Repression & the Russian Film World.

The film director Pavel Bardin arrested at a demonstration outside the court of where the verdict of the Bolotnaya Case was being read out.

It seems rather difficult to talk or even think about Russian cinema in the past few days. Writing becomes a hopeless task before the spectacle of the tsuanmi of the present moment. Thoughts have been on the events in Ukraine and now the verdict of the Bolotnaya Case, but thoughts don't seem able to turn into the clarity of language. Here in Russia, adding up all the arrests at the court and in further actions in downtown Moscow and St Petersburg maybe we'll arrive at the figure of about a thousand. I was standing on Friday outside the courthouse for the Bolotnaya verdict and the spectacle of arrests- most of the time completely random in which stormtroopers often broke into some part of the rather amorphous crowd picking someone standing at the back playing no active part- was one clearly designed to strike a certain fear in people.

Russia with this verdict (and with the Ukrainian events) seems to be on the brink once again. How this will effect culture as a whole (and cinema in particular) is unclear. Yet the photo above of the well-known film director, Pavel Bardin, being dragged away by two riot police seems to point to the fact that culture and politics are likely to be inextricably linked in the near future in Russia. The policing of film and theatre are no longer a mere metaphor. Along with respected mathematicians, well-known journalists and artists, history professors, the Russian автозак (police wagon) now is a temporary home for film directors too.

As John Freedman has pointed out in a post about recent events in Russia, not all representatives of culture are necessarily on the same side and the film world has never lacked its yes men. Yet it seems that the conclusion at the end of Freemdan's article is looking increasingly accurate in a foreboding way:

We find ourselves once again standing with Nikolai Gogol who, in his great novel 'Dead Souls' asked "Rus, whither do you race?"
I hesitate to do it, but as the biographer of Nikolai Erdman, I cannot fail to add the answer that Erdman provided to Gogol's question in his classic tragicomedy 'The Suicide'
In that play the revolutionary writer Viktor Viktorovich quotes Gogol's famous query and recieves an immediate response from a mailman named Yegor: "Straight to the police, mark my word." Yegor snaps.

The police have already shown little compunction in who it arrests (and given the completely random methods it uses ) who knows how many more figures like Bardin will end up in the avtozak). It seems that as one of those on trial for Bolotnaya put it, Russia is looking increasingly similar to the Gianni Rodari story Cipollino (here adapted in animated version):

Sokurov's Open Letter to Putin.

Away from the highlight of Sochi where foreign correspondents appear to spend their time checking out their toilet facilities or harassing the local gay community, the situation in Russia as a whole can't be said to be a very rosy one. Clouds do seem to be gathering and what seems to be a landmark moment- the judgment on the Bolotnaya Case- seems to be coming soon. Moreover while the Winter Olympics took place there was the absurd spectacle of people being arrested for opening their umbrellas in the centre of Moscow. Another group of demonstrators who sang the Russian hymn in Red Square (with rainbow flags) were also arrested and reportedly beaten and humiliated at the police station. It is facts like these as well as a ratcheting up of the aggressive rhetoric by the, at times, hysterical mouthpieces of the regime on state television which lead Sokurov to write an open letter to President Putin.

The letter centres around the closure of the liberal television station Дождь (meaning Rain, hence people demonstratively opening their umbrellas in the centre of Moscow and being bundled into police vans for the temerity) but sets it in the context of a general situation of rapid degeneration into a search for internal enemies and an increasingly aggressive atmosphere. He talks about the despair that grips one when one watches TV channels stating that

"Establishment figures have called for people to be burned, discriminated against, expelled, killed. Diversity is officially deemed a crime. In the words and faces of our politicians there is a war-like madness".

He then goes on to talk about the younger generation excluded from a creative life and in the grips of either a sense of bewildered powerlessness and disorientation, or worse, of some holding the kind of Nazi ideology fighting against which a previous generation had lost their lives, or others who have thrown themselves into an active struggle against the powers that be. Sokurov suggests there is a need to grow wiser.

He then goes on to tell Putin that the wiser ones in the past were the dissidents who stood up to the deceit of power and for human rights while millions were silent.

It is at this point where Sokurov launches into his attack on those who have closed the Liberal television 'Rain'. Characterising those who have served in the state run media as little more than lackeys, Sokurov suggests that they should be 'given a tongue lashing'.

"Each day for decades now they assiduously translate vulgarity, deliver violence to the screens of millions as well as the crushing of those who think differently." These television bureaucrats, Sokurov calls them cynics with 'small eyes and large ears'.

He then goes on to describe the television channel 'Rain' stating that they have the right to make mistakes- that it is a channel searching its own language and strongly in touch with the society of the new Russia. He talks of a meeting with the Culture channel where he couldn't be assured that his own words wouldn't be subject to censorship. Sokurov then went on to ask what it was coming to when an apolitical person like himself is subject to censorship.

In a way this is a traditional ploy of complaining to the 'tsar' about the bad decisions made by his subordinates. Maybe Sokurov genuinely believes that he has the ear of Putin (he did receive funding for his film Faust after a meeting with Putin). This is Sokurov's own account of his meeting and his relation to Putin in an interview with a Guardian journalist:

He was preparing Faust, his most expensive film, just when the economic downturn struck, and couldn't find funding. But a surprise saviour stepped in: Vladimir Putin. Sokurov met Putin at the Russian PM's country residence. "I told him, if I don't have this opportunity to make this film, it will never happen. A few days later, I was told that the amount I needed was going to be allocated. How and why it happened I don't know. Maybe because he has a very clear idea of German culture and history. I don't think it was because of me. I've never demonstrated my loyalty to his party."

Wouldn't Putin himself make a good subject? "I'll never make films about people like Putin because they're not of interest to me." Does his association with Putin compromise him? "When I met him recently, he asked if I was going to dub Faust into Russian. Reading between the lines, you could see these words as a sort of order. But I wasn't afraid to say no to him. The money allocated by him was the state's, not his own. I don't know whether he has any money. According to his official salary, he shouldn't have any money. I can only be responsible to my audience, that's all."   

It will be interesting to see if this letter does have some effect. Will it change the vector of discourse in an increasingly repressive Russia. Sokurov, after all, is a figure of some cultural stature in Russia.Yet it is hard to see any sea change. There are few signs that the Bolotnaya prisoners are about to be released and that, in many ways, is the litmus test. Repression will only necessitate the Mamontovs and Kiselevs to continue their hysterical transmissions. Mobilization in society against repression is at a very low ebb. Will Sokurov's words gain nothing more than a murmur of approval or will be they be a spur to a more active resistance to the trends that Sokurov pinpoints is a matter for some debate.

In many ways perhaps it will be in the reaction (or lack of reaction) to this open letter that one will be able to view how much the intellighentsia still counts as a check on the state's overbearing role.

Here is the link to the original article written in Russian : http://www.snob.ru/profile/26455/blog/71687
Interestingly in a blog for the radio station Ekho Moskvy where he calls the surpression of the Rain Tv channel 'outrageous', Sokurov stated that he was hoping to print the article in a state-run newspaper (probably the Rossiskaya Gazeta). Instead it was published by Snob.
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Musei Kino: The Latest Deception

The increasingly depressing saga of the Cinema Museum seems set to continue. Late last December there seemed to be a breakthrough with an agreement regarding a building that would temporarily house the Museum. Indeed it was bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture who insisted that Naum Kleiman and his team should agree to use this building telling Kleiman in person (according to his interview in gazeta.ru) "stop 'playing up', and accept this building as this is your last chance". It was then revealed on January 13th, the same Minister of Culture, has since decided that the building that they previously insisted on, is totally unsuitable. 


For those who have followed the story of the Cinema Museum it is clear that this pattern of deception and false hopes has been going on for a whole decade and looks like a  slow, tormenting wilfull destruction of cinematic memory. The recent round of news about the Cinema Museum started off with the 13th January Press Conference where the Culture Minister stated that not only was the Cinematic Scientific Research Institute (NIKFI)  unsuitable for housing the Cinema Museum temporarily for five years, but also the proposed permanent site proposed for the Cinema Museum was not acceptable to the Ministry of Culture. Naum Kleiman, as he stated in his interview in the government-owned 'Rossiskaya Gazeta", was not informed at all of the fact that Medinsky had decided against both projects. Medinsky stated at the press conference that the current film theatre Illuzion would be a good alternative. Yet this suggestion seems to be an absurd suggestion. Illuzion has only one screen and this would mean that the Museum's massive archive would still not have any suitable and permanent location. As Kleiman notes in this interview if this were a "shopping centre" a location would have been found. The situation with the huge and priceless archive is, of course, ever more tragic as this sorry saga continues. 

Should it prove that there was never any real political will to create this Museum, then it will become clear that the destruction of historical and cultural memory that the likes of Medinsky and his cabal ended up perpetrating, and the way in which they have gone about this, can only be justifiably be described as cultural vandalism of the most obscene order. Upon first hearing of the Ministry of Culture's new rejection, Naum Kleiman stated: "I am personally ashamed that we have such a Minister (of Culture). Now nothing else has been proposed so the question of discussing a Cinema Museum is off the agenda" and that the events have shown yet again that the people who believe that they run culture are complete incompetents. This will surely be Medinsky's epitaph in years to come- as one of the most shamefully destructive cultural bureaucrats that Russia has known- if the archive is laid to waste and no Museum is built. 


The latest facts- including Medinsky's arrogance in scuppering all agreements reached last December without even informing the most interested parties-  are yet another low and mean attempt at humiliating of one of most respected figures in the Russian film world. It feels watching this saga unfold that the Ministry of Culture is launching a war on culture, and a vicious, grotesque assault on cultural memory. Observing Russian cultural bureaucrats hacking away and destroying any hope of parading the very best of its prized cinematic heritage while at the same time promoting an ersatz national pride based on myths and xenophobic hysteria, with a parade of cheap blockbusters and nationalist costume dramas is a truly ugly and unbearable spectacle. To which there seems little end. One feels that even if Kleiman was slightly more upbeat in the Gazeta interview (and reported by Kinote) one has been here before.

On Pussy Riot and two censored films.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

Madina Mustafina with her tutor Marina Razbezhkina.

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

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

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

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

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

Art Doc Fest 2013: the first days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Magic - Gennady Shpalikov's letter to Vigo

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

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

James Steffen's Book on Parajanov

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

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

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

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

The Cinema Museum.

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

Other Russian Films at Rome.

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


A New Pussy Riot Film showing at IDFA in Amsterdam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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