Valeska Gert

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.