Six Musicians and the City- the Return of the Southern Gaze.

This evening in London at Pushkin House - May 14th - there will be a unique opportunity to see Tatiana Daniliyants' extraordinary film about Yerevan through the eyes of six of the city's most accomplished musicians. An occasion not to be missed. As I tried to argue in an article for Desist Film (in September 2017) the film represents a rare strand of documentary in Russian film. A city glance with a lightness of touch that both Khutsiev and Danelija (now both recently departed) had but few have held since. Hoping that people in London will take the opportunity to go to see this film. 

         Amongst Russian documentary filmmakers there is arguably only one, Tatiana Daniliyants, who restores a vivid and lucid anthropological glance on the city. Not the city of Moscow (although a very early, and very rarely shown, film of hers ‘U’ did feature that city) but ‘southern cities’. If Venice was pictured through the labour of its artisans and craftsmen in her Venice Afloat, then Yerevan comes alive through music or, more precisely, through musicians (one of whom with a certain amount of irony, given Armenia’s landlocked status, named his band The Armenian Naval Orchestra). This symbiosis captured between a city and the labour or the voice of its inhabitants means that Daniliyants’ films are not city films in the conventional sense of the city symphony film but a film about the lived in and the living, breathing city. This is something rather unusual in Russian documentaries which, more often than not, demonstrate a preference for either individual portraits, taut psychological explorations of inner worlds, or will explore a milieu without linking them to any wider sense of the topography of this milieu. Private, inner spaces are all too rarely opened up into broader civic spaces. Fortunately, Tatiana Daniliyants represents a noble exception by rescuing the viewer from that claustrophobia of these rigid psychological portraits and instead placing her protagonists very much within the cityscape.    

       Danilyants’ latest film – Six Musicians and a City- is an exceptionally successful representation of place. Not place alone, but place and destiny, place and history as some extraordinary chronical footage demonstrates. Central to the film is the image of a city recovering, overcoming the trauma of earthquakes, wars, blockades and near famine of the late 1980s and early 1990s (as well as the genocide of a century ago). A film dedicated to physical survival and the survival of voices, the endurance of history and culture. Moreover, the city is present in many guises: the centre and the periphery, the city as memory, the city as architectural and cultural history, the city as nature, the city as coincidental meeting place, the city as fleeting impressions as well as its bar and club life, the city as one imbued simultaneously with nostalgia and a forward-looking drive. All this is the backdrop to the six musicians ‘tour’ of Yerevan. For a documentary filmmaker choosing six protagonists could well be a risky strategy but here it is a winning strategy precisely because of their diverse ways of illuminating the city and how they are themselves reflected in the topography.

        The six musicians come from different generations, have different musical styles and reveal different Yerevans. So, for example, Arto Tuncboyaciyan the avantgarde folk musician and leader of the ‘Armenian Navy Band’ reveals to the viewer his origins as an Armenian singer in Turkey and the influence that growing up there had on his music. Though his links to the city and even to the Armenian language are more tenuous than others, he, interestingly, reveals most powerfully a sense of what the survival of Armenian culture meant in adverse situations.  Indeed, the very concept behind the naming of his band along with his explanations of his music as an outlet of his situation in the exclusionary reality of Turkey places his music as an articulation of the universal moment of Armenian culture.  Which is not to say that the other musicians were any less international. Malkhas, a jazz player and festival organiser and a wonderful racconteur, along with Forsh, a bard and a composer both ‘made it’ internationally (whether in the United States or Argentina), revealing the ease with which Armenian culture travels internationally and, given their return to their native land and contribution to Yerevan, this hints at how the role of the emigrant in Armenian culture seems less dramatic than that of one in, say, Russian culture. The duduk player, Jivan Gaspariyan, also an international traveller with his music, represents perhaps the most traditionalist musician and holds the most nostalgic glance on the city. Yet he, even with his memories of the city (imbued as they are with a melancholic nostalgia for a smaller, bygone Yerevan) does not dismiss the contemporary, larger Yerevan. One of the most extraordinary portraits is of the bard Lilith Pipoyan who finds inspiration in many different eras of Armenian musical and poetic history and illuminates not just those times but also presents us both the Soviet and the peripheral Yerevan alongside a Yerevan based in its milennial history. Grandiose Soviet distilleries appear alongside the ancient Yerevan fortress while then later being shown peripheral Yerevan’s Constructivist buildings. It is the youngest musician, Michael Voskanyan, an ethno-jazz musician playing the ‘Tar’ instrument, who represents the youngest generation of musicians. Interestingly his choosen spaces are the least ‘city-like’ of all: Voskanyan finds shelter in those green, natural spaces still present in Yerevan.

       While all epochs of Armenian history are represented here, it is the trauma of the late eighties and early nineties which plays a central role in the film.  Through different generational perspectives (those who lived through it as adults and those only recently born at the time) as well as through different optics – at times tragic, mournful backdrops which are also sometimes lightened with romantic anecdotal memories such as Malkash’s tale of his traipse through Yerevan on a gloomy and murky early winter morning to be greeted with a rumka of vodka at the currency exchange kiosk. Each account of the nineties – that ‘lost time’ for Armenia – is accompanied by found footage of the time (and this is one of those extra layers of the film that makes it such a rich and rewarding viewing experience), contrasting it with contemporary Yerevan shown in all its splendour, managing to avoid glamour but clearly demonstrating a love for its aesthetic beauty. Notes of criticism or a restrained sadness about Yerevan’s transformation are heard – Malkash’s story of the transformation of the Kopeechka bar into Martini as well as Jivan Gasparyan’s comment that Yerevan has become more a city of businessmen than of artists: though this is not a film that dismisses the transformation. Far from it, as scenes later in the film show, for example, we are impressed by Malkash’s stories about his own contribution to a recent cultural renaissance in the Yerevan jazz scene and the touching scene of Gasparyan walking around the city with his son.

         

Tatiana Daniliyants’ extraordinary film is witness to the individuality of her gaze in the Russian documentary scene. A conglomeration of geographical influences: she is of Armenian descent but then has been connected for many years with Venice, her childhood was spent in Algeria and she has often worked alongside Polish cinematic maitres. All this may partially account for this opening up of cityscapes, and her unique ability to re-explore the civic without the more rigid psychological tautness that accompanies much of the ‘Russian school of documentary filmmaking’.  The film is as such a testament, too, to the vibrancy of Armenian culture (it is, indeed, such an indelible presence in Russian culture, too, one can roll off the names of Valery Brusov, Andrey Bely, Osip Mandelstham, Vassily Grossman and Andrey Bitov as an indicator of how much Armenia has meant to Russian cultural figures). Indeed, for Daniliyants, one could argue that the conduit (her own ‘naval ship’ if we are to think of Arto Tuncboyaciyan’s prescient and pregnant metaphor) was that truly monumental Armenian figure of Soviet cinema, Sergo Parajanov whose visit to Venice was the subject of an extraordinary recent exhibition of Daniliyants’ art work and of a small film of hers. The Parajanov whose photo hangs along with those of that extraordinary actor Frunzik Mkurtichyan and others in the Martini bar appearing at the beginning of the film- part of that great conglomeration of Armenian artistic figures who at the beginning of the film are the subject of Malkash’s recollections and nostalgia. Let’s hope that Moscow will get this treatment some day (whether in documentary or in feature films): a city glance with a lightness of touch rarely seen since the 1960s and, coincidentally, it was southerners back then, like those great recently departed Marlen Khutsiev and Georgij Danelija who managed this in such memorable films as Walking the Streets of Moscow, Ilich gate and July Rain.

Exploring Captivity: Some films to look out for at this year's DOKer Festival

DOKer is taking place in April this year and the opening film will be shown this evening (April 13th). A festival which sees a refocus back on films from closer to home- instead of the one or two films being from Russia or Russian-themed this year there are several as well as other films from its near abroad or at least from Central and Eadtern Europe. This though hasn't meant that the type and quality of film has been decisively different. Indeed as regards quality one can safely say that the festival is going from strength to strength. Here's an initial list of films that I'd recommend that viewers should definitely not miss.

One of the most accomplished films visually and its ability to enthrall the viewer with an impressive narrative drive is Emmauel Gras's Makala. Gras manages to link together many seemingly disparate threads- the almost total lack of dialogue, the superb painterly frames and an attention to the physiognomic grandeur of the protagonist whose Sisyphean tale of backbreaking labour for little return provides both the mythological and social backdrop to this stunning film. There is little surprise that the film went to Cannes and has already received enormous attention and acclaim from film critics. The church scene at the end of the film is a powerful adjunct, almost offering a visual depiction of sociological processes- the isolation of the protagonist and the extraordinary spatial dynamics of this scene give us more than a hint as to the social and metaphysical mythology of the film. This slow-burning but gripping tale of a modern-tale Job mesemerizes the viewer in a way that only the best cinema can do.

The film Makala in many ways prefigures two of the dominant themes of the festivals: one minor and another more major theme which runs through most of the festival films. The minor theme- that of the journey- is most explicitly explored in The Fifth Sun, a film by Cristiana Pecci and Matteo Maggi. At least explicitly because towards the end of the film its explicit theme is overturned in a masterful way by the protagonist. This seemingly straightforward exploration of wanderlust then becomes thrown into absolute chaos by its protagionist. But what could destroy the film only makes it stronger by then becoming a film that questions its own purpose and, more important, raises a reflexive question about the role of the filmmakers. Involuntarily, it seems, the filmmakers are forced to ask themsleves whether or nor they are the real hostage takers?

The filmmaker of A Woman Captured, Bernadett Tuza-Ritter wants to give another answer to this question and, indeed in the cirscumstances of the film, it would seem hard to excuse any other behaviour. Learning that her documentary protagonist is, in fact, literally a slave to her 'employer', an invisible, but unpleasantly audible, middle class tyrant who forces 'Marish' into back-breaking work and finding every possible schema to extort money from her (even the documentary filmmaker must pay this contemporary matriarchal slave merchant for the ability to film her servant). Tuza-Ritter decides that recording this situation is not enough and helps the protagonist set in train the conditions for liberation. Thus giving the filmmaker a role directly opposed to that which seems to be present in The Fifth Sun. It has often been one of the central concerns of Russian filmmakers, most accepting their role as non-interveners and some, like Dvortsevoy, because of this constraint abandoning documentary film. Tuza-Ritter's intervention seems hard to argue with and does make for memorable cinema.

Another portrait of captivity and is that of Till Schauder's When God Sleeps which is, in many ways, a conventional portrait of a hostage of the 'Salman Rushdie of Rap', Shahin Najafi. The filmmaker here observes and it is the protagonists willpower and refusal of submission that finds the way of liberation by refusing to fully submit to the web of fear that Iranian authorities want to weave around him and his group. The filmmaker adds all the context one would expect but one is intrigued by a number of the strands going through the film. One os the singer's relationship with a daughter of one of Iran's conservative elite and another is the singer's engagement with the refugee issue. So it soon becomes clear that the film doesn't play solely to a discourse of the 'danger of Islam' but to a much wider one of the danger of an all encompassing captivity.

DOKer's opening film tonight (April 13th), Over the Limit, is one which has impressed many documentary festivals and should undoubtedly have a wide resonance beyond the festival circuit. The Polish filmmaker, Marta Prus, having been a member of a rhythm gymnastics sports club certainly managed to lend this film a great force in revealing the dynamics of the almost unbearable relationship between Russian gymnast, Rita Mamun and her trainers who explicitly see in her not a human being but simply an athlete. The behaviour of the 'bad cop', Irina Viner-Usmanova, is revealed as a systematic pattern of humiliation. Given Viner-Usmanova's place in Russian society (married to one of the country's richest oligarchs) this could be seen as a powerful indictment of more than just the narrow sphere of rhythm gymnastics. However, like many of the other protaginists in the documentary films there is a coda once again stating that, here too, the protagonist finally released herself from the grip of her captors. The physical backdrop of the film may be unchanging although the beauty of the gymnasts flights in air is very well-captured, but the film as a whole is held together by the claustrophobic psychological dymanics of trainer-gymnast relationship and the powerful drama that this releases.

Jackal Stories once again proves that Argentinian docmentary has so much to offer its Russian colleagues. In many ways it seems to offer some polar opposite or at least this is the impression gained from those Argentinian films shown in Russian documentary festivals. The hynoptic Chechen Family by Martin Sola' pointed the way to a totally original way of filming Chechnya and almost literally froze the Russian audience when it was shown a few years ago. Now Martin Farina's experimental film can also be expected to astound the Russian audience with its way of building on a family archive footage in a way that is so much more anarchic than Russian filmmakers have hitherto managed to do. If Mansky's Private Chronicles is accompanied by Mansky's customary commentary, Farina's films cnsists in a magnificent series of experiments in genres and styles, eluding the controlling authorial voice. By backgrounding what a Russian documentarist may foreground and undermining the cinematic borders that haven't been called into question so much on Russian documentary makes this perhaps the most experimental work of the festival and hopefully will prick the curiosity of Russian filmmakers searching for a way out of dominant and domineering constraints. Latin American film had hitherto been well-represented at DOKer Festivals- this time it is the only film from that area of the world. Most definitively a film not to be missed.

Anastasia Miroshnichenko's film Debut continues with the theme of captivity and escape in an almost literal way given that it is set in a Belarussian female penal colony. The inmates are preparing to put on a play at the local theatre. This allows the filmmaker to delve into the individual biographies of the women. Through their work on the rehearsals and through their reactions to the play we learn more than we would otherwise in a more straightforward 'social documentary' precisely because their part in the play is also their chance to reveal their own personal dramas. Miroshnichenko also captures brilliantly and visually routine everyday prison life at the colony. She masterfully avoids the pitfalls of a cinema of pure denunciation as well as those of a feel good movie.

Other films to watch out for are Balint Revesz's Granny Project, an integenerational exploration of memory and the process of it being recounted between generations. Between revelation and reticence the viewer explores the gaps both between and among generations. Here too the protagonists are captives of, in that Joycean phrase, 'of a nightmare from which (we) are trying to awake'. The captive of this film is the young pre-adolescent Alicia who is caught in a web of institutional logic after abandonment by her mother. The Dutch director, Maasja Ooms, would be best known to the Russian film conoisseur as the cinematographer of what is probably the best cinematographic portrait of a literary figure of recent years, namely Aliona von der Horst's exploration of the life and surroundings of Urals poet, Boris Rhyzy. It is said that Chinese documentary film is one of the world's best unkept secrets and Wang Yang's film Weaving certainly gives some hope that this may be the case. Not a film for those seeking spectacle, this intricate film centres on the demolition of a town and a factory associated with the early years of Mao's rule, this film follows two families and the effect of this demolition. It captures both the intimate struggles and the quarrels over inheritance and the strained family relations in general as well as the gradual story of the demolition of homes and factory. The web being weaved here is that of the inexorable logic of property development and Chinese capitalism. Alas, here there is no flight from captivity other than the banishment decreed by the inhumane and incessant logic of property development itself.

Russian Documentaries at Pushkin House.

Victoria Lomasko and her graphic documentary drawings.

In early May Pushkin House (the major Russian cultural centre in London) will be showing two Russian documentaries in what will hopefully be a rolling programme of documentary films shown there (and hopefully in a host of other centres both in and outside of London). The first two films to be shown in early May are included as part of the excellent exhibition of Victoria Lomasko's graphic documentary reportage which describes a whole host of rarely reported (or in some cases completely unreported) stories of contemporary Russia. The Lomasko exhibition is therefore one of the rare opportunities to start to grasp a real Russia from which one can slowly piece together an entirely different picture of today's Russia. Far from the headlines of spy scandals and geopolitical intrigue, Lomasko foregrounds the voices of those roundly ignored by all. And indeed the first two documentaries to be shown at Pushkin House reflect some of these subject matter and stories which Lomasko worked on.

Poster for Anna Moiseenko's 'Songs of Abdul'

On Wednesday May 2nd Anna Moiseenko's film Songs of Abdul will be shown. Moiseenko, a student of Russia's most indefitagible pedagogue of documentary cinema formation and an impressive filmmaker in her own right (Marina Razbezhkina), has suceeded in this fascinating portrait of Abdulmamad Bekmamadov in a number of extraordinary ways of portraying the protagonist which illuminates the very social fabric of contemporary Russia. Often Russian documentaries concentrate on individual protagonists within their social sphere or in some cases they branch out towards collective portraits (some particulary fine examples focusing on collective subject matter was Daria Khlestkina's The Last Limousine and some of Alina Rudnitskaya's documentaries also manage to go beyond this whether through her emphasis on both social institutions [the abortion clinic, the civil registry office] and the work collective [Catastrophe] or both [Blood]). Moiseenko, however, while moving from a collective tale (in her first major work she depicts life in a commune trying to restore a Soviet like utopianism in her feature-length debut SPARTA: The Territory of Happiness) to this more individual portrait of Abdul, a migrant from the Pamir Mountains, she manages to portray the interweaving realities that Abdul negotiates and so, more thoroughly reveal social realities. For Abdul's life holds within it widely differing social realities. A migrant dependent on low-skilled jobs for survival (and subject to many of the harsh realities of that Central Asian migrants face in Moscow) he is also a bard and much of the film consists of the songs that emerge and that relate his everyday tribulations. Abdul's life therefore is not so much narrated by the filmmaker but self-narrated through his songs. It is worth noting that it was very much thanks to one of the most extraordinary figures of contemporary Russian theatre, Mikhail Ugarov, (who sadly has recently passed away) that such a film eventually got made. For without Ugarov and Gremina's wonderful teatr.doc which opened up Russian drama to real contemporary stories and people, Moiseenko may never have got to meet the extraordinary protagonist of the film whose show was put on there. For those who do get to see Anna Moiseenko's film at Pushkin House there are many splendid moments in the film. One of my favourite scenes is Abdul at the Golden Mask award ceremonies, to me it is a wonderful depiction of contemporary Russian society replete with an undertone of Gogolesque comedy. The film itself has become something of a catalyst for further events. Last summer a massively attended festival of Pamir culture was organised along with a showing of the film. Something that may be repeated soon with the organisers extending this to include other Central Asian cultures.

The protagonist of Moiseenko's 'Songs of Abdul' (Abdulmamad Bekmamadov)

The other film which Pushkin House is showing in early May is Konstantin Selin's Chronicles of a Revolution That Didn't Happen.  Konstantin Selin's is another piece of Russian reality that has rarely been reported either by the international or the mainstream media. Selin's film on the long-distance truckers strike in Russia rarely made it to the international media (or even to the Russian mainstream media). [It was only thanks to admirable sites such as opendemocracy ru and the Russian Reader that the story did get out at all]. Yet it was an extraordinarily story. One brilliantly captured by Victoria Lomasko's graphic drawings and also by this film. A film which recounts the long strike that Russian truckers participated in and their growing political consciousness gained through their self-organisation and their experience of repression once their first timid moves of protest were rebuffed and the reality of the state corporate system of corruption was made clear to them in no uncertain terms. Selin's film follows the protagonists and reveals more about the present state of Russia than one could possibly gean from the media. The emergence and struggles of independent trade unions in post-Soviet Russian is not an entirely new subject for contemporary Russia cinema (Svetlana Baskova made an admirable feature film For Marx which went to the Berlin Film Festival and was based on her earlier documentary on independent trade unions) but it is certainly a real rarity to be able to watch such a film in the UK.

Chronicles of a Revvolution That Didn't Happen.

From Moscow's Central Cultural Venue to Mausoleum: The Sad Decline of its Cinema Museum.

Just after it was opened one evening I took a trip to the VDNKh exhibition centre in Moscow to then make my way to the Cinema Museum. Informed by the information desk that this would involve a forty minute walk I set out in the vague direction they told me. Given my melancholic mood full of  nostalgic memories of what the old Cinema Museum in Krasnopresnenskaya used to be like, this October evening walk in this hyper Stalinist environment gave me the sense that I was walking through the set of a horror film. The walk was shorter than expected and after about twenty minutes I found myself at the entrance of the building pictured above.

Russia's Culture Ministry had long starved the previous museum team of any resources for the construction of what, given Russia's cinematic history and the immense archives that it holds, surely had the potential of being one of the greatest cinema museums in the world. One of the chief culprits in this horror movie of a story, is Vladimir Medinsky, with his dodgy PhD, who, after marginalising an equipe full of talent and with an excellent global reputation, ensured that a team headed by those who could be counted on to reflect his strategy of 'patriotic revanche' in the area of culture was in place before construction would begin on the new building of the Cinema Museum.

Although the news of the re-opening of the Museum this Autumn had been broadcast on a number of national television channels and much was made of it, the amount of people walking around the museum while I was there (the day after the official opening) was never more than four or five. Partly a reflection of the inconvenient location of the building but undoubtedly, too, a reflection of the sheer lack of excitement that this re-opening has been greeted by Russia's cine enthusiasts. There's no doubt that considerable money was put into this venture along with major institutional support once the 'right people' were in charge. The guests at the official opening (Culture Minister Medinsky, Moscow Mayor Sobianin and directors Mikhalkov and Khotinenko) meant that this was meant to be their moment, the moment of this conservative clique of exorcists and demolition men. They had wrested their hands on an institution that in the 1990s and the first five years of the 21st Century daily brought many hundreds to trudge up various flights of stairs and watch and often discuss films for hours afterwards. An institution that had once trul been at the very centre of cultural life in Moscow. Alas in October 2017, however, in spite of a brand new custom-built building, one couldn't help having the feeling that one was walking through a mausoleum, if not a morgue, rather than any vital cultural venue.

A distorted narrative bandied about by the new team, for example, that the old Cinema Museum hadn't exhibited any of its massive archive in the building in Krasnopresnenskaya (a falsehood once again repeated in a recent interview by Solonitsyna on the TV station Moskva 24) or that the conception of the museum was for a 'small group of film scholars and not for the people' was contrived by them to justify their ludicrous usurpation of this Museum. The idea that the old Cinema Museum never exhibited is risible and belied by the video below of the visit by Quentin Tarantino to the Museum during the Moscow Film Festival in the early 2000s (an exhibition by the way which was open to all that summer at the Cinema Museum):

Given the lavish financial riches that the authorities have clearly given to Solonitsyna, one finally has the chance to see what she has done with this new venue.The space afforded now would surely, in theory, permit world class exhibitions and impress a national and international public given just how rich the material in their possession actually is. Unfortunately, even this large space given Solonitsyna et al has been very poorly handled. One large space was given over to hanging portraits of Soviet actors as though they were members of a 1970s Politbureau. Two dozen or so large photos confront the museum goer as he or she walks through nonplussed as what all this is supposed to bring to their museum experience. This plethora of portraits is fine, say, at the Iluzion Cinema where one could gaze at the photos on the wall of actors throughout the epochs and (unlike in Solonitsyna's Cinema Museum) from all parts of the world while sitting in the cafe. But this eerily absurd room in a Cinema Museum is simply not a tangible museum experience bringing much of value to the museum-goer.

Another room was filled with costumes of Sergei Soloviev's adaptation of Anna Karenina. The problem, though, is that Soloviev is hardly anymore at the pinnacle of Russian cinema and his adaptation of Anna Karenina can hardly be considered much of a masterpiece to enthuse many cinephiles (I watched it in Odessa sitting in the same row of seats as Kira Muratova and dearly wished throughout the film that I could have watched Kira Georgievna's variation on Anna Karenina rather than Soloviev's distinctly mediocre effort). Soloviev may indeed be just the kind of figure one would expect to profit from the mediocre and retrograde conception of a Cinema Museum favoured by Larisa Solonitsyna and her ilk but wasting such a large amount of space on displaying the costumes of this rather forgettable film (however lovingly this exhibits are displayed) seems to be one of the few tasks that only Larisa Ottovna is capable of.

The main exhibition space went under the name of 'The Labyrinth of History'. Certainly there are single exhibits which may individually delight. It's interesting to see a copy of Medvedkin's camera gun and there is space devoted to a variety of figures in Soviet cinema, although certainly not all. Curiously Barnet is absent but at least Parajanov is present. But then Parajanov's information plate while noting that he didn't make films for a decade and a half after Sayat Nova does not even bother to mention that he spent a certain part of this period incarcerated in prison camps. An uninformed visitor would be led to assume from the information available here that it was simply the aesthetic dissonance of his vision that caused his absence from cinematography in the 70s and much of the 80s. Texts in the museum are very extensive (I didn't manage to read many of them as my visit was a relatively short one) but it would have been preferable to have an audio guide to rest one's eyes for the exhibits themselves. Yet one more sphere where one can call this museum fully retroguardist. Their 'historical couplings' often veer into the uncannily weird. One section wants to convince us that Bondarchuk's War and Peace can somehow be profitably understood by being set alongside Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and that the visitor can draw significant conclusions from these 'parallel' films.

Then there's the 'international' dimension. Or rather the complete lack of it. Well, with the exception of one aspect. Foreign awards presented to Soviet 'successes' are widely exhibited and one can sense that paroxysm of pride among the national patriots like Mikhalkov's and Solonitsyna's of this world when recalling the Oscar won during World War Two (with a long-winded account of the story of the Oscar statue's journey back from the US to the USSR). The Oscar aside the museum neglects to tell us anything about cinema as an international art and thus so much of interest is utterly squandered. The wax on Medinsky's moribund autarkic historical fantasies is applied liberally while Eisenstein's multicultural, cosmopolitan perspective breathes its last in this atmosphere where the pettily parochial mindset of the present 'authorities' is so firmly stamped.

Soviet cinema may have been at the vanguard of world cinema once but, alas, you don't get much of a whiff of cinephilic excitement of that period when Soviet cinema really did lead the world in this venue. No amount of graffiti-like portraits of Eisenstein on the walls of the Cinema Museum is going to inspire genuine cinephilia. (Moreover, any casual film buff from foreign shores on a trip to Moscow and who happens upon the museum will find that firstly all the information is solely in Russian and, secondly, while nearly every other museum in Moscow has abandoned the two-tier pricing system for Russians and foreigners, the Cinema Museum has brought it back in- and so charging a foreigner an extra 200 roubles for their ticket. What a contrast to the previous museum where the exhibition in the video above was free of charge and apart from the many free screenings ticket prices were amere 50 roubles).

From the various interviews in which Larisa Solonitsyna has spoken of her 'conception' of the Cinema Museum you don't really understand whether any intelligent film buff will ever be encouraged to come to the place she describes in her own words (yet alone the actual Museum). Unenthusiastic about including a cinemateque in the concept of a Cinema Museum (Larisa Ottovna seems to think that youtube does away with any idea of the collective viewing of cinematic classics and since you can see masterclasses by major filmmakers on your computer screen why bother inviting any major filmmaker to Moscow either), it's rather hard to imagine how this 'promotion' of the museum is ever going to create the kind of love of film that the old building in Krasnopresnenskaya (and the team behind it) certainly did. Certainly no Godard will ever present a Dolby system to Solonitsyna and clearly the Szabo's, Tarantino's, Dardenne's, Guediguian, Ioseliani's etc etc etc are not going to come en masse here to ВДНХ as they did to the old Cinema Museum. The Museum may have a stand proudly linking the Cinema Museum to all the other major Cinema Museum's throughout the world but given who is in charge here there is little chance of any international cooperation with any of these globally-oriented cinema museums.

In spite of its relative vicinity to VGIK as well being part of the massive complex of ВДНХ, the Cinema Museum has managed just over 2,000 visitors in four weeks (well under 100 a day). For anyone who can remember the affluence of cinemagoers to the pre-2005 Cinema Museum these are genuinely ridiculous figures. I myself remember watching Fellini's 8 1/2  almost inches away from the huge screen because in the largest hall in Krasnopresnenskaya almost every single inch of available space (not just the seats and rows near the seats but literally every space imaginable) had been occupied by avid filmgoers. Kleiman's Cinema Museum surely attracted well over 2,000 in a weekend (rather than in close to a month as is the case here).

All in all one, one gets the sense that one is visiting a Mausoleum where the spirit of cinema has been coated with lacquer to give it a shiny feel to it and like the Lenin lying in Red Square there is little sense that the exhibits bear any relation to living, breathing entities. The endless display of festival awards and the room of portraits, further, make one feel that after exiting the Cinema Museum that one has just come out of a funeral (the almost funereal politbureau format of the portrait room makes one begin to question why Snow Lake wasn't playing as one walked from portrait to portrait).

There's a sense that the blanking out of history going on generally with regard to cinema is somehow particularly indicative of the past decade. Whether it's ascribing Parajanov's fifteen year absence from filmmaking purely to his asethetic dissonance with the Soviet style of cinematography or whether it's abandoning the idea that cinema can ever again become a collective experience of engagement and revelation as it was in the old Cinema Museum of Krasnopresnenskaya, there's little chance of this new venue seducing a new generation of cinephiles to savour the real riches of cinematic history. Sadly, the paternalistic, authoritarian style of Solonitsyna et al, and the association of the museum with filmic morticians such as Mikhalkov and Khotinenko who have, in recent years, become little more than cinematic trash merchants makes one aware that as long as their narrow nationalist mindset is the dominant one, it is something of a pipe dream to believe that the cinematic imagination will have much life breathed into it from this institution.

The grinding repression in the cultural sphere in Russia that is evidently increasing and evidenced, for example, by the trial and imprisonment of Oleg Sentsov, through to the legal persecution of Kirill Serebrennikov and others associated with him, the possible blacklisting of senior cultural figures and apparent blocking of accreditation for critical journalists at the St Petersburg Cultural Forum as well as the persistent harassment of another theatre director, Konstantin Raikin, is reinforced by the imposition of barely competent officials such as Larisa Solonitsyna, ideologically faithful to the conservative turn of Medinsky and Mikhalkov. Figures able only to suck the life out of the institutions they are called upon to lead and to alienate any potential interest in their sphere. One can only hope that this generation of cultural undertakers appointed by a figure who can justifiably be described as Russia's worst Culture Minister in living memory will at some point in the future be swept away to be replaced by the immense talent that undoubtedly exists in Russia's authentic cinematic community.

In the meantime one can best avoid any extra tramps to this sad Mausoleum-like external structure and its morgue-like feel within situated in this ultra-Stalinist entertainment park and make one's way to the Tretyakov Gallery where members from the previous team of the Cinema Museum with far fewer resources at their disposal manage to show some excellent programmes as well as new recent releases, hoping one day that the conservative turn in Russian society will be ultimately reversed.

News Regarding The Boris Barnet Project.

Just over two years ago I posted on this blog about a project dedicated to the figure of Boris Barnet. A project regarding a filmmaker who left very little in terms of documents, essays, articles to posterity. Only his films, a handful of letters to his fifth and final wife and the sketch miraculously surviving in spite of Barnet's tendency to discard nearly everything in his possession. And yet there are many possible leads. People still alive who knew him (for example his daughter, Olga Barnet; the filmmaker Marlen Khutsiev who worked with him on the film Liana and others who worked with him towards the end of his career). At the presetnt time I am collecting and presenting some material on another blog http://borisbarnetblog.wordpress.com 

Here is a short description of the Boris Barnet project

The Boris Barnet project aims to be a project starting off as a blog and then will move to a website domain and eventually lead to a book to be printed by Cygnnet Books (who have produced excellent books on Andrey Tarkovsky and Andrei Zvyagintsev). We aim to produce a selection of images and printed material on this blog much of which is either not publicly available or has been available only in Russian or has been locked up in archives (or published in books and journals long out of print). A series of translations and summaries of articles from Russian will also be gradually published in the months to come. Hopefully this will be a site that both film lovers as well as students of film can turn to in order to discover more about the life and work of one of Russia’s (and the world’s) most interesting film directors.

Blogposts (and material on the site) will include the following:

Photographs and portraits of Boris Barnet
Accounts of Barnet’s films
Aspects of Barnet’s cinematographic practice
Themes in Barnet’s films
Historical background to the films
Synopses of the films
Attempts to describe the locations where the films were shot
Accounts of actors who starred in Barnet films
Film sequences of Barnet films
Video essays
Contemporary reviews of Barnet films
Accounts of Barnet’s filmmaking process
Memoirs of Barnet from those who knew him
Transcripts from interviews with film scholars and acquaintances of Barnet
Biographical and other information on the actors in Barnet films
Information on other members of the film crew (scriptwriters, Directors of Photography, Artistic Directors etc)
Gifs of Barnet scenes
Screenshots of particular moments in Barnet films

In Search of Lost Reality (3): Other Films from This Year's Art Doc Fest.

A frame from Sergei Loznitsa's Austerlitz, one of the most impressive films of the Art Doc Fest

It is quite rare to find a film festival where  nearly every film watched has something to recommend about it each deserving a single blog post about them. But it is precisely in Russian or Russian-language documentary film festivals that one discovers an extraordinary variety which is not, alas, matched in contemporary Russian-language narrative cinema events. Moreover, it is often the case that some of the most interesting names that have emerged in Russian-language feature films are directors who have also worked with documentary cinema in their careers (and often these directors criss-cross between the two) : this is especially true of two of the biggest names in the post-Soviet firmament- Alexander Sokurov and Sergei Loznitsa. Also among the most interesting of upcoming directors a director like Ivan I. Tverdovsky also has had a grounding in  the documentary field. With the increasingly poor selection of films at Russia's showcase festival Kinotavr (as well as the fact that documentaries are increasingly included in the dozen or so competition films shown there: this year two documentaries both already shown at least year's Art Doc Fest were included in the competition programme), it seems that the interest that there is in contemporary Russian cinema would do well to turn to the Russian or Russian-language documentary field rather than feature films in the foreseeable future.  

Here are some of the picks alongside Konstantin Selin's film that I discussed in a previous blog on this festival.

A scene from Anna Moiseenko's Songs of Abdul.

1) Anna Moiseenko's Songs of Abdul is not only one of the few Russian-language documentaries on migrants or migration in recent years (with the notable exception of Denis Shabaev's Not My Job) and so deserving of interest for choosing a subject matter that, for some reason, Russian documentary filmmakers rarely choose but is also innovative in a formal way. The narrative commentary formally absent in this film as it is in most films by the razbezhkintsy (former students of Marina Razbezhkina) is, nonetheless, replaced by the songs of the documentary protagonist, Abdumamadi Gulmamad. In many ways not only has Moiseenko found a documentary protagonist who manages to illuminate many (often conflicting) worlds (not simply the world of a migrant but also that of an artist, and moreover, an artist rooted in his own world who finds himself momentarily at the centre of the Moscow art world at a Golden Mask awards ceremony) but who also becomes, in many ways, the Narrating Subject of this film as much as the director through the commentary of the songs. Indeed in many ways the input by the documentary protagonist seems also to add to the humour of this film (the scene of the Golden Mask awards being a case in point). Indeed it manages to be one of the most humorous as well as being one of the most socially innovative films on show at Art Doc Fest. By the protagonist telling his Odyssean tale as migrant through his songs and so structuring the film directed by Anna Moiseenko and shot by her and Ekena Shalkina. Moiseenko and Shalkina illustrated both his homecoming after 10 years to his wife and family in a small village in the Pamir mountains and his life in Moscow along with the endless labour and housing issues that a migrant in Moscow faces as well as the looming threat of deportation that Abdul's fellow migrants faced.

The film director of Songs of Abdul, Anna Moiseenko

2) Elena Demidova's The Last Man is a continuation of her film Lyosha on the forest fires of 2010. Demidova gives us both a superb choice of documentary hero and a highly reflexive film on the relationship between the documentarian and their documentary protagonist as well as something of a mini encyclopaedia of Russian village life. Along with the footage from the earlier film in the first part of the documentary and the extraordinary monologue of the main protagonist, in the second part it details the growing dynamic between documentarian and documentary hero ending with a phone call from Lyosha's wife demanding an end to all contact with the film's protagonist. In this way Demidova reveals the dynamics of author and subject underlying (but usually hidden from) a documentary film and in so doing brilliantly unmasks the narrative stability of a documentary portrait by foregrounding the relationship between film director and protagonist. In spite of its length (two hours) the film nevertheless finds a way of keeping the audience hooked by its portraits not just of the protagonist but also of his neighbours. There is surely enough 'cinema' to keep the audience going.

3)

The film director of Six Musicians as a backdrop to a city, Tatyana Danilyants

Tatyana Danilyants' Six Musicians as a backdrop to a city is a very different film to many of those shown at Art Doc Fest. Like many of Danilyants' films this is a city film. Not this time a film of Venice but one of Yerevan. A city film linked inextricably to its music and, in particular,to six musicians who the director felt represented a special bond to the city. Allowing them to choose the locations to be filmed, Danilyants encouraged the musicians to reveal to the viewer their city while she reveals the extraordinary vitality and versatility of the music of Yerevan. One can not help noting that Danilyants is the only documentary filmmaker in Russia making a 'city film' of any kind and this makes her films strangely unique and, in the context of Russian documentary, extremely innovative. Of course her films are not centred on Russian cities but of very particular cities on the periphery of the Slavic world but, all the same, this foregrounding of cities, this relating documentary heroes to their location and transforming the city into the ultimate protagonist of the film makes for a cinema that is almost untimely and radically opposed to much of Russian-language documentary. Indeed after watching a documentary by Danilyants one starts to wonder why the city as subject is so absent in other Russian-language films. In terms of the film itself the use of archive footage of the tragic late 80s and early 90s of Yerevan as well as one of the musicians (Lilit Pipoyan, the only female musician in the film and, for me, one of the most memorable protagonists) choice of a peripheral location of the city added authenticity to the film.

 A still from Tatyana Danilyants' film Six musicians as a backdrop to a city

4)

The film director of Naked Life, Daria Khrenova

 Daria Khrenova's film Naked Life about the actionist artist Pyotr Pavlensky was one of two films directly about him in the festival. In fact it was Irene Langemann's Pavlensky- Man and Power which was to open the festival.While Langemann's film may have been, in the words of film critic Carmen Grey "a compact primer for those who have not followed ..the acts of one of Russia's most effective champions of dissent-through-spectacle" , Khrenova's film can be said to be much more of a primary document than Langemann's just as the film by Gogol's Wives on Pussy Riot was a primary document in comparison to the film by Lerner and Pozdorovkin: in retrospect very much a secondary document. There is a proviso that while Gogol's Wives began as underground activist filmmakers, Daria Khrenova had already a certain established reputation as a documentary filmmaker. Maybe the film that comes closest to Khrenova's was Andrey Gryazyev's film Tomorrow on two members of the Voina collective. Khrenova manages a similarly intimate portrait of the artist and his partner but also contrives to add some extra lyrical coverage that adds certain poetical touches such as the march of elderly Stalinists near Red Square along with a group of police officers watching Pavlensky's actions on a screen and commenting on them (often expressing ideas about the action that art critics would find difficult to formulate). Another key element in the film is the story of the state investigator who turned from Pavlensky's prosecutor to a staunch defender (transforming his own life in the process). All in all it deserves to be the Pavlensky film on international film circuits precisely because of the raw proximity that Khrenova achieves with the artist.

A still from Daria Khrenova's Naked Life in which police officers watch Pavlensky's art actions on a screen

There are a whole host of other films deserving of accounts. And there are films which will surely receive (and have already achieved) much international coverage. To be brief about Sergei Loznitsa's Austerlitz is a rather impossible task and in many ways it was the film that for me most stood out during the festival. Again the film Close Relations by Mansky on Ukraine also deserves a rather lengthy piece. Thankfully Carmen Gray in an article mentioned earlier has written about these films at some length for Senses of Cinema. Many films deserve to be written about at a later time. Alina Rudnitskaya's Catastrophe is a film rather unlike some of her previous odysseys through the institutions but developing them into a very poignant piece on one of the worst post-Soviet catastrophic incidents at a hydro-electric station. And then there are the films which time constraints meant sacrificing and desperately hoping for another chance to watch them.  

A frame from Alina Rudnitskaya's film Catastrophe on a disaster at a hydro-electric power station and its aftermath

In Search of Lost Reality (2) Film Programmes at Art Doc Fest

The broad variety of films at Art Doc Fest is one of its other highlights and it is worthwhile making some remarks on the different programmes. The competition programme this year has a variety of films about Ukraine (four in total), two on psychiatric institutions, one on the Russian road (entitled The Road)- a documentary which has won certain plaudits from those who have see this film by Dmitry Kalashnikov. An Israeli director, Vlady Antonevich, has made a documentary thriller on the Neo-nazi undeground in Russia responsible for a number of heinous murders of migrants. The lack of interest from the police in uncovering these murders opens up the question of some kind of collusion between police and Neo-Nazis. Of those films which are of particular interest were Sergei Loznitsa's Austerlitz  and Daria Khrenova's A Naked Life as well as Konstantin Selin's film Chronicles of a Revolution That Didn't Take Place written about in the previous post.

There were another eight programmes and a number of films shown as 'Special Showings' at the festival. The Sreda programme included some very significant films by directors who have already proven their worth and significance in the Russian documentary film world. Sergei Kachkin's Perm 36: Reflexion was premiered in Perm and had its Moscow premiere days before the start of Art Doc Fest. Each showing has attracted a large number of well-known spectators and high levels of intellectual debate about what could be called 'the moral question' in history. I've interviewed Sergei on his career and this latest film for this blog  and it is surely the case that this film deserves an international run. Alina Rudnitskaya's Catastrophe on the 2009 hydro-electric power station disaster and its aftermath is yet another indication that Rudnitskaya is one of the most interesting film directors in Russia today. Her documentary tours of government agencies in one form or another (from blood banks to abortion clinics) served her well for this look at one of the most tragic incidents in recent years in a power station. Rudnitskaya justifiably was awarded the Grand Prix Award three years ago at Art Doc Fest. Ivan Tverdovsky is another significant figure in the documentary sphere and has offered a film entitled Weather Forecast about an old vessel which serves weather stations in the Russian artic and which often is their only link with the outside world.

The Psy.Doc programme is another unique conception for a documentary film festivals. It consists in a film screening with an after-film discussion with a psychologist who will give their expert opinion of the film and the psychology involved in the film. An interesting idea with some very fascinating films. One of which was a portrait of one of the demonstrators on August 25th 1968 Natalia Gorbanevskaya who in spite of her willingness to be at the centre of the dissident movement and pay the price of repression often stated "I am no heroine, I am an ordinary person". This film has its Russian premiere at the festival.

The programme After the Union includes films created in former Soviet Republics while the War and Peace programme is dedicated to the situation in Ukraine. In these two programme Tatyana Danilyants Six Musicians in the Backdrop of a City and Vitaly Mansky Kin will be discussed in separate posts. A separate programme to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Art Doc Fest with winners from previous years and the A to Z programme of last year's laureates of Russian documentary festivals and awards allows one to rewatch those films that one may have missed over the past year.

In Search of Lost Reality (1): On the 10th Anniversary of Art Doc Fest and Konstantin Selin's new departure in Russian Documentary.

This year Art Doc Fest is celebrating its tenth anniversary and since December 1st this year's edition of the festival has been taking place at the Oktyabr Cinema in Moscow's central Novy Arbat street. (The festival now takes place also in St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg as well as Riga). Its expansion to other cities and countries marks something of a success, especially given the fact that after a frontal conflict with Russia's Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, has left the festival without even the meagre government funding it once had. So while the festival has its own 'patriarch' in Vitaly Mansky, it can boast of a total independence from the government (as well as permitting itself to exhibit a certain antagonism). It has become festival which doesn't hesitate to announce its conflictual relationship to the cultural bureaucrats in charge and even vaunts its oppositional reputation. Nonetheless, at the same time the festival nevertheless ensures that the programme is a very broad one. This year was no exception.

First there are always the major films which expect to attract the larger crowds - in recent years they've included films about corruption in the Sochi Winter Olympics and Khodorkovsky. This year, too a film on, Khodorkovsky was once again in the programme and two about the murdered opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov (one of them was already shown at last year's festival). Another major film event was the opening film on the actionist artist Petr Pavlensky (once again two films on this artist have been shown at the festival- see a subsequent post for my view of the Russian film on Pavlensky by Daria Khrenova which surely deserves international recognition, even more so than the German film which opened the festival). Some of these directly political films always ensure Art Doc Fest's reputation for its determination to show films anathema to the authorities, as well as full cinema halls and heated political discussions.And yet not always do these films turn out to be the most radical films either in terms of their cinematic value or even their political stance. Gentelev's Putin's Games shown three years ago will probably not go down in film history whereas other films shown to smaller audiences have much more likelihood in doing so.

A shot from Chronicles of a Revolution That Didn't Take Place

In this sense arguably the most important film at this year's festival was a less conventional 'political' film precisely in the fact that it has shed light not on big politics (Putin, corruption, the martyrs of the liberal opposition) reported throughout the international media but about an extraordinary moment of popular resistance that went almost unreported in both the Russian and the international media. The story of long-distance truck drivers who managed, against the resistance of the authorities (with considerable police harassment and obstruction) and a news black out from all the main TV channels to win a strike and set up an authentically independent trade union in its aftermath will ensure Konstantin Selin's film Chronicle of a Revolution That Didn't Happen narrates Reality rather than fixing a political position. Selin's film is powerful in showing not so much a collective portrayal of struggle but the reformation (or rather transformation) of political consciousness in the process of a struggle. Following two protagonists but not extricating them from the collective moment, this film manages to merge the individual and collective story in a new way for Russian documentary. By balancing the individual and the collective stories and focusing on the transformation of consciousness of the film's protagonists, Konstantin Selin's Chronicle has achieved something relatively rare in Russian documentary and surely in this way his film will earn its place not just as an exploration of an unacknowledged story hidden from view (an example of Lost Reality restored) but also as an attempt to force through into a new cinematic territory merging the best of Russian documentary (its observational focus on the individual protagonist in his environment) with the addition of locating this in social and political reality and also picturing the protagonists dynamic transformation of consciousness as to this reality.  

The film director Konstantin Selin

Pasolini in Russia: the re-emergence of one of Italy's greatest 20th Century poets and visionary filmmakers in the Russian cultural firmament

Angela Felice and Kirill Medvedev at the opening event of the Pasolini Days in St Petersburg's cinema Rodina

While the world celebrated the 40th anniversary of Pasolini's death last year there was barely no mention of this in Russia. This year, however, it seems that the figure of Pasolini is stalking the Russian consciousness with a whole series of culturally significant moments that may have been little reported but will surely prove to be landmarks when looking back. Landmarks because the links between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Russia have gone back a long way, although had recently become attenuated and landmarks because of the resonance of the figure and thought of Pasolini in contemporary Russia. Equally, Russia and Russian culture was of great importance for Pasolini. As Francesca Tuscano has shown in her work 'Russia in the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini',  Pasolini's work is replete with Russian influences and allusions(in other essays and a monograph on Pasolini in Russia she shows a reciprocal story), Russia was, indeed, the starting point for one of Pasolini's most important poems 'The Religion of My Time' after his first journey to Moscow in 1957. Pasolini's influence was equally significant in bringing to the attention of Italian scholars the Soviet Formalists from Shklovsky to Jacobson as well as Bakhtin. His posthumously published novel Petrolio is full of Russian allusions and references. Both Dostoyevsky and Shklovsky are cited often. Many Russians too have discovered that Pasolini (both the poet and the filmmaker and to a lesser extent his other roles) were central to their world.

One of Francesca Tuscano's works on the reciprocal influences of Pasolini and Russia

Of course there have been ebbs and flows in the interest that Russians have shown in the work of Pasolini. Pasolini may be the most 'Russian' of Italian figures but he is also one that encounters a certain resistance. From Soviet times Pasolini can be seen as just as 'uncomfortable' (scomodo) a figure in Russia as he was in Italy. Such that the Soviet press simply ignored his assassination (no contemporary press reports of this central event in modern Italian history were published in the Soviet press). His support for Sinyavsky and Daniel meant that from the late sixties he was very much a figure either ignored or attacked in the Soviet press. Perestroika 'rescued' him with a number of retrospectives (even though causing a certain scandal even then), though the ground had been prepared with a number of translations of poetry in the early eighties. A major publication of his written works also took place in 2000 with the publication of a book entitled Teorema which, however, was not centred on his eponymous film and novel but brought a large collection of material to the attention of the Russian reading public.

Kirill Medvedev, poet, publisher (Free Marxist Press) and the translator of Pasolini's Friulan poems

2016 has proved to be one of those years in which Pasolini has returned into the Russian cultural consciousness. Surely in hindsight one of the central moments of this recuperation of the legacy of Pasolini will prove to be the very first full translation into Russia of Pasolini's Friulan poems including both major cycles of his dialect poetry - La meglio gioventu as well as La Nuova Gioventu. Kirill Medvedev (a poet who has in the past worked on and published a number of translations by Pasolini) has rendered an immense service and overcome many truly colossal hurdles in rendering these essential poems for an understanding of the genesis and final years of the poet Pasolini. An historic moment given that Russian is the very first foreign language into which these poems have been fully translated (and so undoubtedly a landmark moment globally as well as in Russia itself). For it is in Pasolini's Friulan poems where we find the beginning and the end of Pasolini's poetry. The re-writings of the early poems undertaken in the early 70s encapsulate those two moments of the appearance of luminosity (born as one of Pasolini's own poems in Italian puts it through the experience of the Resistance) and the dying of the light in his visionary nightmare of the consumerist hell of a future fascism which Pasolini depicted in his last film Salo' or the 120 Days of Sodom. A hell which seems so very contemporary in these days of Trump, Brexit and the nativist right stretching from France through Austria to Hungary in line with a sadistic 'conservative revolution' all too visible in Russia itself. The emergence of a poet in Friulan (and in a version of Friulan hitherto considered nonliterary) in the early 1940s and the abjuration of this hope incarnated within his poetry in the early 1970s are embodied in a Russian text which demonstrates this dialectic to be of extreme contemporary relevance in Russia itself. The book includes a range of commentaries on this poetry from those of Angela Felice, the Director of the Casarsa Pasolini Centre (who came to introduce the book) to Michael Hardt (well-known for his collaborative works with Toni Negri). Moreover, the book includes an interesting experiment carried out by the leftist Ukrainian activist based in Odessa, Denis Pilash, who translates a number of Pasolini's poems into his native Rusyn language (a language as marginalized from the literary process in this part of the world as that of Friulan would have been in the early 1940s).

Kirill Medvedev's volume of translations of the full 1974 edition of Pasolini's Friulan poems La Nuova Gioventu, cover by Nikolai Oleynikov.

The book presentations last weekend were accompanied by a further event. The showing in St Petersburg and Moscow of a film which Pasolini associated himself with in the early 1970s. This film was December 12th. While Pasolini did not shoot the whole of the film but collaborated with the left extra-parliamentary group Lotta Continua in producing the film and indeed he filmed some significant moments of the film-indeed deeply lyrical moments of this very political film. The film showing (chosen by the film review Seance from a list of possible Pasolini films submitted to them by Kirill Medvedev) caused some consternation on the part of some of the Italian parties organising the weekend and in part led to the withdrawal of support from the Moscow wing of the Italian Institute of Culture for the Pasolini weekend (though the St Petersburg IIC did rightly support the initiative). While December 12th may remain an uncomfortable film for Italians to watch (reminding them of a decade full of real traumas but also hopes and clashes long since buried by the anemic abulia of the period from the 1980s to the reign of Berlusconi and beyond), it remains a historical document of supreme importance. Concentrating on the events surrounding the bombing of a Milanese bank (and attempting to reconstruct the truth of these events) and on the quasi revolutionary atmosphere in the country in the early 1970s, the film brings out uncomfortable memories to Italians who lived through the period. Yet the traumas of the Italian 1970s has already been the subject matter of a previous Italian Cultural Institute event from another angle (with its own explicit perspective on the decade). The film Sfiorando il Muro was given two separate showings in Moscow a few years back. A film which was both a deeply personal story (the director was the daughter of a neo-fascist activist shot dead by the Red Brigades in the early 70s) but not shying away from a political reading of the 1970s (in the city of Padua). Even if it did attempt to give voice to different participants, it firmly stamps its own depiction of the decade on the viewers mind.

The 12th December- shown at two cinemas in Moscow and St Petersburg- this weekend to accompany the publication of Pasolini's Friulan poems.

Yet the Pasolini contribution this year has not been limited to this. The arrival of David Grieco at the Moscow International Film Festival with his film La Macchinazione on the murder of Pasolini, a film responding to Abel Ferrara's film on the same subject but from a very different and more political angle was another significant moment. Its repeat showing at a more recent festival devoted to Italian cinema in Moscow has given people in Moscow a second chance to view this film.

Alexandra Petrova, author of a Russian novel on Rome where the spirit of Pier Paolo Pasolini is very much present.

The presence of Pasolini is also a significant one in a recently published novel, Appendix (Аппендикс) by Alexandra Petrova, a writer who has spent almost twenty years in Italy. The novel in Russian has received a lot of critical attention and was the occasion for an interesting discussion led by the poet Elena Fanailova for Radio Svoboda. The novel is now in the running for two prestigious literary prizes in Russia. Pasolini is present both implicitly and explicitly in the novel- for example in the form of direct citations (for example a chapter is introduced with translated lines from his poem Il canto Popolare) as well as toponomical links. The chapter 'Roman Monsters' which the citation heads discusses the Rebibbia of Pasolini and the Rebibbia of this novels protagonist. In fact the novels of Pasolini even where he is not cited are surely a literary antecedent of this novel (portraying a Rome not of the beau monde or dolce vita but of the periphery, just as Pasolini had done so provoking such scandal six decades ago). It is a novel of immigrants, trans, and marginalised radicals moving back and forth from Rome, to Saint Petersburg (or Leningrad), Brazil and Africa just as it heads back and forth in historical time - and often to those 1970s, that last season of political revolt highlighted in the film 12th December, a season with which one of the novel's protagonists is closely associated with.

The cover of Alexandra Petrova's novel Appendix

Pasolini's presence in Russian culture seems likely to grow stronger than ever. The Russian translation of a large section of Pasolini's Petrolio was published a year ago, as was the book by Emanuele Trevi (Qualcosa di Scritto) trying to dissect the unfinished work of Pasolini and to give (an admittedly none too flattering) portrait of Pasolini's close friend, Laura Betti, who would keep alive the memory of Pasolini in unorthodox ways. The Laura Betti who also had come to Moscow to present a Pasolini retrospective a number of years ago (a trip, alas, not mentioned in Trevi's book).

Emanuele Trevi speaking through the translator of his novel in Moscow at the presentation of his book in Moscow