cinema in Italy

2010-02-25T01:37:00.001-08:00

A month in Italy left me with ample time firstly for a visit to a film festival in Trieste, secondly for watching some of my DVDs that I left there and thirdly to read some of my Italian collection of books on Soviet culture and cinema. I have always been curious as to the different approach and different reception that Soviet cinema and culture has had in Italy as compared to Britain. An obviously minor topic but a curious one nonetheless and one which would need an amount of research to draw anything but merely impressionistic conclusions. Yet there are some fascinating stories linking Italy with Russian and Soviet cinema. One of course was the story of Francesco Misiano who I blogged about a few months ago - someone who played a not insignificant part in the very history of Soviet cinema.

One of the people most associated with the discovery of Soviet cinema in Italy was Umberto Barbaro (pictured above) - one of the main figures in Italy's 'Experimental Centre of Cinematography' which existed during fascism but then was to create a whole generation of anti-fascist Neorealist filmmakers and be a refuge for staunch anti-fascists like Barbaro even during the fascist period. Barbaro was to translate the writings of Pudovkin and Eisenstein after the second world war and become the first great film scholar to bring Soviet cinema to the attention of the Italian cinema world. It is curious, though, that even during the 'ventennio' (the period of fascist rule) Soviet cinema entered fascist Italy -for example, at the Venice Film Festival in 1932 & 1934- Ekk's film 'A Voucher for Life' (Putyovka v Zhizn') enjoying particular success. Even specialised reviews devoted considerable space to Soviet cinema so it can't be said that there was a total absence of cinematic links.

It was, of course, only after the second world war that Soviet cinema could, however, be more openly available to a larger public. This was, perhaps, not the most propitious time for this to happen. Late Stalinist cinema was suffering its film famine and, alas, producing some of its least appealing "lacquered" films and those like The Vow (Kliatva) and The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina) in which Stalin appears as a demi god-like figure. Yet culture in immediate post-war Italy was a highly politicised sphere and the Cold War played a more significant role in Italy than elsewhere. There is, apparently, a review by Italo Calvino defending these films. The role of cinema clubs is another interesting story and again one in which politics played its part and the Cold War determined to a large degree how Soviet cinema was received. Another film scholar, Guido Aristarco, will appear on the horizon and will develop a Marxist approach to film criticism and will be as much a champion of Eisenstein as Barbaro was for Pudovkin (he was also referred to by Luchino Visconti as the "most Viscontian of critics").

The greatest interpreter of Russian & Soviet cinema in Italy was Giovanni Buttafava whose knowledge of Soviet cinema was phenomenal (the great Russian critic Naum Kleiman painted a wonderful portrait of Gianni Buttafava in his introduction to his interviews with Bernard Eisenschitz). Almost as fascinating were characters like Gastone Predieri who Enrico Ghezzi characterised as "the man with the projector". Predieri made sure that the Association Italy-USSR would have one of the largest stores of Soviet films in Western Europe. In fact even today searching on youtube, clips of rare Soviet films regularly appear with Italian subtitles. Enrico Ghezzi's role as conductor of Italy's mythical 'Fuori Orario' (a late night TV programme that runs from 2 am to 6am and which shows all the films that are nowhere to be seen or found elsewhere- among which hundreds of hidden Soviet classics have been shown on Italian television).

These are some of the names of Italian scholars and film professionals who have brought Soviet cinema to Italy. 'Film professionals', though, is a misleading characterisation of these characters- there is a passion mixed with 'fanaticism' in these characters that is rarely seen in the Anglo-Saxon world - or rather Italian history has shaped a less academic and more 'passionate' relationship between the world of Soviet cinema and Italian interpreters of this world. The reception of Italian cinema was both more politicised but also more possible outside a purely academic sphere because the greater amount of possible links during the Cold War through the Italian Communist Party. Yet discovering more in this realm is a subject for further research.

Henri Cartier Bresson's Soviet Photographs Exhibition in Genoa's Palazzo Ducale

2010-02-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

Staying in Liguria usually means a weekly visit to Genova (or Genoa as it is written in English). I love the description given of the city by one of Chekhov's characters in the last act of The Seagull who when asked (as someone who has travelled everywhere in the world) which city is the best city in the world to live in replies Genoa because it is only there that one feels the presence of a world soul. Chekhov only very briefly visited Genoa so I am not sure if this was his genuine feeling about the city. My own love for the city grows each time I visit.

This visit was rewarded with a very special treat. Genoa has a splendid record of Russian themed exhibitions - significant ones have been a large exhibition in 2001 on major Russian artists who have lived & painted in Liguria, another one on Soviet avant-garde arists and this time an exhibition of Henri Cartier Bresson's photographs of the Soviet Union during two trips there in 1954 and 1972/3. The exhibition included photographs from Moscow, Irkutsk, Georgia, Kyryzstan and Baku. For me the real revelation was those photographs he took in 1954.

My favourite was of a street scene near a tram stop (it is the photo rather badly reproduced here). In the right-hand background there is a tram and some passengers alighting, in the left background a seller of kvas. In the foreground are two 'milliotsionery' smiling and glancing in different directions - one appears to be looking at the two young women at the very front of the photograph. One of these women has her back to the camera but her head is turned so that her expression is clearly visible, the other woman is looking elsewhere. There is a sense that they are pausing for thought. The woman whose front is towards the camera is holding a small case and they are both wearing sandals. Cartier Bresson has managed to capture something special in this photograph and in many others of Moscow and elsewehere in the Soviet Union. A moment of life, something which it is nearly impossible to discover in Soviet cinema of 1954. For me the best scenes of street life can only be found in Khutsiev's 1967 movie 'July Rain' at the very end when he is filming a veterans meeting on Vitory Day (May 9th) or perhaps some of Romm's closing street scenes at the end of his documentary 'Ordinary Fascism' even though to me they don't generate the charm that Cartier Bresson or Khutsiev captures.

In the exhibition were some other splendid photographs. A wonderful street scene in Baku with children, a scene near Kazansky Train Station with a line of taxis, flower sellers and an elegantly dressed womansurprised by the camera. Cartier Bresson manages to capture some wonderful facial expressions. Other splendid photos are of the Metropol Hotel canteen for workers with its 'doska pochyota' portraits of Lenin and Stalin(this was 1954) and the various workers; another photograph that was amongst the best was of a shop assistant demonstrating a single bag to six or seven female customers- the eyes of these customers all fixed on this single handbag. A fascinating portrait of the human face.

All in all a real documentary of the Soviet Union of 1954 (and also of the early seventies) rarely fixed in Soviet film of that time. Genoa's excellent exhibitions of Russian and Soviet culture has made it an excellent showcase as to what can be done to promote real cultural ties with Russia.

Alpe Adria (Trieste) Film Festival

2010-01-27T04:06:00.000-08:00

Rather than taking a prolonged break while I am not watching nor reading about Russian and Soviet films, here is a short post about a festival that only has an indirect link to Russian film but is one of the most interesting showcases of cinema from the Eastern part of Europe. Occasionally Russian films are shown here including an excellent retrospective of Gherman films (both father and son) in 2006. This year few Russian films were represented although Todorovsky's 'Stilyagi' (Hipsters) was shown as a special event. A Georgian short was also shown (reportedly excellent although I could not make it to the cinema as planned). The protagonist of the film could not make it to her husbands funeral and so is present via mobile telephone wailing her grief through the telephone which is played at the funeral. The film is by Salome Aleksi and the Italian title is Felicità (Happiness).

Another film with a Russian context is Leslie Woodhead's 'How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin'. Very much a BBC made documentary which gives the Beatles more credit for overthrowing the Soviet system than it does Gorbachev. The director finds his quotes and his Beatle fanatics and makes an enjoyable documentary but one which repeats too many motifs that have a real hackneyed feel to them. The Soviet Union is portrayed as a country ruled by geriatrics with no access to any music other than weird national folk ensembles. No mention whatsoever is made of Vladimir Vysotsky who probably 'rocked' the Kremlin far more than the Beatles and although the film does go on to give a minimal explanation of how reality developed after Stalin, the Soviet images and film clips are mainly indicative of the Soviet Union in the late fourties and early fifties or of a frail and mentally defective Brezhnev. There are some witty moments when someone explains how one day all telephone boxes in the Soviet Union were vandalised after word got around that a part of it could be used to make a guitar. However it is a pity that the film gave such a traditioal Cold War image of Russians hankering after anything Western and not giving due credit to Russia's own brand of rock and alternative music (a short clip of Viktor Tsoy was all there was). Regrettably I missed other Russian documentaries on the Soviet space programme by Pavel Medvedev (the title of the film was Ascension) as well as Aleksandr Gutman's 17th August (about a prisoner condemned to life imprisonment). Ukraine was represented by Sergij Bukovskij's documentary on the holodomor 'The Living'. Alas I can not report anything on these films.

The festival in general was dedicated to a number of themes with a special emphasis on Greek cinema as well as on Musical documentaries. Anghelopoulos's superb early film Voyage to Cythera was, for me, the highlight of the Greek films retrospective and I was sorry to miss his more recent film 'The Dust of Time'. Voyage to Cythera is about a Greek exile who returns home after spending 32 years in the Soviet Union. His return is a bitter one and he is finally sent by the Greek police on a raft to international waters given that he is neither allowed to remain in Greece nor will a ship transport him back to the Soviet Union. Anghelopoulos has a superb craft of narrating in an absolutely unique way and combines Tarkovsky's meditative sculpting of time with Fellini's melancholic nostalgia.

The films in the competition at Alpe Adria are, this year, often impressive. One of my favourites was a Roumanian film called 'The Happiest Girl in the World' by Radu Jude. A tale of a girl from a poor family who has won an expensive car. She comes to Bucharest to star in a commercial thanking the company but the advertising never gets shot correctly and her day is spoiled also by her parents who convince her through nagging and bullying to turn the car over to them so that they can set up in business. The photo shoot takes up most of the picture as we watch the tens of failed shoots with which there is always something that goes wrong. A film very much in the style of 'The Death of Mr Lazarescu' and perhaps not quite sharing that film's brilliance but well worth a viewing. Other films from the Balkans have reflected on the wars of succession. The better of the two was 'Ordinary People' which managed to highlight one person's journey from normality to war criminal and showing it as a process of utter banality. There is no hint of dramatic conflict in the individual just an emphasis that this was a process that could happen to any ordinary person. The film was hard to watch because of it's utter lack of drama and many spectators left the hall and yet on reflection Vladimir Perishich has made a very poignant film. Other films included a Hungarian film called I'm Not Your Friend in which a mosaic of relationships between the main protagonists end in a finale in which the women each exact terrible revenge for their betrayal by their male partners (the film is preceded by a long piece in which four year old children try to make friends with each other in a pre-school playgroup). The son of Goran Paskaljevic, Vladimir, had debuted here with a black comedy on modern Belgrade. One of the film's protagonists states his desire to make two films- the first of which will portray all Serbs as completely crazy and then after pandering to this Western stereotype (and achieving international success) a second more patriotic film will then be made. It seems here as though Paskeljavic Junior has suceeded in making a parody of the first film & overall this black comedy was an interesting debut.

As Trieste is a city very close to my heart (perhaps the city closest to my heart) it is great that it offers such a wonderful chance to watch some fascinating films (and this is only of four annual film festivals of note). Another film festival held in Trieste - Science plus Fiction - occasionally also has a significant Russian/Soviet component to it. More than once retrospectives of Soviet science fiction films have been part of the bill.

This time my return to Trieste has also been greeted by Trieste's famous bora wind. A wind that reaches well over 100 km/h and which is probably Trieste's most famous feature for most Italian's. A film documentary has also been made on this natural phenomenon- a symbol of this unique city with its very specific history.

Trieste. Alpe Adria Film Festival & Vadim Abdrashitov

2010-01-21T00:48:00.000-08:00

I'm off on a trip to Italy firstly to visit friends and attend the Alpe Adria film festival in Trieste and then to spend some time in Liguria. I'll try to send a couple of posts on the film festival (though few Russian films are showing here, the most high profile of which, however, is the Todorovsky musical 'Stilyagi' Hipsters) and will resume fuller postings later in February when I shall have more time to add the postings that I have written in the meantime.

Yesterday I hoped to post a long post commemorating the Markelov and Baburova murders and a reflection on the film 'Russia 88' which has finally passed the obtuse censors but alas a cranky computer prevented me from doing this. 19th January was also the birthday of Vadim Abdrashitov - a film director barely known in the West but one of Russia's finest. A director who developed a style of cinema with his script writer Mindadze mixing a form of social realism with forms of the fantastic. A director who has rarely been shown abroad but who deserves to be more widely known.

My post on Markelov and Baburova & Russia 88 will be posted later.

Otsep's & Barnet's Miss Mend on DVD & Mezhrabpom

2010-01-19T04:20:00.000-08:00

Finally Otsep's & Barnet's Miss Mend is to be released on DVD by Flicker Alley, Dave Kehr the New York Times film critic reports. Very welcome news given that so few of Barnet's films are actually available in English-language versions. The critical reception of the film in the Anglo-Saxon world has, with the exception of Noel Burch's brilliant article 'Harold Lloyd versus Doctor Mabuse', been almost non-existent. Yet Burch's article provides a powerful case for seeing Barnet's and Otsep's film as a seminal work of world cinema in which two cinematic codes (American slapstick and German expressionism) battled it out on the screen. The Soviet detective genre exemplified by Shaginian's 'Mess Mend' drawing on and playing with the notion of a 'Red Pinkerton' was a relatively short-lived phenomenon. That this was to be produced in the Mezhrabpom-Rus studios is, of course, no suprise- the most colourful of early Soviet studios both in terms of output and its history as well as a number of its colourful personalities associated with it (Francesco Misiano and Willi Munzenberg being the most well-known). Finally a fuller account of its history in English is about to be written by Dr Jamie Miller (author of Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin). Very welcome news given the dearth of information on this fascinating film studio.

Chekhov adaptations in Russian/Soviet film.

2010-01-16T06:38:00.000-08:00

In today's Guardian an editorial is dedicated to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov with the title 'Still the One to Trust' stating that his plays were the one's that lasted the best of all. Very true, although I have think his stories are still the best of Chekhov (though I have read too few of them). Chekhov was perhaps the most adapted author on Russian and Soviet screens. Soloviev has made some valiant efforts and even Mikhalkov's 'An Unfinished Piece for the Mechanical Piano' is worthy of mention (whatever one may think of Mikhalkov himself). Kheifits, Annensky, Bondarchuk, Lotianu were all to make their own well-known and loved adaptations of Chekhov's stories. Above are two of the more recent adaptations - a trailer for Shakhnazarov's 'Ward No. 6' which was premiered at the Moscow International Film Festival in June last year and shown at the Russian Film Festival in London this Autumn and Muratova's excellent 'Chekhovian Motifs' which I saw at the Moscow Film Festival in 2002. Her incredibly lengthy marriage scene is wonderful as is the earlier part of the film - this passage shows a family argument over money but in Muratova's inimitable style.

If there is a Chekhov in Russian cinema it is surely Boris Barnet. I think that Neya Zorkaya made this argument in one of her articles and it is undoubtedly true that his ability to merge comic elements with tragedy is Chekhovian to the hilt. Though Barnet himself never worked on a Chekhov adaptation. Of Chekhov's major plays adapted to the Soviet screen I think Konchalovsky's 'Uncle Vanya' & Karasik's 'The Seagull' are the immediate ones that come to mind. Not (as far as I remember) masterpieces like Konchalovsky's adaptation of Turgensky 'A Nest of Nobility' but both definitely worth a viewing.

Other significant films from Chekhov (which I have yet to watch) have been Dykhovichny's 'The Black Monk' & Sniezhkin's 'Marigolds in Flower' which was less of an adaptation and more of a transposition of a Chekhovian spirit at least according to contemporary reviews.

Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome.

2010-01-14T17:41:00.000-08:00

Since I've mentioned Kira Muratova's in a couple of posts and have desparately tried to find a subtitled version (unsuccessfully) of this film, here are a couple of youtube videos of short sections of the film. One five minute section set in Moscow's metro, and the other video showing the ending of the film with the song Chiquita. As there is no dialogue the clips are for all. Of course those who have never travelled on Moscow's metro at rush hour won't get that frisson of recognition of the absolute truth of the first scene. Well these Muratova clips are only a minor section of what is available of Muratova's films on You Tube- alas, little of 'Melody for a Barrel Organ' has been posted there yet. For me these two films represent pinnacles of Muratova's art. Bleak but magnificent.

Amateur, Parallel and Underground Cinema in the Soviet Union & other articles from Kino Kultura

2010-01-14T12:36:00.000-08:00

The January edition of the brilliant online journal, Kinokultura, dedicated to Russian cinema has just become available. This journal has some fascinating reviews of contemporary films and usually two or three brilliant scholarly articles and reports from film festivals. This time in the journal a fascinating account of the Amateur film movement of the late Soviet period was given by Maria Vinogradova. Amateur film was established in a number of contexts and it is not correct to suggest that amateur film was necessarily less conformist (or even less susceptible to state control) than professional cinema. Sometimes it was under double censorship but Vinogradova details the ways in which amateur auteurs like Evgenii Iufit & Irina Evteeva (pictured above) managed to develop their own unique styles and what material circumstances led to the development of the Underground style of Iufit and Kondratiev.

I have yet to watch all my Iufit DVDs but my viewing of 'Papa, umer ded moroz' (Dad, Father Christmas is Dead') certainly led to curiosity about how this director could be working in the early 1980s. Vinogradova's article suggests a whole new area of research could be opened up given that amateur cinema was in some way linked to different epochs of Soviet cinema. The 1920s and the 1950s were significant periods (the director Grigory Roshal played an important role after the war) but the 1980s was when the whole movement lifted off.

Vinogradova's article is interesting in that she suggests that an undiscovered treasure trove of potentially fascinating hitherto unknown artworks may come up which could have considerable consequences for a writing of the history of Soviet film and maybe will expand our knowledge of Soviet experimental film beyond the 1920s.

In the same edition of Kino Kultura is a review by David Gillespie of last years Moscow International Film Festival's winner 'Peter on the way to heaven' by Nikolai Dostal. I think Gillespie is right in his scepticism about the film. It certainly didn't overwhelm me at the Festival and was way below the superb film by Muratova 'Melody for a barrel organ' which was reviewed in the previous edition of Kino Kultura by Nancy Condee. Muratova, of course, was Soviet cinema's answer to Underground in her own inimitable way. The excluded professional who returned to Formalism and made the bleakest of portraits of the perestroika period in her Asthenic Syndrome. Muratova who has been able to make the most uncommercial of cinema in the most commercial of times.

Boris Barnet- A Video Commentary by Nicole Brenez

2009-12-29T16:59:00.000-08:00

A commentary on one of Barnet's most delightful films 'By the Bluest of Seas'. While the Great Terror was about to get underway, this film by Barnet breathed a completely different air. Neither escapism like the musicals of Aleksandrov nor ideological justification of the oncoming Terror with the films of wreckers, spies and saboteurs, nor even one engaged in applauding the frenzy of construction and Stakhanovism. Barnet's path was another one. A lyrical one that emphasised desire above duty. In 'By the Bluest of Seas' there is little sense of two characters from the centre conquering the periphery. The main male charcaters are lost, shipwrecked, unproductive types whose behaviour corresponds only to the logic of desire and hopeless infatuation. That something like this could be made on the eve of the Great Terror is something of a small miracle. Of course, it was to be blacklisted when the ideologues got their claws into the film demanding that Barnet should work on "the ideological system of images based on thorough knowledge of real life" instead of being carried away by emotions. Fortunately Barnet was not to learn his lesson and when he made the odd ideologically acceptable film he would direct it so carelessly that it would become a flop anyway(or even according to Marlen Khutsiev and Otar Ioseliani he would just turn up to the shooting drunk and enjoy himself anyway).

This video commentary by Nicole Brenez puts a very French gloss on the film but there is something about Barnet that seems to make him only understood and applauded in Mediterranean countries. In France he was lauded by Rivette, Godard and Eisenschitz (and arguably Truffaut drew on this film in his 'Jules et Jim'), in Italy Enrico Ghezzi makes sure that Barnet is never forgotten by nocturnal Italian film buffs and in Spain Barnet's film was shown recently at the Filmoteca in Madrid. Only the UK seems to ignore this great director (and yet Barnet himself was a relative of London immigrants to Russia two generations earlier). Time for a rediscovery?

What was Stalinist cinema?

2009-12-26T02:57:00.000-08:00

Over the last few weeks I have been reading a few acounts of various aspects of Stalinist cinema. A book on Grigory Aleksandrov, another on the more administrative aspects of Soviet cinema under Stalin as well as others on gender and masculinity in Stalinist cinema, propaganda in Soviet cinema and the use of history in Stalinist cinema. A whole collection of books as well as some articles that should make it easier to answer the question. Yet the more I read the harder I find it to grasp what Stalinist cinema actually was, how to describe it (my Italian grandfather used to tell me 'piu si studia, piu neisciu se diventa' - the more you study, the more stupid you become- evidently true in this case).

There seems to be a shift in how people have tried to describe it in recent years. Robert Warshow wrote the ultimate Cold War text and this tradition has been continued in some ways by Peter Kenez who often does little to disguise his distaste for everything and nearly everyone involved in Soviet cinema. So he talks about films like Pyriev's 'The Party Card' and Ermler's 'The Great Citizen' being 'repellent and morally reprehensible'. Fair enough one may say and yet there is something mechanical in some of Kenez's judgements. Warshow's essay is actually more interesting in that in his negative judgements and in his rather comical asides (for example, where he talks of being "sick of the people who sat with me in the audience... whom I suspected of being either cinema enthusiasts or Communists - and I wasn't sure which was worse") he has some interesting points to make (albeit about the pre-Stalinist cinema of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Pudovkin). He gives a very honest account of watching these films and trying to deal with his own aesthetic and moral judgements simultaneously and it leads him to his interesting judgement that "it was not at all an aesthetic failure that I encountered in these movies, but something worse: a triumph of art over humanity". Of course, we do not have his views on the advent of Socialist Realism proper in the films from the mid 1930s onwards which it is hard to denote as such a triumph of art over anything.

So how can we then approach these films? Socialist Realism represented, of course, a retreat for artists like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Pudovkin even though Eisenstein at least cocked the final snook in his Ivan the Terrible Part Two. It seems that aesthetic or moral considerations will get us only so far and we would do better by turning our attention to other aspects. John Haynes in his book 'New Soviet Man' does this by looking at gender and making some fascinating points about the chaos that really reigned in this sphere & he pinpoints Ivan the Terrible as being the ultimate point in which Patriarchy dissolves into chaos and disorder. James Miller looks at the administration of cinema under Stalin giving us more information on the effect of the purges in cinema and accounts of studio life, the failed attempt to build a Soviet Hollywood and the fates of the top cinematic bureaucrats under Stalin (with a more rounded view of Shumiatsky who is known in the West mainly for being the scourge of Eisenstein). Miller actually shows us how the logic of Stalinism was a chaotic process driven by insecurity rather than any ineluctable totalitarian logic. Rimgaila Salys is perhaps the most detailed account imaginable in western scholarship of how individual films got to be produced. Salys concentrates on Aleksandrov's four musicals and goes through each and every stage in its production and reception.

However, it is probably Dobrenko's accounts which pull all these strings together. His book 'Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution' is a tour de force (I am impatient to read his 'Political Economy of Socialist Realism'). It is an account of how cinema under Stalin became an institution for the production of history. Stalinist art became a political-aesthetic project. Stalinism was the 'total art work' which introduced a new temporality 'the concluded future' (a kind of future pluperfect in Dobrenko's words). The book is difficult to summarise because he is constantly grappling both with the films themselves and the theories of de Certeau, Barthes, Baudrillard and, of course, Boris Groys which gives us some fascinating insights. Especially interesting is his linking the genesis of the museum with the guillotine and revolution and statements such as these "Societies based on terror are soon worn down. They produce more history than they can consume". Dobrenko's work, then, is trying to ask questions that no Russian cinema scholars had previously asked. He is looking at Stalinist cinema to try to answer the question as to what was reality in the Stalinist Soviet Union and arguing that the only place where socialism could be found was in cultural production itself. That is that 'Socialism was a system of signs'. In any case Dobrenko opens up a whole new perspective on Stalinist cinema and discovers new logics in the ways that genres were developed and then went into a demise. There is a real dialectical feel to his explanations that illuminate hitherto unexplored territory.

As well as reading up on Stalinist cinema I have subjected myself to viewing some Stalinist films on DVD. A couple of days ago I summoned up the courage to watch some of those films that I have been avoiding for years - Pyriev's 'The Party Card', Chiaureli's 'The Vow' and Macheret's 'The Mistake of Engineer Kochin'. Films about wreckers, saboteurs and the exhaltation of Stalin. Before that I had watched the Aleksandrov musicals in my possession (all except 'Circus') as well as the Maksim trilogy. Slowly trying to divert my gaze from the obvious to discover other motifs- to discover the art that had previously triumphed over humanity and now had been congealed and mummified into stasis. Was perhaps Barnet's 'Bountiful Summer' the only counter-indication of the late Stalin period: his film being the only example of a cinema of movement and therefore justifying Rivette's 'vostorg' at watching this film with his dicovery that Soviet cinema in the guise of Barnet had still found itself wriggle room even when all other directors produced films that were showing sure signs of rigor mortis?

Francesco Misiano - The Man Who Brought 'Battleship Potemkin' to the West

2009-12-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

Every now and again reading up on some aspect of Soviet film history I come across a name that I hadn't heard of previously and yet realize that finding out about this individual I have suddenly discovered some incredible story. Today reading Jamie Miller's new book on Soviet Cinema in the Stalin era (Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin - a book that concentrates on Soviet cinema as a film industry rather than looking at Stalinist cinema aesthetically) I discovered a name previously unknown to me for nothing was written about him in the main accounts of Russian cinema history. Neither Jay Leyda's 'Kino' nor Buttafava's book of articles on Russian and Soviet cinema - Il Cinema Russo e Sovietico- gave a single mention to this person in their works.

Yet Misiano is an absolutely fascinating historical character. He was a studio director at Mezhrabpom in so far as Soviet cinematic history goes but much more than that. He was a lifelong Italian anti-fascist who fought alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht in Berlin and was imprisoned in a German prison for ten months after the Spartakist revolt. Released, he then became an deputy in the Italian parliament. In 1919 he tried to lead the population of Rijeka (Fiume) against D'Annunzio. D'Annunzio reacted by proclaiming a death sentence against this 'traitor'. In 1921 as a parliamentarian he was beaten and forced out of the Parliament by thirty fascist deputies, his head was shaved and spat at while forced to wear a sign over his shoulders and made to walk along Rome's Via del Corso. Following this and further fascist intimidation and violence against him, he then escaped to Berlin and then on to Moscow where he would help to found one of Soviet Russia's best cinematographic studios - Mezhrabpomfilm. He was the person who would take Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' to Berlin in his luggage and who would invite Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to Moscow. In 1933 he invited German members of the film world who were opponents of the Nazis to the Soviet Union- the most famous of these being Bela Balasz, Joris Ivens, Hans Richter, Erwin Piscator. In 1936 he was sent on an anti-fascist mission to the Horn of Africa (following Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia). He then fell out of favour in the Soviet Union in 1936 but fortunately died that year before Stalin's Great Terror went into full flow (in a matter of months he would undoubtedly have become a victim of this Terror had he not died previously). Very few turned up to his funeral (even Italy's communist leader Palmiro Togliatti ignored it) given Misiano's fall from Stalinist grace shortly before his death.

A figure almost completely ignored in the cinematic history accounts of Soviet cinema (although there have been several biographies published in Italy on this fascinating figure of twentieth century history).

In the same book I also read of Ida Penzo (the wife of Eisenstein's assistant cameraman, Vladimir Nilsen who was executed in the Great Terror) - she was Italian and spent a decade and a half in the Gulag (until released in 1955). She was a ballerina and actress and had acted in Dovzhenko's 'The Diplomatic Pouch'. Another of these many tragic (and yet fascinating) stories that Soviet cinema offers up in droves.

Yuri Mamin

2009-12-02T11:19:00.000-08:00

Today's 'Novaya Gazeta' has an interview with Yuri Mamin- one of Russia's leading satirical filmmakers. Mamin was fairly prolific at the end of the perestroika and early post-Soviet period and made a number of forceful satirical films on various aspects of Russian life and with plentiful caricatures of Russian national types. His international hit was 'A Window on Paris' where he imagined a hidden window in a collective apartment in St Petersburg which looks out onto Paris. The inhabitants can come and go from St Petersburg to Paris and back. The film is a reflection on Western and Russian cultures and realities as well as caricaturing these stereotypes. His earlier film 'Fountain' is an image of a building and its inhabitants - an image and a reality which becomes ever more absurd as the film progresses. Mamin talked about how he tried to use all sorts of genres and how each of these genres would flow into the others. He stated that "it begins as a comedy of situations and ends as grotesque". Another film that he made was 'Sideburns' which took on the subject of the rise of neo-fascist movements imagining a gang of Pushkinists attired in nineteenth century dress with mutton chop sideburns who terrorise rivals. This film was apparently purchased by persons unknown who then refused to show or distribute the film. A prolonged silence was interrupted by his film 'Gorko!' in 1998 and only again by last years 'Don't think about the white monkeys'. This film completely recited in verse had a discrete showing in Moscow's cinemas. The balance that Mamin achieves between social satire and the use of absurdity and grotesque is masterful and has a manneristic feel to it. A review in Kino Kultura has this to say about it:

It’s the sort of highly stylized, absurdist, mannered filmmaking that is now so rare. It possesses the gorging visceral qualities of La Grande Bouffe (Ferreri 1973), the tactile sumptuousness of Peter Greenaway’s 1980-90s films such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and A Zed & Two Noughts, and the trippy surrealism of Terry Gilliam. It is stylized and mannered in a way that few films these days dare. It is most pleasing when it junks reality, confuses points of view, or descends into the grotesque

( http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/25r-whitemonkey.shtml - for the full review).

In today's interview Mamin talks about the difficulties of being a satirical director in todays Russia (but wasn't it ever thus?), and develops into the common explanation of how difficult it is to finance films like his. He also talks about making a remake of Window on Paris. This looks like a film to watch out for. In any case one can only rejoice at the fact that Mamin seems to be making a comeback after the last decade and a half of near absence from the large screen.

Here is the link to the Novaya interview:

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/134/28.html

Pavel Lungin's 'Tsar' & the religious plague in recent Russian filmmaking

2009-12-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

I have yet to see Lungin's new film 'Tsar' although I am very curious to see Oleg Yankovsky in his final role and, of course, a film on Ivan the Terrible by a notable director is interesting in itself given how one can then go on to compare the film to Eisenstein's classic. It seems that Lungin is returning to a religious theme even in this film and it will be interesting to find out in what way Lungin is representative of an apparent religious revival. From reading a review or two of Lungin, of course, is unlikely to be a simple case of straight ideologist for Russian Orthodox Nationalism and he seems to be wary of tying religiosity with a strong state ideology (I guess one should be thankful for small mercies).

And yet... Frederick Jameson in an article on Soviet Magic Realism written in the late eighties already mentioned this return of religion in his article on Sokurov's 'Days of Eclipse' and presciently slammed a return to 'religious trendiness'. Jameson's 1988 footnote (or as he puts it a short 'diatribe') on this tendency now, alas, is deserving of a lengthy study. Apart from Lungin another two films Khotinenko's 'Priest' (Pop) amd Proshkin's 'Miracle' (Chudo) are evidence that this inclusion of the odd scene has become a veritable flood. Indicative of a sea change.

Andrei Plakhov has written about this subject recently and places it in a context of trends in European cinema per se. Here is the link to the article in Russian.
http://www.openspace.ru/cinema/projects/8787/details/13448/?expand=yes#expand

In any case, there are some directors (thankfully in my view) who remain distant from this plague of religiosity and are a healthy antidote. To my mind Kira Muratova is the most shining example (and in the films of Aleksei German there also seems a healthy absence of 'a religious point of view'). Regrettably he, unlike Muratova, has been notably silent in the last decade.

Andrei Khrzhanovsky 70 today.

2009-11-30T05:39:00.000-08:00

The film-maker of mainly, but not only, animated films Andrei Khrzhanovsky is 70 today. His animated trilogy on Pushkin, his short animated film There Once Lived a Man called Kozyavin, and his recent wonderful feature cum documentary cum animated film 'A room and a half ' on the poet Joseph Brodsky which was, perhaps, the best film I saw last year in Russia all prove what a great man he is. His speech at the last 'pseudo' Congress of the Filmmakers Union telling Mikhalkov that no proctologist would save him now (a moment truly to be savoured in that shameful Congress)- all this point to what a unique and shining figure he is in the Russian cinematic and cultural world.

In today's Novaya Gazeta the great actor Sergey Iurskii (who played the role of Brodksy's father in 'A Room and a half' alongside Alisa Freindlikh and who are shown in the photo above)has written a short article on the filmmaker- http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/133/06.html . Iurskii reminds readers of Khrzhanovsky's work with such people as Alfred Shnitke, Tonino Guerra, Iuri Norstein, Innokenti Smokutunovksy, Natalia Gutman, Iurii Arabov and others.

Andrei Khrzhanovsky is one of Russia's cinematic world most attractive figures and part of that universe of great talents that makes Russia's cultural achievements still undeniably one of the richest that the world has to offer.

For a superb commentary on Khrzhanovsky's film 'A Room amd a Half' here is the link to David MacFadyen's review in the journal 'KinoKultura'.

http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/25r-poltorykomnaty.shtml

The Imperial Trace

2009-11-26T16:42:00.000-08:00

This last week I have spent reading Nancy Condee's recent book on recent Russian cinema. A real tour de force in that Russian cinema is seen in the context of larger theoretical concerns but it is done in such a cogent and convincing way that the references to Said, Jameson as well as a host of historians and theorists of nationalism and empire have their 'diegetic' logic. While the first chapter sets the theoretical scene and an account of recent history of the Russian film industry is given in the next chapter, the six chapters on the contemporary giants of Russian film - Mikhalkov, Muratova, Abdrashitov- Mindadze, Sokurov, German and Balabanov - are masterfully done, bringing out both a well-argued view of each director as well as a host of examples and evidence from their films. At times her writing excels and Condee discovers some succint gems to put her points across. Her thesis in the book is how the imperial identification accounts for a great deal in contemporary Russian cinema but this is not argued dogmatically. It illuminates many things that one feels when watching films by these directors. For me her best chapters were on Muratova and German. Her readings of the filmmakers are open-ended and she is one of the few scholars who really is open to the excellent Russian scholarship that is available.

There are perhaps too many points to make about the book - each chapter deserves a summary. I have a feeling that my preferences for Muratova and German in this group of six are more than justified. My scepticism over Sokurov has been confirmed (although tonight watching his 'Mournful Unconcern' if I have a critique it is not a critique of technique and atmosphere), as for Abdrashitov-Mindadze while wishing that they were more available outside Russia I recognize that they lack the universality of the others. Balabanov is, fascinating but Condee's concluding comments in the postscript are a powerful warning as to his right directed neomodernism and Mikhalkov's retro style is all too obviously hiding a deeply false ideology and commits the sin of 'glossy Stalinism'.

Anyway this blog is not able to do justice to the detailed argumentation present in the book but it is, I think, quite a revelation that is still all too rare in writing about Russian and Soviet cinema.

Post-Soviet Montage

2009-11-20T05:23:00.000-08:00

Reading accounts of the glasnost era and post-Soviet cinema there seems to be an emphasis on the categories of social fantasy, chernuka, the recent return of the blockbuster and, of course, the triad of auteurs Sokurov, Gherman and Muratova. Yet missing in many accounts are some very interesting films that haven't been given their due. In this category, Oleg Kovalov is a central figure. His is a return to montage (maybe a third return - the second return, arguably, was linked to the thaw camerwork of Urusevsky and, maybe, one could include Peleshian- although I'm still waiting to see his films for myself).

Kovalov's film The Guardians of Scorpio is a montage of a 1950s spy story with documentary and feature films including large sections from an educational film about the effects of alcoholism. The film's deconstruction of the 1950s lakirovka (and that of Soviet narrative cliches) is masterful. It also, I think, suggested a new direction in which post-Soviet cinema could have taken. Maybe a successor to this is Aleksei Fedorchenko's First on the Moon - a mockumentary. (Lutsik's Outskirts also relies in another way on Soviet classics of the 1930s to comment on the 1990s). The retelling of Soviet history regrettably, though, has produced a new layer of lakirovka in films like Burnt by the Sun, The Thief, Father. Sokurov's Russian Ark and its retelling of history, though relying on artistic experimentation and dialogic tropes still appears the culmination of this new mythologization of Russian history.

The voice of Kovalov and others, though obviously unlikely to garner popular enthusiasm, should have more critical attention directed to their further experiments in montage and demythologization of history. It is also regrettable that more critical attention hasn't been paid to Gherman's Khrustalev, mashinu which, undoubtedly, matches and surpasses (to my mind) the aesthetic novelty of Sokurov's films.

The Soviet Sport Film (some hidden gems)

2009-11-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a new history of Russian cinema written by Birgit Beumers (probably the most active writer on Russian cinema in the UK today, along with Julian Graffy). Well her book is one of the few which try to look at the whole history of Russian (and to some extent Soviet film from its inception). An unenviable task as the years to the death of Stalin are unforgettably and brilliantly captured in the classic account 'Kino' by Jay Leyda. Single periods and genres are also brilliantly written about and a whole host of new readings are available. The immense scholarship behind the Russian 'Kinovedcheskie Zapiski' journal including giants like Evgeny Margolit, Naum Kleiman and the late Neya Zorkaya means that a new version covering the whole of Russian cinematic history is long overdue. Well I expect to expand on the virtues and shortcomings of this new history in weeks to come but my first impressions are coloured by films that Beumers hasn't mentioned. My first gripe is that she has completely neglected a few classics of Stalinist cinema - Room's 'A Strict Youth', Kuleshov's 'The Great Consoler' and Barnet's 'By the Bluest of Seas' are not given a single mention between them.

Moreover, her account of Klimov's films neglects his 'Sport, Sport, Sport'. Since I spent a month or two last year watching the film about ten times to translate the film and then help to insert the subtitles I think that this is one of the most neglected and more fascinating films that need to be rehabilitated. The film director, Aleksander Sokurov, has spoken of how he feels this to have some truly unique features that surprise him more than Klimov's much better known 'Come and See'. As last year I spent some time trying to research Soviet sports films I feel that there are a few more gems to come in this completely under-reserached region of Soviet film (even in Russia it is genuinely difficult to unearth scholarship about this genre of film). Anyway apart from 'Sport, Sport, Sport' there are potentially some fascinating films from the 1920s dedicated to fizkultura and one dedicated to the 1929 Spartakiad. Yutkevich made a film in 1946 that was fulsomely praised by Matisse (but is simply ignored by scholarhsip). Many films were shot in the 1970s (to be honest amidst a lot of dross especially by Victor Sadovsky all of whose films were sports films and, alas, rather poor and conventional ones) but there were some really curious films like 'Girl with a pony-tail' and 'The new girl' which deserve some scholarly attention.

However, it is Klimov's film which stands as one of the very central films in this genre. A documentary film with fantastic elements it is as much an experiment in style and pivotal in Klimov's move from comedy to tragedy. Sport seen like in this film has rarely been seen before or since. Maybe a flawed masterpiece (Klimov was highly critical of it) yet it has enough of a unique vision for it to merit mention in a history of Russian cinema.

The latest saga of Mikhalkovshchina

2009-11-08T02:58:00.000-08:00

According to the blog of film critic Andrei Shemyakin (http://shemyakins.livejournal.com/) a new purge in the Russian cinematic world has taken place. Filmmakers like Aleksandr Sokurov and Vadim Abdrashitov, the producer Aleksandr Rodnyansky and the editor of Russia's foremost monthly cinema journal 'Iskusstvo Kino' Danil Dondurei have all been removed from the State Cinema Council. The story of Russia cinema's travails in the past few years is a long and tedious one but there seems a number of constants: an attempt to build a vertical of power under Nikita Mikhalkov and an attempt to push a 'national-patriotic' agenda. In the past year these trends have led to a full-scale conflict (bursting into the public arena in the struggle over the rival Cinematographers Union congresses) and now a purging of critical voices. The campaign against Marlen Khutsiev was taken to sickening lengths this spring even excluding him from posts he held at VGIK (the State Cinema School). Now it appears that this is going further with the removal of others who have been critical of the present reign of Mikhalkovshchina. Shemayakin denominates the new elite around Mikhalkov (mainly a group of lesser figures in the cinema world and of bureaucrats close to the political elite) as a cinemenklatura. This, unfortunately, is likely to be a story that will run and run.

Eisenstein's Immoral Memories

2009-11-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

Have just finished Eisenstein's Immoral Memories. I believe that this is not the full edition of his memoirs but there are nonetheless some wonderful sequences. Herbert Marshall's introduction and some of his notes do tend to reflect a Cold War prism of thinking but it is a delight to read Eisenstein whose style of writing obeys a personal logic and is nowhere pervaded by the logic of public Socialist Realist rhetoric.

Eisenstein returns again and again to his memories of Meyerhold in these memoirs and these were written at the height of the Stalin period when no rehabilitation of Meyerhold was in site. The writing style is impish, fresh and delightfully eclectic.

His account of many of his meetings are gems in themselves and for me the meeting with Joyce held a great interest. His realization only at the end of the evening that he had met with someone who was more or less blind. His accounts of his time in France and his problems with the French authorities who wanted to extradite him are also often very amusing.
He describes many of his ideas about montage, intellectual cinema and the use of colour. Reading this account of his life it is astounding too how many film projects that Eisenstein worked on throughout (projects that were never completed). They runs in their tens - Sutter's Gold, An American Tragedy, a film on Pushkin (based on the book by Tynyanov, a film on Toussaint L'Ouverture and so on). Truly a renaissance man in all his multiple passions and interests. I realize that I have only begun to glimpse the depths of the world of Eisenstein. (Recently I read Bordwell's 'The Cinema of Eisenstein- an excellent introduction, probably the best in English, which it is necessary to return to again and again). Too few of Naum Kleiman's writings on Eisenstein are available in translation. A real pity for Kleiman is the very best of Eisenstein scholars.

Kira Muratova - 75 yesterday.

2009-11-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

One day late but Ukraine's greatest living director had her 75th birthday yesterday. For those who managed to catch her new film 'Melody for a street organ' (or for those who can go and watch the film at London's Apollo cinema tomorrow) they will understand the greatness of this film director. Her film 'The Asthenic Syndrome' is the film of the glasnost period and 'Melody of a Street Organ', I believe, equals this film in its impact on the viewer. She is the great formalist director of contemporary Russian film (well, yes Ukraine's greatest living director who is better described as a Russian film maker- a bit complicated, I suppose). Her films merit the characterisation of a powerful Kino Fist that Eisenstein gave to his idea of cinema (maybe Gherman's 'Khrustalev, mashinu' comes into this category, too). A retrospective of her films in the UK and elsewhere is surely merited.

Musei Kino

2009-11-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

How can one write about Russian or Soviet film without mentioning the name of Naum Kleiman and remembering the days when the Cinema Museum (Musei Kino) had its own building near Krasnopresenskaya metro? The story of its closure (although it is running a small operation at the Central House of Artists) is, perhaps, one of the saddest indications of the sickening maneouvres by 'cultural' representatives of the 'national-patriotic' elite like Nikita Mikhalkov. (However, I do not intend to write a blog on the machinations of this rather unsavoury character: undoubtedly a talented director but a deeply unpleasant person when it comes to the story of the Cinema Museum and as well as his recent machinations at the Union of Cinematographers and clash with Marlen Khutsiev).

Musei Kino's director, Naum Kleiman, has been compared to Henri Langlois, the man at the head of Cinemateque Francaise for many years. In many ways justly. I remember spending sometimes six days a week at the Musei Kino and the four screens showed films from the entire history of world cinema. It was a film education greater than I could get anywhere else. I spent the first year watching all the world classics that I had not managed to see and then concentrated on Soviet cinema. I remember falling in love with Soviet film after a viewing of 'The Extraordinary of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks'. Without Musei Kino I would have known nothing of Otar Ioseliani, Boris Barnet, Vasili Shukshin, Kira Muratova, Abram Room, Aleksandr Medvedkin, Marlen Khutsiev, Elem Klimov, Mikhail Kalatozov, FEKS... well, the list is endless. I would also have missed out on the Master Class of the Dardenne Brothers, Istvan Szabo, not have met Shavkat Abdusalamov and not have watched on a large screen the full opus of Fassbinder, Bertolucci, Godard or Bresson.

This building was truly a second home for me in Moscow and I still mourn its loss. Hopefully one day a new Cinema Museum will open and Naum Kleiman will be there to direct it. A vain hope? Let's hope not.

For those who read Russian here is the website address ( www.museikino.ru )dedicated to this most venerable of institutions. A rebuilt Cinema Museum with Naum Kleiman at its helm would signify that one could breathe more freely in contemporary Russia.

Irakli Kvirikvadze & the battle of the Fellinists and the Antonionists

2009-11-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

The great racconteur of Georgian cinema is, of course, Irakli Kvirikvadze who made The Swimmer and a Georgian version of Pirandello's The Jar. He is famous for his extremely tall stories. The only attitude to a Kvirikadze story is 'Se non e' vero, e' ben trovato...' (Even if it's not true, it's a great story). Well reading last spring his interview with Larisa Maliukova last summer on a dirty elektrichka from Zhelezka to Moscow was a supreme delight. I just loved his tale of the champagne fight at VGIK one New Year between Fellinists and Antonionists. Here is my (poor) translation and the original in Russian below:

I was in love with Fellini. At that time our cinema gods were Fellini and Antonioni. In VGIK there was a sharp dividing line between Fellinists and Antonionists. My close friend Soso Chkheidze was an Antonionist. On the fifth floor of the halls of residence one New Year there began one hell of a battle at 3 o' clock in the morning. Champagne bottles flew everywhere. To my mind the Fellinists came out on top.

Я был влюблен в Феллини. В ту пору нашими кинобогами были Феллини и Антониони. Во ВГИКе возник жесткий водораздел между феллинистами и антонионистами. Мой близкий друг Сосо Чхеидзе был антонионистом. В Новый год в общежитии на пятом этаже часа в три ночи началось эпохальное сражение. Бутылки от шампанского летели во все стороны. По-моему, феллинисты победили.

Which Russia is Real? (A Discussion)

2009-11-05T10:59:00.001-08:00

Yesterday (November 4th) as part of the 3rd Russian Film Festival in London there was a discussion with the title 'Which Russia is Real?' in which the directors Pavel Bardin(left) Vitali Mansky and the film critic Andrei Plakhov (right) were present as were a number of other British documentarists and media personalities including Teresa Cherfas who produced the Jonathan Dimbleby Russia series and the former BBC correspondent Bridget Kendall. Well, the discussion was a bit of a mish-mash. What were they looking at? Documentary film, the vision of Russia in the West, the view of Russia in Russia, the view of Britain for a Russian film critic, which are the best documentary films of Russia, should films give a positive image of Russia (the Positive Hero replaced by the Positive Image?) as well as some discussion of the film Russia 88 and of the vicissitudes of it and Mansky's film 'The Revolution that Wasn't' in Russia itself. Oh, and the question of censorship and freedom. In short themes that could have taken a whole evening to get through. The proliferation of themes meant that none were discussed and thrashed out till they produced some completely new thinking but I left the meeting feeling that enough hints were given in new directions that one could start thinking about this subject in some new way and yes it was great to see and hear some words from critics like Plakhov and directors like Mansky and Bardin. Some of the British speakers left me less impressed although there was an interesting account by the director of a documentary school of an exchange programme between VGIK documentary studios and his school, and how the students were able to find new images of the respective countries that they visited.

Andrei Plakhov in answering the question 'Which Russia is Real?' tried to question about 'Which Britain is Real?'. Being a film critic prior to coming to the UK he had an image of Britain and London as rather like a Ken Loach / Mike Leigh film - he mentioned the film Naked and recounted how this image changed after visits here. Then mention was made of the fact that films which had success abroad in Russia inevitably come under the charge of films being made for export. Of course, there then comes the call for the Positive Image of Russia which one member of the audience made (although in a slightly different context). Naturally, the Positive Image being manufactured on Russia's state channels or on Russia Today was heavily criticised especially by the two documentary filmmakers (both critical intellectuals who have been on Ekho Moskvy a number of times). Pavel Bardin made the comment that people in Russia were in danger of having their view of reality over-determined by State Television so they will one day start actually believing the television image rather than their own eyes. Mansky then told the audience of his watching Turkmeni television and described how this kind of lakirovka is only possible in a country with concentration camps. To the question of having a more positive image of Russia they replied that making an excellently made film even if it is about prostitution is a way of creating a positive image by showing foreign audiences that Russia can make great films (and Plakhov cited the case of how Aki Kaurismaki was criticised at first for making a bad image of Finland but then became a kind of national hero for making Finland so well known). Well, I suppose the context is all important and that what these directors were saying would be said by all critical filmmakers.

An interesting point was made about the different traditions of socially critical filmmaking in Russia and Britain. Maybe the question was erroneously made to Bridget Kendall but it was, I feel, one of the questions that pointed to a way out of a vicious circle and over labouring the point of justifying the right of challenging false images. Here was a new idea that Russia and Britain may have different cultural traditions of social criticism in filmmaking and a lot could have been said about this, although there was, alas, no one to talk about this for none had their lives so steeply emmerged in both cultures (maybe one should have tried to cajole an argument out from the excellent translator of the meeting).

A question from the floor as to why Pavel Bardin chose the genre of mockumentary for his film 'Russia 88' could also have led to some new explorations of the genre. Bardin explained that it was a genre that he had long contemplated using (even before deciding about the subject of his film) and explained that he thought there were merits in reaching a wider public (were it not for the fact that his film hadn't been given a certficate but is doing fine on the internet and is selling many pirated copies). In retrospect it is hard to call Russia 88 a mockumentary- it is a kind of fusion. Maybe the most authentic mockumentary made in recent years in Russia was 'First on the Moon' - a very interesting film that would have led to some fascinating viewpoints on history and myth.

Pavel Bardin mentioned the many problems his film has had with bureaucracy and doesn't think it will ever be shown on Russian TV but the film has been shown at meetings which involved widely differing audiences (from decision-makers 100 meters from the Kremlin to antifa and National Bolshevik activists in Barnaul) and their reaction to the film according to Bardin has been completely 'adequate'. My memory of this spring/summer when his film came out in pirated editions in the streets of Moscow is that the film was definitely being pushed by the sellers (although not sure if their reaction to the film can be seen as completely 'adequate').

Vitali Mansky in describing the censorship situation used the example of how his film had not been shown even at the Documentary Film festival. A portrait of Russia's opposition his film was not so much the victim of censorship but of self-censorship in which festival directors and TV programmers are not even willing to try and get the agreement from some bureaucrat but are trying to grasp what their reaction might be. The bureaucrats or potential censors are actually more liberal than these frightened little lesser bureaucrats.

Someone from the floor asked whether freedom in this country was any greater than that in Russia to which Teresa Cherfas suggested that this was a deeply pernicious way of seeing things. Well, this question always arises in some form or another and this slightly moralistic reply also arises (allusions to murdered journalists). The problem is that this discussion - whose freedom is greater? - is, it seems, very much a red herring theme. The more interesting problem is to discover what is the real, everyday situation of censorship and the unsaid. What are the taboos? (Mansky suggested that Putin's daughter is one such taboo in Russia detailing how he spent a very long time just trying to get a shot of them from behind in a documentary he made on Putin). There are obviously both parallels and differences and, perhaps, it would be more productive to tease out what these are in a more calm, unhysterical and less polemical way. Yet this obviously is not a way that people are encouraged to discuss this question.

Alas, although Jeremy Hicks was present there was no significant discussion of the history of Rusian and Soviet documentary film. A missed opportunity. All in all though, it was a discusion that led to some unanswered but highly interesting pointers to possible new angles on documentary films and the image of a country. The meeting was very well attended for an event of this kind with most seats being occupied and the discussion didn't lag. A good chance to get to reflect on this question from many new angles.

Boris Barnet and the hidden classics of Russian Cinema

2009-11-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

This blog aims to be devoted to Russian and Soviet film from its inception. The point is to make available material, to add comments on contemporary film, to comment on articles and books and recent news linked to Russian film. There is one subject that I will return to time after time: trying to publicize those classics of Soviet film who I feel should be remembered. Boris Barnet for me is the ultimate 'forgotten' classic film-maker and as I've started to write about him he will, most definitely, be a subject that this blog will return to often. At the moment I'll just leave this wonderful shot of 'At the Bluest of Seas' - one of the greatest films of the Stalin period. A film which represents joy and desire and ignores ideology and exhortation. There is a beautiful reading of the film: a video commentary by Nicole Brenez (available on youtube). Barnet, however, is only one of the many names that will appear in this blog. Names like Shepitko, Klimov, Khutsiev, Shukshin, Protazanov, Perestiani that may not have the resonance that Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Tarkovsky have in the cinematic community but which are deserving of being remembered and rediscovered by all who call themselves film buffs.

2009-11-03T14:44:00.000-08:00