Perhaps one of the most interesting of small festivals that take place in Russia is the International Festival of Independent Cinema entitled 2morrow/Завтра. A relatively small and young festival (now in its seventh edition), it was the brainchild of the late Russian film director Ivan Dykhovichny and is now run by his widow Olga and film director Angelina Nikonova. It concentrates on bringing to the Moscow public some of the more interesting festival hits of recent months and other occasional retrospectives and sections which can be just as inspiring as the main fare. For all the smallness of its size, it is far fresher in many ways than the unwieldy Moscow International Film Festival in June. Simply because it has no need to protect its reputation, its reputation seems to grow year by year.
It may not have had a particularly emphatic Russian flavour to it (one section devoted to regional Russian cinema called Offside showed a programme of six regional films from as far afield as Omsk (in fact there were two films by directors associated with this town), Buriatiya, Chelyabinsk and Yakutia. Of the films I watched from this section the quality was variable, although the Buryatian film Булаг (Bulag) [shown in the clip above] seemed to win the hearts of much of the audience. The director Солбон Лыгденов (Solbon Lygdenov) directed a film which could keep pace with many of the popular hits of recent years. Directed on a relatively small budget the film involved a return of Lygdenov to his native country after working for a number of years in the West and, nothwithstanding offers of work by Timur Bekmanbetov, he chose the harsher working conditions of his native country as director than a well-paid storyboard artist in Hollywood.
The Chelyabinsk film-maker Vladimir Kozlov Десятка (Ten) made a weaker film that only started to come alive towards the end but on such minute amounts of money that suggest that for all its problems with its drammaturgical effectiveness, the director may have some future ahead of him. Now preparing a film on Siberian punk rock, this film maker may begin to smooth out the uneveness of his debut film.
The most awaited Russian film of the festival was, of course, the documentary project Реальность (Reality) co-ordinated by the likes of Rastorguev, Kostomarov, Pivovarov and Cattin among others but what which was filmed by the documentary subjects themselves. An exploration of the formal possibilities of documentary and film itself, viewers at the festival were treated a section of just over half an hour of the material and were able to meet and question the subjects themselves. Being treated to this preview, it is still difficult to imagine it as a completed film though abounding with fascinating footage. All the same it is a curious complement to the film operators work for the Lenta.ru site. This kind of concentration on both the 'newsworthy' and the everyday surely suggests that the film-makers- Rastorguev and Kostomarov et al are trying to look at reality through two very different lenses but by doing so will produce fascinating historic documents of early 21st century Russia.
Finally, in terms of Russian input there was a retrospective of Artur Aristaskisyan. An Armenian-Russian film director with only two major films to his name (and both made well over a decade ago), these films proved sufficient to inspire very high plaudits for having chosen Aristaskisyan to highlight. My trip to his first 1994 film Ладони (Palms) was one of the most rewarding moments of the festival. A '"relentless depiction of life at the margin" as Graeme Hobbs has argued it challenges us to rethink cinema in a way that is so rare these days. Full of impossible stories it enforces a necessary shame on the viewer for days after. Aristaskisyan has since become a particular kind of dissident activist unco-opted by some of the less welcome recent trends in the Russian opposition. Searching to forge a genuine opposition and dissidence, Aristaskisyan seems to have abandoned cinema by trying to find new ways of forging his vision. It certainly seems a loss to cinema though.
Apart from this, the festival also included a Kazakh film Harmony Lessons directed by Emir Baigazin. The cinematographer Aziz Zambakiyev won an award at Berlin and some opening shots give us a superb sense of landscape. The film is both poetic and disturbing, and the youth of the film-maker as well as the unusual origin of the film for a competition film for the Berlinale suggests that major hopes will be placed on the shoulders of Baigazin for leading a Kazakh new wave. The film impressed not only at Berlin with very enthusiastic reviews but also convinced the festival jury in Moscow to award it the Gran Prix in spite of some very powerful competition such as the film that some critics suggested should have won at Venice (The Policeman's Wife) even though it divided the audience here.
This overview of the Russian and former Soviet nations input doesn't do justice to the importance of this festival as a whole. However badly funded this festival breathes a fresh gust of wind into the Moscow film scene. With whatever minimal resources the festival directors manage to find, their selection of films truly puts the late June Moscow International Film Festival to shame. As Andrei Plakhov argued in his piece for Kommersant by refusing to compete with other festivals or attempting to repeat the successes of others, this festival slowly increases its own sphere of influence to become one of the most vital and vibrant film festivals in Russia today.
The history of the British authorities and Russian cinema has been, it must be said, a rather shameful one. To detail, perhaps, the most obvious example, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was not only banned for almost three decades it then remained as X-rated for another three. In many ways Britain has never been one of the countries most open to Russian cinema.Outside narrow academic circles, Russian films rarely get noticed and even more rarely get shown. An anecdotal example was that of my local 'independent' cinema in the city of Brighton (the Duke of Yorks). An example sufficient to highlight the kind of difficulty one has in bringing Russian film to the UK. Brighotn's International Film Society after a few months decided that it was high time to show a Russian film and after consulting me drew up a list of ten films that the cinema could choose from to be shown at the society's monthly screening. Instead of picking from this ten it insisted on showing the only Russian film (Sokurov's Russian Ark) that had previously passed through its screens in its previous years. Russian film was still, in the early 2000s, practically unavailable outside the two or three films that would be shown at, say, the London Film Festival.
The Russian diaspora which has descended on the UK in recent years has led to some improvement. A Russian Film Festival now runs annually in London and under the previous London mayor, Ken Livingstone, a Russian Winter Festival involving cultural events and occasional film showings took place. Yet the UK still is a country whose reception of Russian cinema is far behind that of other cultures. Only last year a UK guest (and former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival) at the Odessa Film Festival was asked to name a Russian-language film that had impressed her recently. Yet the questioner was left unsatisfied because not one name came to mind to this British film critic. A rather similar scene greated the press conference of the very first Russian Film Festival in London. Pavel Lungin was practically begging the journalists at the press conference to ask the Russian panel about the films on show. Not one UK journalist could oblige him.
The Russian Film Festival seems, at least to have survived and thrived and Russian book fairs appear to have some kind of success in London (though whether the main pundits are British russophiles is doubtful- at least judging from the first Russian Film Festival 90% of atendees were Russian emigres). The odd Russian cultural centre like, for example, Pushkin House does some valuable work and the recent appearance of the Calvert Journal finally provides some detailed coverage of Russian culture to a larger audience. However, it now seems that the Britain embassy in Russia is stepping in to return Britain back to the 'good old days' of the Iron Curtain.
One of Russia's most respected documentary film-makers has felt the full bureaucratic force of Britain's visa clampdown making Russia's system seem much liberal in comparison. While the UK hasn't, it seems, stooped to deny Vitaly Mansky a visa in practice, it seems to wish to force him to cancel all other travel plans in order to visit the London Film Festival. In the case of Mansky an unrealistic choice given the fact that he is one of Europe's top documentary film-makers and will, of course, be invited to many festivals. This may be a rather insignificant detail on the UK's steady path to cultural isolationism and yet an indicative one. Mansky is not alone in terms of significant cultural figures from Russia being subjected to humiliation at the hands of British philistines at Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya. A number of respected Russian cultural figures have commented on the UK's arcane and insulting visa process in which passports are surrendered to the British embassy for up to a month. Vitaly Mansky appears to be in good company though. According to Claire Kitson's book on Yuri Norstein the worldwide acclaimed animated film-maker was subjected to a long search and interrogation by British customs on his trip to the UK.
The question has already been posed whether as a protest Mansky should not withdraw his film from the London Film Festival. It seems as though it's the Brits who look just like the officious, bureaucratic boors that they so like to portray Russians as. A case of Welcome Russian Culture, or No Unauthorized Access?
For the past months I have been digesting the large number of films seen at Kinotavr, Moscow and Odessa film festivals and I hope to produce a steady stream of reviews of many of the films watched as they appear here in Russia to general release. Hopefully, too, my longer reviews of the festivals will appear in the Bright Lights Film Journal at some point. In short, many films from and about Russia deserve mentions and there are probably too many highlights to mention. Nonetheless, I certainly hope to write about what has been dubbed Russia's first sex comedy Интимные Места (Intimate Parts), Kira Muratova's latest film (and as to be expected from yet another masterpiece that improves at each viewing Вечное Возвращение (Eternal Return), Lopushansky's new film Роль (Role) as well as Razykov's Стыд (Shame) and a share of documentaries including a major new film by the godfather of Russian documentary Vitaly Mansky with his film Труба (Pipeline).
One of the most intriguing foreign films of the Moscow film festival was the Spanish film El Efecto K: El Montador de Stalin by Valencian film director Valentí Figueres - a rather unique exploration of Soviet film history from the standpoint of an imagined friend of Eisenstein's it is one of the few attempts to explore the romance of the Soviet film experiment from a fictional mock documentary perspective so I am hoping to explore this film too in a separate post. If the films to write about are manifold then so are the new books that have or about to come out on Russian and Soviet film. And there is a lot to cheer about for both readers in Russian and in English. Books in Russian
For Russian readers Evgeni Margolit´s magnus opus on Soviet cinema history is surely one of the film books of the decade and the need for an English translation (and not just English translation) of one of Russia´s greatest living film scholars is urgent. Few have had the ability or the skill to explore Soviet film history in such depth magnificently overturning every prejudice and every stereotype that has been fixed to Soviet film. The attempts by foreign scholars in the field have rarely produced masterpieces on a large canvas. Jay Leyda still remains unique in handling a broad swathe of Soviet cinema history. Academics have produced much more staid copies of these histories given their general need to produce their works for the all too narrow category of undergraduate students. Some manage to write outside of this tradition but few in the Anglo saxon world are able to do so while transmitting genuine passion for their subject. Therefore all the more need for translations of those who have produced those masterpieces unproduceable in the Anglo Saxon world. Margolit's book is not a systematic study (for all its well over 500 pages) but takes on individual films and little studied phenomena with an erudition that astounds in each and every paragraph. I have given myself a year to read the book in and hopefully will produce a much more detailed review of this book.
Elena Stishova remains one of the most interesting film critics writing in Russia today. Her latest book analyses the movement from Soviet to post-Soviet cinema and from Tarkovsky, Shepitko, German she movesthrough Muratova and Abdrashitov on to Loznitsa and Zvyagintsev. Tracking a period beyond the confines of Margolit's book (his story finishes in 1968), Stishova is one of the essential voices helping us to understand the labyrinths and mental complexity of contemporary Russian film.
Having written late last year a small blog piece on Genadii Shpalikov and named him the Soviet Vigo little was I expecting to find Shpalikov´s own confirmation of the influence that Vigo had on him. The publication of a selection of Shpalikov´s writings demonstrate what a loss to Soviet cinema his suicide was after having written various film scripts and directed alas only one film. It seems that his contribution will rarely be fully acknowledged in any English-language study of Soviet cinema and yet his contribution like manydirectors of single film who played their main parts elsewhere- notably in scripwriting (Petr Lutsik being his 1990s equivalent) deserves some much fuller acknowledgment. I'll try to translate a few pieces in the near future to give some indication of Shpalikov's immense talent).
Books in English: If the new books in Russian deal with broader swathes of cinematic history or the writings of a singular figure in Soviet film, recent books in English have begun to look into the work of two fundamentally important figures in Russian and Soviet cinema. Two figures who, in some ways, couldn't be more different but nonetheless two figures who were significant outsiders both managing to change the entire perception and direction of Russian and Soviet cinema.
Alexei Balabanov who died this year has been described by Anna Neiman as Trofim-like in his relentless pursuit of leaving a trace on cinematic history and all too many Russian critics have been content on playing the Lumiere-like director in shunning him from the picture. Thankfully there have been scholars and writers who have shunned this ostracism like Anna Nieman herself in her superb essay for Kino Kultura on what was to be Balabanov's final film earlier this year (and hopefully more will come from her superb pen on Balabanov) and like Florian Weinhold who spent years studying the Balabanov oeuvre and specifically what he calls his zeitgeist films to publish the first major book on Balabanov to appear. Weinhold gives a fine description of these films and places them in a far wider and more international context than many film scholars are apt to do. Describing how Balabanov bends, distorts and subverts some Hollywood genres and how the misinterpretation of Balabanov has mislabelled the director for many years now, Weinhold's book is a heartfelt plea for Balabanov to be given his due not only in his native Russia but also far and wide. Florian supplied a fine introduction to this work on this blog in June but now the book is widely available and I hope to be able to review it in more depth at some point both here and elsewhere.
The second figure who finally is getting a major study is Sergei Parajanov. The author James Steffen is surely the person best placed to undertake this study and the title should be eagerly awaited by all. The sheer fact that so many books have been dedicated to Tarkovsky and none of note in the Anglo-Saxon world to Paradjanov means that a book to Paradjanov is long overdue. A Russian language biography of Paradjanov has been reviewed here but little justice has been done to Paradjanov's real contribution to world cinema. This book by James Steffen promises to be one of the major film books of the year and I hope to review it both here and on at least one other site.
Finally one of the most important translations for some time. Eisenstein's notes for a general history of cinema edited by that great Eisenstein scholar Naum Kleiman along with Antonio Somaini is also one of those dreams come true for those who haven't lost sight of the time when Soviet cinema really was full of Renaissance-like figures. To fail to note this book would be criminal. Yet another book that is likely to revolutionise one's image of this towering figure. A review of this book too will be forthcoming soon.
In short, both films and books that will be reviewed here and elsewhere in far more detail in the coming weeks and months. And wait for some possible announcement of a new website to be devoted to Russian and Soviet film in the coming months. If time and resources permit this blog will be transformed into a more significant and flexible source of news, information and analysis and reserach into Russian and Soviet film.
A number of news items around Russian film recently have suggested that Russian film and art in general is feeling the effects of the recent 'morality' laws on even if the consequnces may not be as direct as some have suggested. The anti-gay law, in particular, has been at the centre of attention in a number of Russian film stories and it is worth trying to consider these in order to work out what the possible consequences of the Mizulina and Milonov decrees may be. In many ways, these issues have been brewing for some time. Last year there seemed to be (what in retrospective appears as) a kind of prologue of the return of censorship in Russia with the attempt to keep the Serbian film Clip off of Russian cinema screen. The idea of a Hays Code for the Russian film industry was first mooted by Vladimir Putin back in 2011 but this summer this proposal seemed to take on new flesh with the establishment of a working group charged with developing 'a code of ethics' for the Russian film industry. This, of course, is only one of the contexts in which Russian film has found itself operating in more constraining circumstances. Another is the 'patriotic agenda' which the government seems intent on foisting on the Russian public with only occasional successes. Of course, cinema as a tool for state goals is nothing new in Russia but in the new post-Soviet Russia it has certain aspects which are make it more pernicious idea than in the Soviet Union. Partyl this is because the Russian film world has rarely been as divided as it is now- events have led to the formation of two separate film-makers unions and a poisoned atmosphere which will take long to heal. This schism is both personal, political and ideological and has led to a situation where Russian film world no longer speaks with one voice on barely anything which makes it well-nigh impossible for it confront the instrumentalisation of it by the power elite. For all the faults of someone like Ivan Pyryev may have had as Chairman of the Film-makers Union just after it was set up in the late 1950s, he at least acted as a counterweight to the demands of the Soviet nomenklatura and not as the voice of the post-Soviet power structures like Nikita Mikhalkov with his goal of creating a cinemenklatura acting in parallel with the political elite. Yet the Mikhalkov curse now may be becoming less relevant: Mikhalkov seems to have become a spent force who has wreaked his havoc. Now new forces are coming into play.
One of these is a rather interventionist Culture Minister in the guise of Vladimir Medinsky. An author of rather popular books designed to debunk myths about Russia, Medinsky has taken a much more ideological stance than many of his predecessors at the Ministry. While some reacted positively to his initial nomination as minister, Medinsky seems to have remained driven more by an interventionist vision of his own than by the much more laissez-faire approach of the Culture Minister of the early noughties, Mikhail Shvydkoi.
The Tchaikovsky biopic scandal.
It was, in fact, Medinsky who has recently intervened in one of the main 'scandals' which have touched on the question of homosexuality and Russian film: namely the proposed biopic on Tchaikovsky which will be filmed by Kirill Serebrennikov and scripted by Yuri Arabov.
Medinsky ostensibly backed up what Yuri Arabov is reported to have said in an interview with Izvestia which led him to denying that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was an incontrovertible fact, stated that those who insisted on the need for a film to portray Tchaikovsky as gay were philistines stating that he had no desire to 'promote homosexuality'. There was a hint that intimations of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality had been purged in rewriting of the script. Arabov is no newcomer to making controversial remarks but usually he is seen as someone highly critical of the state of things in both the Russian film-world and Russian society as a whole. It was just this April that Arabov made a speech at the NIKA ceremony that was excised from a television broadcast of the ceremony because of a striking denunciation of the states of things in the Russian film world. The journalist Natalia Antonova said of Arabov's speech that "those of us in attendance – and those of us with access to YouTube – will remember Arabov’s speech for a long time." Alas, it seems that Yuri Arabov will now be remembered outside of Russia for his part in spouting what appears to be the 'government line' on 'homosexual propaganda'. To my mind unfairly.
Alec Luhn's article in the Guardian about this story seemed to take little account of the context and the tone of the interview. If one reads the interview trying to imagine the situation of a journalist from a broadly pro-government newspaper interviewing you about a film which is yet to receive an important second batch of state funding, Arabov appears jesuitical. He seems sincere in saying that this is not a film about homosexuality (and he surely has the right and the ability to script this film about much more than this) but he probably said a lot that didn't reflect much more than a will to get the tiresome interview over with as quickly as possible. At the back of his mind Arabov may have been thinking that by his casuistry it would have had an easier journey through the funding hurdles that it still had to jump through. Maybe an ill-advised move in retrospect but it's a pity that Arabov's words are quoted once again by Shaun Walker and others without the gloss that Larisa Malyukova gives in her comment cited by Alec Luhn where she states that "You know what kind of ministry of culture we have. Everyone is being careful, and he's (Arabov) being careful, and rightly so". The ease with which foreign correspondents ignore context all too easily leads to the simple-minded trashing of reputations- in this case of one of Russia's most accomplished living script-writers.
In any case the Tchaikovsky saga had its sequels. If Yuri Arabov played a game of 'soft cop' to the authorities, Kirill Serebrennikov has been intent on taking on the role of 'hard cop' (the metaphor may not be entirely appropriate given the real power relations, of course). Even so Serebrennikov has not spared any words at what is clearly the idiocy of the cultural bureaucrats. He has mocked, cajoled and damned them in equal measure. First up was a short synopsis of his 'proposed film' on his Facebook page. In it the composer meets his first love at a ball only
to discover that she is already married. When she leaves her husband, Tchaikovsky
dies of cholera with his love by his side. His ruse to mock was soon uncovered. He had shared the synopsis of Carl Froelich decidedly heterosexual 1939 Nazi movie Es War eine Rauschende Ballnacht (which ironically went under the English-language title It was a gay ballnight.
The news just recently that the film had been denied a second amount of national funding through the Cinema Fund because the latter did not find any potential of winning much of an audience infuriated Serebrennikov (and justly so). His Facebook status of September 19th announced that he was fed up with the philistine preoccupation about the question of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality (that has been stirred up in the Russian press) and the deliberately humiliating and insulting comments made by the Cinema Fund regarding the proposed film. So angry was he that he announced that he would be return the 30milion roubles given by the Ministry of Culture and seeking all the finances for the film abroad reminding people of the sour reviews and poisonous gossip that Tchaikovsky had been subjected to in his own lifetime in Russia itself. Since then Serebrennikov has added a post that while not concerning the film directly is a reminder of what Russia has to lose if it goes further along the road of moral fanaticism that powerful forces such as the Orthodox Church hierarchy and the Milonov's and Mizulina's of the country seem to be pushing it towards. Speaking of the various waves of emigration that Russia suffered in the past century, Serebrennikov brought people's attention to the strange case of Olga Tobreluts and her exhibition in Rome which was denied any support by the embassy there on account of its possible contravention of the anti gay propganda laws. Tobreluts' decsion to remain in Budapest instead of returning to saint Petersburg lead to Serebrennikov arguing that these new laws were leading to a new wave of emigration from Russia to escape not wars, revolutions, famines or repressions but rather to get away from what the directors refers to as Мудаки (a very strong term of abuse that would have something of similar force as the swearword 'cunt' in the English language without the possible misoygyny that the English word implies). Whether the 'mudakrats' following the lead of the Milonov's and Mizullina's of this world will take notice is unlikely but Serebrennikov surely deserves to be supported by the entire Russian cultural world. His is a rather clear call to put a stop to the games of the moral fanatics who seem intent on launching a sacred war on secular Russian culture. He and his scriptwriter also need to be 'given a break' by certain Western journalists who know all too little about the Russian film context and draw rather stupid conclusions like this spectacularly ill-informed piece by Claire Brigg for Radio Free Europe which states that Serebrennikov has questioned Tchaikovsky's homosexuality. He has not. He stated that is not necessarily the theme that the film will centre around. As an artist (and a very fine film director) he has that right.
The scandal over the Tchaikovsky biopic (a genre which reached its apex and dominated Russian film in the late Stalinist years of the малокартинье (the film famine) has developed into an almost international case. Paul Rudnick's witty post in the New Yorker suggested some further creative re-adaptations of biopics that could be added to a hetero Tchaikovsky. Yet it seems that the Tchaikovsky affaire is not the only angle against which one may see the deleterious effects of recent developments. A further post will discuss other developments also related to the new 'morality' laws.
Further to my previous post regarding the refusal of the Ministry of Culture to prolong Naum Kleiman's contract as director of the Cinema Museum a few things have moved. The open letter translated in my previous post led to an apparent demarche on the part of the Culture Ministry who first denied that Naum Kleiman would be sacked and then was informed that his contract was being prolonged by a year. Also there was a promise to seriously start work on finding a permanent building for the Cinema Museum in both Moscow and St Petersburg. Some of the Russian cinematic community seemed to greet this with joy. Yet looking at things more soberly there seems much less to rejoice about than at first sight.
The idea that Naum Kleiman's contract has been prolonged for a year (and not longer) seems an utter insult. It only confirms that the Ministry of Culture do want him to be rid of him and that they seem to be happy to play a waiting game. Promises of seriously 'looking into' the idea of a new building for the Cinema Museum were made a decade ago when international names like Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, the brothers Dardenne publicly supported the call to keep the museum open. The German Chancellor of the time Gerhard Schroeder was supposed to have even brought up this with Putin. The Cinema Museum was not saved and no serious projects to build a new Cinema Museum have ever been allowed to get off the ground. The criminal raider-like theft of the old building near Krasnopresnenskaya went ahead and Naum Kleiman and his cinema museum was left roaming from one small cinema hall to another in the peripheries of Moscow over the past decade. There seems little real hope that a government willing to destroy its Academy of Sciences is half-interested in preserving its own radical cinematic history, little hope that a government insistent on force-feeding its population an ideological diet of religious nationalism is willing to genuinely allow and foster the return of a centre where revolutionary visions - often atheist and anarchist visions but nearly always transgressive visions- of global cinematic excellence can be readily available.
Another important moment of yesterday's agreement was the nomination of Konstantin Ernst as head of the Supervisory Council of the Cinema Museum. The General Director of Russia's First television Channel and producer of many rather tasteless films in the last decade and a half, there seems little encouraging in this fact either. The signature of Konstantin Ernst (along with that of Fedor Bondarchuk) looked rather incongruous in the open letter in defence of Naum Kleiman, but the fact that Ernst has wangled himself into a position of great importance bodes rather ill. The logic, I suppose, is that unless one can get people like this on your side there would be no hope for the Museum idea to be revived. And yet along with the prolonging of only one year of Naum Kleiman's contract and the manouevring of a person close to power into a position of great importance in this structure could soon prove to become the worst of all possible worlds.
What shouldn't be forgotten is that the Museum of Cinema also holds priceless exhibits often donated to the Cinema Museum precisely because Naum Kleiman was director and could be fully trusted. For this reason alone the Cinema Museum should be fully under the control of Kleiman and people who he personally nominates not for a further year but for perpetuity. This issue hasn't been broached at all in the past day or two and yet given the raider-like grab of the Cinema Museum building eight years old and the absolute inertia of the past decade, deep pessimism over this issue often proves to be the most realistic outlook.
As for the euphoria of today amongst the cinematic community in Russia I remember how in late 2005 a picket outside Dom Kino was staged in the hope of a last minute reprieve for the Cinema Museum. Up popped an actor-politician by the name of Yevgeni Gerasimov (a member of the Moscow Duma for United Russia) telling the demonstrators that everything was fine, the Museum of Cinema had been saved. A wave of euphoria seized the crowd. It wasn't to last very long- by the evening it was discovered that he had simply uttered a bare-faced lie - the cinema museum had instead been doomed.
"We, already without a cinemateque for a decade, are now rejoicing that the Minister of Culture has made such a fine agreement with our Langlois (the mythical director of Paris's Cinemateque who Kleiman has often been compared to), and no one is going to be sacked- at least, not yet, and the Museum will certainly exist. Sooner or later it will be built! Like in the old Soviet joke about a swimming pool in a lunatic asylum: we are diving so well that they've promised to add the water soon."
It seems that until the asylum's walls are broken down the promises are there to be broken. As for swimming pools we all know what happened to Moscow's finest open-air one.
If today's media reports are to be believed one of the crassest and appalling decisions has been made with regard to Russian film in the past decade: the Ministry of Culture has informed Naum Kleiman that it will not be renewing his contract after August 12th, thereby effectively sacking him. The Cinema Museum story is one that has been running for some time now- ever since the Museum was unceremoniously kicked out of its premises in 2005 spelling the death-knell for hopes of a renaissance in Russian film and the emergence of a Russian New Wave given the splendid educational role that it was carrying out. The Cinema Museum has since limped on with roaming events in a variety of locations in Moscow, most recently occasional showings at the Mossovet cinema. If the Ministry of Culture now believes that it can completely do without the scholarly expertise and genius of Naum Kleiman (a figure who has, correctly in my mind, been compared with the legendary Henri Langlois of the French cinemateque) it will be a sign of the total cultural bankruptcy of this government and its Ministry of Culture. Such a decision to remove a cultural authority of such global stature as Naum Kleiman smacks of cultural illiteracy at its most suicidal. Marginalizing Naum Kleiman has echoes of some very sinister historical antecedents. The film community in Russia has reacted quickly with an open letter appearing immediately in the Seance film journal. One can only hope that the whole world cinema community will follow suit should the reports be confirmed. My rough and rather quick translation of the Seance open letter appears here:
Open letter to the Minister
of Culture Vladimir Medinsky.
Respected Valdimir
Rostislavovich!
We
have heard from the mass media that from August 12th the permanent
director and founder of the Museum of Cinema Naum Kleiman will be removed from
his post. This decision, if it is to be final, would have the most serious and
negative effects on the future of Russian cinema.
We
fully understand that the Cinema Museum may be in need of a professional
manager who could resolve day-today administrative and financial issues working
alongside Naum Kleiman who was and is the leading artistic director. The Cinema
Museum for many years now has been roaming the capital without its own
premises. But if as a result of the arrival of this manager at the Museum, Naum
Kleiman were to leave we would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There
are institutes which at different times are led by charismatic and talented or
not very charismatic and not very talented people. These people can be changed
because with a change of personnel at the top of the institution, the body is
more important than the person who leads it. But Naum Kleiman created the
Cinema Museum. He is not only its’ director, he is its parent, its founding
father. And parents aren’t kicked out of their own home.
Naum Kleiman is a figure of global significance
and the Museum created by him is known far beyond Russian borders. In 2005 when the Cinema Museum was deprived of
its building, wise people warned that this would be a catastrophe not only for
film education but above all for the film industry. 8-10 years ago the then
rising young directors all announced that they were formed by the Cinema
Museum.
Vladimir
Rostislavovich we ask you personally to go out of your way so that Naum Kleiman
as a leading scholar, a researcher who has helped to foster more than one
generation of directors and finding himself at the height of his creative
powers, should be assured 100% artistic independence from any manager in
terms of programming, decisions regarding the fate of the Museum’s
collection as well as in terms of the selection of his creative team. If he no
longer remains among the acting directors of the Museum, if he leaves, then
there would, in reality, be nothing left for a new director to manage, whoever
that manager is.
We assure
you that in our film community, and in the world film community, there is not a
single serious cinematographer who would not relate to Naum Kleiman and his
work other than with immense respect and boundless attachment.
It was signed by Liubov Arkus, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Georgii Daneliya, Sergei Selyanov, Alexander Sokurov, Sergei Solovivev and Konstantin Ernst. Signatures are being added all the time. Here is the link in Russian: Open letter in support of Naum Kleiman
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