RUSSIAN CINEMA AFTER THE GREATS
The moment one talks of Russian cinema one thinks of Eisenstein or Tarkovsky.
These stalwarts, no doubt, did wonders not just for Russian Cinema but also for cinema as an Art. They contributed to and evolved a language of film that was both path breaking and unique. Editing as it were owes its existence to Eisenstein and Mood/Atmosphere to Tarkovsky.
A few adjectives can sum up the typical Russian Film easily:
poetic, ponderous, philosophical, mystic and metaphysical.
Is it their history you might ask. Is it their political belief? Is it Communism?
Or Socialism in its benign form that brought out these facets in its sons.
Whatever the cause, the humility of these Directors cannot be denied. The reverence with which they approach the camera and the extreme excellence with which they handle it can only point to their training, their education, and their overall development as human beings which lends itself so brilliantly to film making.
One has only to watch ‘THE CRANES ARE FLYING by MIKHAIL KALATOZOV’ to learn what the camera is capable of. Shot by his long time collaborator and cinematographer SERGEI URUSEVSKY this black and white 1957 film is a lesson in using the cumbersome camera as a paint brush, a sharpened pencil, a chisel.
No doubt the VGIK [??? RUSSIAN FEDERATION STATE INSTITUTE OF CINEMATOGRAPHY, the first ever film school in the world, est 1919] plays a substantial part in their growth, their shaping into auteurs and into complete craftsmen but one would be forced to accept that their love of poetry as a nation, their prodigious literary output, their acute musical ear and their ease with the painterly palette has also contributed to this phenomenon.
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin, Akhmatova, Yevshenko, Kandinsky, Chagall…..Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Shoshtakovich……….
Of course these and other looming personalities would have had their influence on a growing nation, struggling in bread lines and Siberian camps, in the terrible aftermath of World War II . In the aftermath of Lenin, of Stalin, Of Kruschev, of Gorbochev. Of Yeltsin. Now with Putin.
Harsh conditions and lack of basic amenities would have sensitized them to a world of dreams, a world of idealism, a world of intense emotions. A world that gets lost when we have nothing to struggle for or against.
It is said of the Russians that they were the most literary people in the world in the Pre-Perestroika times.
Does Capitalism squeeze away the need for a thought process hell bent as it is only on profit? Or is there a middle path, the Golden Mean of the Buddha that can be achieved without selling one’s soul?
A journey that traverses through technology, art and commerce without losing its focus. Its destination being the newly discovered art of the 20th century. Film. At least this is what Lenin believed even if it was Bolshevik Propaganda,
that Film was the Supreme Art which led to the birth of one of the best Film Schools in the world.
After the break down of the Soviet Empire, the generosity that lent itself to such an expensive craft went missing along with the Politburo. Creative Councils sprung up overnight, run by independent producers lured more by the glamour of film making than by film itself. Hardly twenty-twenty five films of substance get made these days, but among those that do, what a world!
Just as Iran has been aided in its cinematic output by it turbulent history, tumultuous political upheavals and a universal love for rhyme and metaphor, Russia too is able to produce great works of cinematic art for similar reasons. A few films to have come out in the past decade hold light to this fact. Women Directors, Visual Effects , Horror stories, Hi-Def Films, yes the Russian Film has broken barriers and boundaries like the rest of the world but without losing its innate capacity to question and provoke the audience into artistic submission.
Handpicked notables include:
THE THIEF –PAVEL CHUKRAJ
SKY. PLANE .GIRL –VERA STOROZHEVA
NIGHT WATCH –TIMUR BEKMAMDETOV
BURNT BY THE SUN- NIKITA MIKHALKHOV
RUSSIAN ARK – ALEKSANDR SOKUROV
THE RETURN – ANDREY ZVYAGINTEV
ROADS TO KOKTEBEL – BORIS KHLEBNIKOV
A case in point
CUCKOO – ALEXANDER ROGOSHKIN
Cuckoo, is an exquisite portrayal of humanistic characters caught up in strife not of their doing. They are at odds with one another via language barriers and social conditioning. How do these differences contribute to humour in such a dire situation? How do these differences matter? Do they? At a very basic level each of them realizes that the ultimate truth of his/ her existence can be reached only through Life, which can happen only via Peace.
Shot in Lapland, in the gorgeous winter sun, capturing the brilliant Northern light in all its hues and tones, Rogoshkin does wonders with his sequence of the Land of the Dead.
Giving due respect and regard for the indigenous culture of the Sami Peoples, he does great service by showcasing their food habits , raiment , customs and dying traditions before they are lost in the mayhem of modernity.
The main lead Anni [ ANNI-KRISTIINA-JUUSO ] is herself a Sami and this provides great authenticity to her role. It is not very often that we see soldiers spouting classics to garner peace.The Finn [ VILLE HAAPASAALO ] mentions ‘WAR AND PEACE’, ‘A FAREWELL TO ARMS’ etc , while the Russian [ VIKTOR BYCHKOV ] moons over poetry , nature and specifically mentions the great Russian poet YESENIN ……and of course the Sami talks of her female needs with a lack of self consciousness that would shame any feminist. It is all done with a brushstroke of classicism. Spirits, Ravens, Potions, and Amulets all exist in happy proximity with Bombers and Female Fighter Pilots as easily as a Sami making love to both a Finn and a Russian without any inhibitions.
An interview with the Director Rogoshkin on his forthcoming film is followed by a review of the film Cuckoo.
Wednesday, 12 July 2006
Alexander Rogozhkin in Karlovy Vary.
Fabrizio Maltese for europeanfilms.net
Peregon (Transit) is the new film from prolific Russian writer-director Alexander Rogozhkin, which was presented In Competition at this year’s edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Several of his past films have screened there, including Zhizn Idiotom (Life with an Idiot) and the Chechen war drama Blokpost (Check Point), for which he won the Best Director Prize in 1998. Peregon is a story set on a secret military transit base in the remote Chukotka region, where planes from allied forces came in from Alaska, including quite a few with female pilots, which of course attracted the attention of the mostly male Russian crew at the base. Boyd van Hoeij, the editor of europeanfilms.net, met with Peregon’s director during the festival.
Where did the original idea for Peregon come from?
The idea came to me twenty years ago, but I thought I would do it differently. There were three ways used by the US to aid Russia at the time [during WWII]: through Persia, via the North and through Chucotka, though the Chucotka connection was completely secret, and the first publications about it only appeared at the beginning of the 1990s. I already had a script about this time and these people, but since it would probably have been impossible to shoot it [on location] in Persia, I changed the setting to Chucotka.
Are the characters complete fictional creations or did you model some of your characters on stories from actual people who worked at such transit bases in WWII?
I read a lot about the subject, but the characters are purely fictional. What surprised me when I was working on the script and doing research in the archives was that the people who worked at the military bases were very young; they were born in 1925 or 1927. In that time, the people who would participate in normal life were killed or hurt in the war. Kurt Vonnegut said of the First World War generation that the war had made them four centimetres shorter…
How did you decide on the structure of the film, which offers a panoramic view of many different characters?
The decision was quite easy, because I love novels and novelists from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Tolstoy, Faulkner, Updike and Dostoyevsky. In fact, I would call my film a “film novel”. Tom Woolfe, writing about Faulkner, said that the story is like a postage stamp: it is not the story that is important, but the inner life of the characters. I was very happy to be able to write about them, and I wrote the film as if it were a novel. The producers hate it, because they always want something shorter and when they translated the script in English, it became even longer: almost twice as long as in Russian! The film is a bit longer than originally planned, though. If I were more talented the film would have been shorter! [Laughs.]
There is small murder mystery in the second half of the film. While the first half is an impressionistic portrait of the characters, when the murder investigation begins, the storytelling becomes more rigid because it demands a form in which such things can be properly resolved.
I did this on purpose, creating a more impressionistic first part in which things pass as in life and are not really organised. Then, when the investigator arrives and he starts his investigation and tries to understand what happened, we start to organise the material. It is then that [the audience] starts understanding who is who, what their various relationships to each other are, and how some have a different, second life hidden behind the first one. It thus shows you that very often, things on the surface seem very different from how they truly are: you see a person from one side, and then you suddenly see this person as someone completely different. Good people become bad, bad people become better, some turn out to be informers though you never expected them to be. As a director, I tried to be a provocateur, trying to get the audience to participate, let them make their own decisions and also let them change their point of view about certain characters, as happens in real life.
Would you say that the film is patriotic?
Yes, I do think it is a patriotic film, but not only for the Russian people but for all the allies who helped each other during WWII. In Russia, we differentiate between “kvasnoy”, which is a very superficial, simple kind of patriotism and real patriotism, and this film would belong in the latter category. What is interesting for me as an artist is that, of course, it is very bad that people participate in and kill each other during wars, but at the same time, I can show and admire that even in the worst circumstances, a human being can remain a human being.
Have you got an idea of the Russian public’s reaction, even though the film came out in Russia only this week?
It will be interesting to see their reaction to this kind of film. During the Soviet era, it was said that we were the most literature-oriented and -reading people in the world, but now we say that Russian people do not like to read, at least not those who go to the cinema. They are a lot of subtitles in this film: some dialogue is in American English, some in the native language of Chukotka [which is not related to Russian] and there is no voice-over, so it will be interesting to see how the audience will react. It is a time in which simple stories seem to prevail, where everything moves along predictable lines and there are just two characters who meet on a train or in a plane. Of course these stories can be made interesting as well, but it seems that people do not want to work hard to make their stories more interesting.
Could you talk a bit about your new film?
I am currently writing the script for a film set in the eleventh century. It is now set in Russia, but it will probably be changed to Norway and Constantinople. It is about the great movements of the tribes and will take a long pre-production time. In the meantime, I might do something simpler [in terms of production], a contemporary story.
Director portraits (c): Fabrizio Maltese for europeanfilms.net, 2006. Special thanks to Raisa Fomina of Peregon’s sales agent Intercinema XXI Century for the translation from the Russian.
Movie Review
The Cuckoo (2003)
THREE’S COMPANY Wartime strangers connect in the moving ”Cuckoo”
Credits
Limited Release: Jul 11, 2003; Rated: PG-13; Length: 104 Minutes; Genres: Foreign Language, Romance; With: Viktor Bychkov, Ville Haapasalo and Anni-Kristiina Juuso
A-
By Lisa Schwarzbaum for Entertainment Weekly.
The Cuckoo is a stirring action movie — in the international manner of ”The Fast Runner” or ”No Man’s Land” rather than ”T3.” Indeed, actions express what words can’t in Alexander Rogozhkin’s captivating pacifist drama, set in the starkly beautiful, primeval forest greenery of Lapland during the summer of 1944 before Finland pulled out of its alliance with Nazi Germany. There, on a remote reindeer farm, a wounded Russian army captain who writes poetry (Viktor Bychkov) and a Finnish soldier who doesn’t want to fight (Ville Haapasalo) find refuge with Anni (Anni-Kristiina Juuso), a young Lapp widow. No one shares a language. Yet superficial definitions of enemy and ally fall away as a ménage of companionship and shared labor is established.
The speech barrier separating the three intimate strangers doesn’t keep them from talking; in fact, incomprehension inspires volubility, as each freely pours out needs and longings. (In the film’s sweetest moments of comedy, misinterpretation is absurdly cheerful, each expressive talker blithely confident that the other surely understands.)
”The Cuckoo” is about the primal human desire to connect (with her husband gone for four years, Anni hungers for a man’s touch) and the possibility that peace is a more powerful instinct than war. Rogozhkin, who also wrote the eloquent screenplay, has an unobtrusive respect for his odd trio, a deep understanding of the extraordinary Lapp landscape and how to use it without relying on its exoticism, and a keen eye for casting: Juuso, herself a Sami (as the Lapp people prefer to call themselves) reindeer herder and who is making her feature debut, holds the screen with her open gaze, and when she loses herself in spiritual rituals to nurse a wounded man to life, her radiance transcends the boundaries of language.
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KKK…very intrsting post.But it was very very looong. If we could have put the whole thing in two posts, that would have been great.
KKK – you have me ^:)^^:)^^:)^^:)^^:)^^:)^
to your knowledge on russian cinema …
Very warm welcome to PFC :-)
Yes it is true that we only hear about Eisenstien and Tarkovsky when it comes to discussing Russian Cinema …. but thanks for your pointers.
Wonderful to find someone posting on Russian cinema here …
Hey, great post…One of the best in fact in recent days…. Here are a few more good films Russia made in the past two decades :
The italian
Luna papa
Khrustalyov, My Car!
Strana glukhikh
hey KKK..great post..we need more people to write about other international cinema..lesser known..unseen..thank you so much..
hey ct..heard about the italian but not the other three..do you have them,seen them..where when how?
AK: Good to see you back on PFC…. We were all wondering ki ‘kahan chale gaye’. All the films that I have mentioned are winners of the Russian Guild of Film Critics award which has also been won by films like ‘The return’ and ‘Svoi’. have been trying to get these films for a long time now but all without luck.
I can give you all the films that KKK names in her post..provided you find for me the names you added ha ha
Deal! I have russian ark, the return and Night watch… I really want Cuckoo…looks like a damn interesting film…
Thank you all for being so encouraging.
I agree P that the post is long , got carried away!
I have not seen the films that Chaitanya mentioned………will get hold of them now.
And KK loved your ‘bouquets’.
As for Anurag, what can I say except that I wish I had made BLACK FRIDAY. I am really excited to get a comment from you.
Merci Beaucoup.
K3