on the new Post-Soviet Cinema
Max Pyziur
filmmaker by the name of Kira Muratova from Odessa. Someone recently
pointed me in the direction of the following piece taken from the March
1993 issue of Sight and Sound.
All typos are my own.
Max
p...@panix.com
wasl...@simon.wustl.edu
begin attached -----------
Private Lives of Russian Cinema (Sight & Sound, Mar. '93, pp. 26-29)
A sensitive policeman, a baby abandoned in a cabbage
patch and a narcoleptic teacher: these are among the
subjects explored in the new post-Soviet cinema.
By Julian Graffy
'No,' said Alice, 'I don't even knew what
a Mock Turtle is." (Lewis Caroll)
'It lies all the time, that Nevsky Prospect...'
(Nikolai Gogol)
"What the Soviet Union was I knew, but as for
Russia, we've never been introduced," an old
peasant woman tells Iosif Pasternak when
asked in his new documentary, Le Fantome Efremov,
what her country's newly restored name
means to her. But what land of a country was it
that had two names, The Soviet Union and The
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - neither of
which contained the slightest hint of geography,
any reference to a place you could find on
a map? In return, these names that weren't
a place seem only too appropriate for a country
that continued to exist for 70 years through an
act of linguistic and ideological funambulism,
the triumph of will over actuality, of state
mythology over lived experience.
During the period of the hegemony of
Socalist Realism, with its 'positive heroes' and
'elevating' ('revolutionary romantic') depiction
of life as it ought to be, Soviet art came close
to achieving the 'paradisiacal' monophony
deplored by the writer Evgeny Zamiatin in a
series of admonitory essays written shortly
after the October revolution. The Krushchev
'thaw' inaugurated, in cinema as in the other
arts, a troubled attempt to reclaim polyphony,
the primacy of individual experiences hitherto
marginalised by an art which centered human
aspisations on constructing factories,
overfufilling five-year plans or defending the
motherland, banishing the complexity of personal
emotion from a world which excoriated
'psychologlsing' as a throwback to the disdained
pre-Revolutionary epoch.
It is now fashionable to dismiss the Brezhnev
years as a 'period of stagnation' but the
investigation of individual experience gained
in strength during those years, a process represented
in literature through the Moscow novels
of Yury Trifonov and in cinema through a succession
of powerful subversions of official
dogma by the director Vadim Abdrashitov and
his regular scriptwriter Aleksandr Mindadze.
But if personal imperatives were back on the
artistic agenda, the chasm between the private
and public for the individual Soviet citizen was
as enormous as ever. Veteran director Yuly Raizman
actually called his 1982 film about the
uneasy adjustment of a Moscow bureaucrat to
premature retirement Private Life.
For Soviet women, of course, the balancing
act was even more demanding, and their
attempts to stay on the tightrope are addressed
in a series of important films of the period. In
Kira Muratova's first film Short Meetings (1967)
Valentina Ivanovna (played by Muratova herself)
manages to cope with the towns water-
supply problems, but almost loses her nomadic
husband. Sofiko, in Lana Gogoberidze's Several
Interviews on Personal Matters (1978), is a successful
journalist, but her husband's resentment at
her long working hours makes him turn to
other women. Elizaveta, in Gleb Panfilov's I
Want to Speak (1975), is a national champion
rifleman and model of upward mobility,
Soviet style, but her obsessive attention to public
business - she actually becomes the chairman
of her towns Soviet - and her naive faith
in party dogma lead to the death of her son.
Only in Vladimir Menshov's fairy tale Moscow
Doesn't Believe in Tears (1979) does a chance meeting
on a train lead our heroine belatedly to a
successful marriage of career and true love.
The Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers'
Union, in May 1986, ushered in a greater freedom
of expression, whether about the
cankered Stalinist past or - the rackety, chaotic
present - a present that could now include the
disaffected youth of Valery Ogordinikov's 1987
Burglar or Setgel Solovev's 1988 ASSA, as well as
the hard currency prostitutes of Petr Todorovsky's
1989 Intergirl. Documentarists filed
their reports on the experiences of drug
addicts and Aids victims. The private life that
was being retrieved was confused, often damaged,
sometimes ugly.
The key film text of the period is Muratova's
The Asthenic Syndrome (1989). The film opens with
the doctor heroine Natalia moaning hysterically
at the funeral of her husband, and Muratova's
camera then trails her back to the
nightmarish concrete of her apartment block
through city streets where she abuses and is
abused by strangers. In its concentration on a
woman's experience and its black-and-white
photography, the film is reminiscent of Muratova's
first two films, Short Meetings and Long
Farewells (1971), both shelved for their failure to
offer positive models of behaviour. But suddenly,
40 minutes into The Asthenic Syndrome,
black and white gives way to colour, and we are
revealed to have been watching a film, and one
not at all to the liking of its cinematic audience,
who make determinedly for the exits,
resisting the lure of a discussion with the leading
actress about the triumphs of Soviet authorial cinema,
and muttering that they did not
come to the cinema to be depressed, they can
get enough of that at home.
As the second part of The Asthenic Syndrome
reveals, they are only too right. If Natalia's
despair is motivated by bereavement, and if life
finally reclaims her in her acceptance of the
kindness of a young woman who cleans her
coat, the Moscow of part two of the film is a
place of shocking, universal trauma, the debilitating
condition of the film's title expressing
itself by turn in the 'My Own Private Moscow'
narcolepsy of the teacher hero Nikolai and the
bouts of frenetic activity of the other characters.
If the Muscovites of The Asthenic Syndrome
are revealed to have private lives, these seem to
be lives without moral of even linguistic rudders.
Muratova had her characters repeat their
lines even in Short Meetings, but here the device
is formalised as, for example, a pair of school-
girls prate their lesson in Russian and English,
exposing the fatuousness of what they are
taught. By 1989, if Muratova's diagnosis is correct,
the gap between official bohaviour and
private desires has reduced an entire country
m neurotic semi-idiocy.
The accuracy of The Asthenic Syndrome was
acknowledged by its achieving the distinction,
rare in the perestroika period, of being briefly
shelved. The reasons for this banning are themselves
revealing: objections were made to a
scene at the end of the film in which a well-
dressed woman on the underground gives vent
to a stream of obscene invective. Language was
always a crucial weapon in the armoury of
a regime that called its main newspaper
Pravda ('The Truth'). Late Soviet bureaucracy,
it appeared, was not at all discountenanced by
a public discourse where distance from reality
was apparent even to schoolchildren, but could
not tolerate a speech which echoed the experience
of the Moscow streets.
A further reason for the shelving of The
Asthenic Syndrome is alleged to have been its
naked bodies. The reclamation of private life
by Russian cinema has included a reclamation
of the body, a process that has taken a variety of
forms. The burgeoning video salons have done
good business with some of the causes celebres of
western cinematic nudity, and with the
inevitable glut of Soviet simulacra. But if the
bodies of Hollywood seem dressed even in their
nudity, clothed in the burnished beauty of
their flawless skins, Muratova shows us nakedness.
The young men and women of The Asthenic
Syndrome stare statically at camera, as if to
remind us of what bodies, ordinary bodies so
long elided from Soviet cinema, actually look
like. Muratova's latest film, The Sensitive Policeman,
contains two long sequences in which the
naked policeman and his wife get up, wash and
dress for work. Nakedness, not nudity, is also
what gives savage power to a scene at the end of
Vitaly Kanevsky's Don't Move, Die and Rise Again!
(1989) in which a mother flails around a settlement
after the death of her daughter, directly
echoing the ending of Dovzhenko's Earth,
where a naked woman, devastated by the loss
of her lover, sways frenziedly around a peasant
hut (a scene that was cut from the Soviet version
of the film for many years).
The body is restored to us too in a remarkable
recent film by Aleksandr Sokurev. The Second Circle
(1990). Death is, of course, one of the
commonplaces of cinema, but dead bodies are
not. Sokurov's originality, as the critic Mikhail
Yampolsky has pointed out, is not to show the
death of his hero's father, but to devote his
entire film to the bereft sons dealings with the
body - washing it, registering it, moving it and
preparing it for burial - and through this
to provide a corrosive snapshot of late-Soviet
alienation.
These and other films of the Gorbachev
years managed to chronicle, with sometimes
devastating passion, a society terminally
estranged from itself. In the last two years.
however, some film-makers have felt able to
move even further in the direction of an
almost clinical analysis, putting their human
exhibits under a compassionate but unflinching
microscope, codifying their assumptions,
behaviour and language, exposing their disorientation,
battered hopes and fragile yearnings.
Cabbage Patch and cliche
"See the Policeman standing on point duty
Watching everything, committing
Everything to memory and .see his bride,
The Ambulance speeding up all in white..."
(Dmitry Prigov)
Tolia, the hero of Muratova's The Sensitive Policeman,
finds an abandoned baby in a cabbage
patch and takes it back to the police station,
where a middle-aged female doctor exmines it
before it is temporarily deposited in a children's
home. Later, Tolia and his wife Klava conceive
the idea of adopting the child, but the home's
managers outmaneuver them and little
Natashka is given to the doctor.
Muratova first worked on this screenplay
during the Brezhnev period, when she was
banned from directing, but was not allowed to
develop it because "such things do not happan
in this country." Years later, after completing
The Asthenic Syndrome, overwhelmed by "a long
period of despair, because it seemed to me that
there was nowhere to go and nothing to say,
that everything had been said," she returned to
her foundling and, one can surmise, made of it
a rather different film.
The film's very title should alert us to Muratova's
analytical intent, for if the policeman
(strong, brave, alert, protective) is a key component
of official Soviet mythoIogy, he is also, as
Klava complains, the butt of subversive, mocking
popular anecdote. But Muratova's Tolia is
not the policeman of official myth - he is
scarcely seen at work. His superiors are never
mentioned, even his colleague is only glimpsed
taking his children to school. This is a policeman
observed in private life - and there is
something decply wrong about private life in
The Sensitive Policeman. As much as in The Asthenic
Syndrome, it seems drained of meaning, a meaning
Tolia searches for in his compulsive disquisitions
about the horrifying chance that he and
Klava might never have met.
All the characters in the film, but particu-
larly the men, seem naive, childish, doll-like -
this is a world in which ideas, not children, are
conceived, and children are adopted or found
in cabbage patches. The film, made by the Pri-
modessa company as the USSR was coming to
an end, includes set-piece scenes in symbolic
Soviet institutions - police station, children's
home, courtroom - but the denizens of these
places are all either corrupt or mad and seem
to be performing rather than experiencing
their lives. It is also audaciously contains its own
heretically privatised 'Odessa Steps' sequence,
in which Tolia asks Klava whether she has
remembered to eat, and expresses his pity for
the suffering of walls and grass. Muratova's
eye for Soviet reality is breathtakingly acute,
down to the large red Moscow Olympics towel
with which Tolia and Klava dry themselves
after their morning ablutions, but her boldest
formal strokes are in the areas of character
and language, where the devices invented for
The Asthenic Syndrome are overt and pervasive.
The Sensitive Policeman is a film full of doublings,
including a succession of pairs of characters
- two nurses; two disabled workmen, one
missing the left hand, the other the right; even
Tolia and Klava themselves, who dress and tie
their shoelaces in unison. This doubling is
echoed in actions, in repetitions of the same
bodily tics, in entire sequences, but above all in
language. Scarcely a line in The Sensitive Policeman
man is not repeated: twice, three times, four
times. Whole conversations, of which a lengthy
scene at the beginning of people complaining
about the nocturnal barking of dogs is but one
bravura example, are threaded out of reiterated
cliches, while some characters can express
themselves only through varying the intonation
and word order of a single sentence.
By making overt the riches of Soviet lexis,
ranging from offical jargon to street squabbles
(an approach allied to the Russian Conceptualist
Poets recent project of studying the linguistic
world of daily life by incanting its
platitudes). Muratova offers a seering analysis
of late-Soviet mentalities. The bold formalism
of The Sensitive Policeman displays an entire world
drifting, in Cavafy's words, "at a slight angle to
the universe."
Dream of elsewhere
Nikolal Dostal's Cloud Heaven (shown at last
year's London Film Festival) could be read as a
companion piece to The Sensitive Policeman. Its
hero, the naive dreamer Kolia, failing to engage
any of the other inhabitants of his provincial
small town block of flats in conversation one
boring Sunday, announces in frustration - for
something to say - that he is leaving, inventing
a mysterious invitation out east from an old
schoolmate. All his lugubrious acquantances,
from his best friend Fedia to a pair of hitherto
contemptuous crones, plunge avidly into his
fiction, his dream of elsewhere, arranging a
jolly farewell party at which they studiously
ignore him, concentrating their passion on the
pies and vodka.
Dostal's characters, like Muratova's, have
only a tentative hold on reality, and he is
equally alert to the drabness of Soviet language
- Kolia's conversational gambits are endlessly
repeated reports that though the radio forecasts
rain, it has nevertheless "turned out nice again".
Like Muratova's Tolia, Kolia uses a fantasy
narrative to attempt to bring his life to life.
Iosif Pasternak's new documentary Le Fantome
Efremov, made for French Television is
structured round asking the inhabitants of the
town of Efremov what Russia (their newly restored
country) means to them. Pasternak
chose Efremov because of its situation in the
centre of Russia, near the estates of Tolstoy and
turgenev (Chkhov called it the muddiest town
he'd ever visited), and because in 1917 the
writer Konstantin Paustovsky went there to
report on how the Russian backwoods had
responded to the Revolution. A man explains
that the latest revolution, the defeat of the
August 1991 putsch, was "a Moscow event",
unnoticed here. Another, younger man insists
that Efremov itself is a phantom, a place (like
the worlds of Tolia and Kolia) that has too
little energy to exist outside the collective
hallucination of its inhabitants. At the end of the film
Liudochka, a young kindergarten teacher who
might be Chekhov's Irina, dreams (like Kolia) of
escaping, not to Moscow, but to the regional
centre, Tula, where the cultured citizens
complete entire sentences without swearing.
Painful autopsy
The Russian press now carries regular cries of
alarm about the cinematic production crisis,
the distribution crisis, the attendance crisis
(a survey of Muscovites taken last year revealed
that 65 per cent of them had been to the cinema
less than three times in the last six
months, a catastrophic figure by Russian standards).
And yet films of high quality are still
being made, their makers participating in the
autopsy on the Soviet experiment that is a key
strand of contemporary intellectual life.
The cinematic inquest is also proceeding in
other arenas. The Cinema Museum in Moscow
has embarked on an ambitious retrospective of
Russian and German films from the 20s to the
80s, which will continue intermittently for a
year. Despite financial turmoil in the publishing
world, important new film journals continue
to appear. Typical of the work published
in the stylish Seans (St. Petersburg, six issues
since 1990) is a reclamation by critic Oleg
Kovalov of Andrei Moskvin, the cinematographer
who gave the 20s FEKs (Factory of the Eccentric
Actor) films of Kozintsev and
Trauberg (The Devil's Wheel, The Overcoat, SVD and
New Babylon) their haunted, neurotic surface.
Kinovedcheskie zapiski (Cinematic Notes, Moscow,
14 issues since 1988) has had special issues on
such subjects as Eisenstein, FEKS and 70s cinema,
and devotes its lates issue to Tarkovsky.
The doyen of Russian film magazines, Iskusstvo
kino (Art of the Cinema, a journal which has lately
taken to paying Sight and Sound the compliment of
reprinting its recent articles), has also had
some excellent special issues, notably on
women in cinema and on Jewish cinema.
Somehow, too, pioneering books continue to
appear, however niggardly the print run. Levon
Grigorian's Tri tsveta odnoi strasti (Three Colours of
a Single Passion, Moscow, 1991) is the first booklength
study in Russian of the posthuously
lionised Sergei Paradzhanov, who was imprisoned
and banned from Soviet screens. Yury Tsivian's
Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino. Kinematograf v
Rossii 1896-1930 (The historical Reception of the
Cinema. The Cinematograph in Russia 1896-1930, Riga,
1991), due to appear in English in 1994, is a work
of fundamental importance. Combining
keen intellectual curiosity with exemplary
scholarship, Tsivian traces the evolution not
just of film language, but of the receptive
capacities and tastes of the filmgoing audience,
bringing the period of Russian and Soviet
silent film into focus as never before.
Tne most famous Soviet film fan was, of
course, Joseph Stalin. Kremlevskii tsenzor,
Stalin smotrit kino (The Kremlin Censor.
Stalin Watches the Cinema, Moscow,1992) by Grigory Mariamov,
who worked at the time at the State Cinema
organization Goskino and helped the cinema
minister Ivan Bolshakov select new offerings
for the leader, is chaotically organised, but
shows just how directly and compulsively
Stalin intervened in all aspects of "the most
important art". Stalin, it transpires, read and
corrected scripts, down to orthographical
errors and misplaced commas; suggested
themes; changed endings; changed titles;
changed the winners of Stalin prizes; and
even told Eisenstein to shorten Ivan the Terrible's
beard. He planned Mikhail Chiaureli's The fall of Berlin
as part of a bombastic series intended to
demonstrate his greatness as a military leader,
to be entitled Stalin's Ten Blows (only three of
them were made). He saw The Great Waltz and
demanded from Bolshakov a series of films on
Russian composers such as Glinka and Rimsky-
Korsakov. He hated Chaplin's The Great Dictator
and the only copy was securely locked away.
Mariamov's book gives detailed accounts of
Stalin's dealings with Soviet film-makers, from
his removal of Trotsky from Eisenstein and
Aleksandrov's October in 1927 until his death
a quarter of a century later.
A farcical business
At the beginning of three earlier decades, the
20s, the 30s and the 50s, a range of political and
economic, cultural and ideological pressures
brought Russian cinema to its knees. Now it is
again in crisis, a crisis that is but a microcosm
of the desperate state of a country buffeted by a
series of shocks, psychological as much as political
and economic. But Russian cinema has
shown great staying power, and the breadth of
its appeal should not be underestimated.
In 1913 Tsar Nicholas II dismissed the new
art form: "I consider that cinematography is an
empty matter, which no one needs ... Only an
abnormal person could place this farcical business
on the level of art." Yet according to Peter
Kenez's new study Cinema and Soviet Society 1917-1953,
Nicholas was at the same time fascinated
by the new technology, commissioning myriad
royal newsreels and bestowing the title 'court
cinematographer' on at least five of his subjects.
The talented and brave people working in the
industry today are needed as never before
to hel their audiences articulate an understanding
of the disjointed times they are living
through. One can only ope that reports of
impending cataclysm will turn out to have been
exaggerated.