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| Arsenal |
It is usual to divide Russian cinema into
three periods: the Russian Empire years, which concluded in 1917; the Cinema of
the Soviet Union; and, after 1989, Russian movies. Soviet Cinema sub-divides
into a pre-Stalin ‘Golden Age’, 1925 to 1929. Under Stalin the movie industry
was ordered to follow the rules of Socialist Realism, 1933 to 1941; the avant-gardists
- Kouleshov, Vertov, Eisenstein - were denounced as ‘elitist’. Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937) was destroyed and
only some photographs remain. Eisenstein’s response was Alexander Nevsky
(1938), Ivan the Terrible Part 1
(1944) and Ivan the Terrible Part II
(1945) where, no longer allowed to use montage, he develops a slow paced, long
take style. It is employed to great effect in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964): no-one makes eye contact.
Tarkovsky uses it to encourage the viewer to contemplate and appreciate the
world we are part of. Kelly Reichardt and former Borderlines guest Patrick
Keiller also use this approach, for their own reasons.
Eisenstein’s co-director on October, Grigory Aleksandrov, adapted
best to Stalin’s demands: he made Merry Fellows
(1934) the first Soviet musical comedy and Stalin’s favourite movie, Volga-Volga (1938). The opening credits
tell you what will happen and a sing-song follows. Socialist Realism decreed
that film-makers were only allowed to show people doing their jobs. This did
not allow much in the way of escapist fun. Movies about pilots and explorers were
popular: Yuli Raizman's Flyers (1935)
and Sergei Gerasimov's The Courageous
Seven (1936).
The war years generated many interesting, eye-popping,
anti-Nazi movies. Moscow Strikes Back
(Dir. Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin, 1942), with added Edward G Robinson
narration, was well-received in the USA. Documentaries – like Ukraine in Flames (Dir. Alexander
Dovzhenko and Yuliya Solntseva, 1943) – shared images British film-makers would
not have shot in the first place. Dramas, such as Zoya (Dir. Lev Arnshtam, 1944), went further than Western war films
of the period: the German soldiers were crueller, the female characters
stronger. The harrowing and ground-breaking Come
and See (Dir. Elem Klimov, 1985) was based on Klimov’s direct experience of
the bombing of Stalingrad – “As a young boy I had been in hell. […] Had I
included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have
watched it.” A young boy, a soldier, witnesses World War II. It influenced Steven
Spielberg’s handling of Schindler’s List
(1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Post-war, Soviet cinema is described simply
as a nadir. After Stalin’s death in 1953 censorship became less fatal. The films
became more accessible to the West. The
Cranes Are Flying (Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957) won the Palme d’Or at
Cannes. War and Peace (Dir. Sergei
Bondarchuk, 1967) – an eight hour adaptation with a cast of thousands; Dersu Uzala (Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1974);
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
(Dir. Vladimir Men'shov, 1979); and, Burned
by the Sun (Dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, 1994) all won Oscars.
The Lumière Brothers visited Russia in 1895
but Russia was a slow starter in this field. Its first pictures – folk songs
and stories – appeared in 1906; animations followed in 1911. 1812 (Dir. Vasil Goncharov, 1912, 32
minutes) was the first ever film of Napoleon’s war with Russia. It’s like a
pre-Renaissance painting’s attempt at perspective: the film-makers and actors
have worked out how to portray some things but not others. The public enjoyed
High Society dramas. Vera Kholodnaya was Russia’s first movie star; The Mirages (1916) is available on
YouTube. Kholodnaya was poisoned by the French ambassador, her lover, who
believed she was a Bolshevik spy. Other sources suggest she died of Spanish flu
in 1919.
The Russian Revolution began in 1917 and
the civil war continued for five years. The leading film-makers – Ermolieff, Mozzhukhin,
Protazanov – emigrated. On 27 August 1919 Vladimir Lenin signed a decree
incorporating cinema into the Soviet state. "Of all the arts," he
said, "for us, the cinema is the most important."
In a massive, but largely illiterate,
nation cinema offered a means of communication, education and propaganda. In
1919 the film industry was nationalised (for three years) and the world’s first
film school, the VGIK, created. It is simpler to judge the finished product than
monitor every take: Goskino, the state body controlling cinema production, was
established in 1922. Cinema was planned, financed and censored by the state, to
varying degrees, until the late 1980s. In return, film-makers enjoyed status, relative
security and investment.
What followed was an explosion of
creativity that’s still inspiring film-makers nine decades later. Glomuv’s Diary (Dir. Sergei Eisenstein,
1923) looks like an art student film, even now. In 1925 Eisenstein made Strike and The Battleship Potemkin – these were far more exciting than any
action movies coming out of Hollywood at the time. There is no doubting the
bravery and dynamism of Hollywood’s stunt-men and stars during the silent era
but the Soviet directors had an understanding of editing no viewer had
experienced before.
The films were popular: Lev Kuleshov’s
comedy The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr
West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) and thriller The Death Ray (1925). Silly: Vsevolod Pudovkin's short Chess Fever (1925), starring the World
Chess Champion, José Raúl Capablanca, acting strangely. Bold: Bed and Sofa (Dir. Abram Room, 1927)
concerns a working class woman living with two men – the title tells you what
she thinks they contribute – and features a visit to an abortion clinic.
Experimental: Borderlines screened Man
with a Movie Camera (Dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929) – no dialogue, actors or
storyline – a few years ago. Vertov was a pioneer in the cinéma vérité style of
documentary moviemaking, an attempt to capture the ‘real’ world without
standard cinematic staging. Modern: The
New Babylon (Dir. Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1929) covers the
events leading up to the 1871 Paris Commune. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the score
which, during the dance scene, juxtaposes the French anthem, La Marseillaise contrapuntally
with the ‘Can-can’ from Offenbach's Orpheus
in the Underworld.
The Big Three - Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
Dovzhenko – led the way. Pudovkin – actor, screenwriter, whose directing was
analysed and written about by Stanley Kubrick – graduated to studies of
revolutionary figures: he directed Mother,
from Mikhail Gorky’s novel, in 1926, The
End of St.-Petersburg (1927) and Storm
over Asia (1928). Eisenstein, whose theories have been studied by everyone,
directed October: Ten Days that Shook the
World in 1927.
Alexander Dovzhenko directed his Ukraine Trilogy,
an account of the impact of the Civil War upon his homeland less than a decade
earlier: Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1928), Earth (1930). I am going to say that Timosh’s act of defiance at
the climax of Arsenal prefigures the Superman character (1938).
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| Arsenal |
Borderlines screens Arsenal at The Courtyard on Tuesday 8 March 2016. Bronnt Industries
Kapital will perform Guy Bartell’s new score. You may recall their performance
– Turksib (1929), converted barn –
for Borderlines in 2012.
Arsenal - Bronnt Industries Kapital (excerpt I) from Bronnt Industries on Vimeo.
Turksib, like many films of the period, celebrated Soviet advances in agriculture. There’s a long sequence about irrigation. In Earth (1930) farmer Vasyl is so overjoyed to have access to the collective tractor, after generations of back-breaking farm-work, that he dances a hopak all the way home. It had been cheaper to hire a peasant than own a donkey: barges were pulled by a dozen men, not a couple of horses. The labourers in Turksib were no different to seventeenth century English landowners: they were proud of their prize cattle.
Turksib, like many films of the period, celebrated Soviet advances in agriculture. There’s a long sequence about irrigation. In Earth (1930) farmer Vasyl is so overjoyed to have access to the collective tractor, after generations of back-breaking farm-work, that he dances a hopak all the way home. It had been cheaper to hire a peasant than own a donkey: barges were pulled by a dozen men, not a couple of horses. The labourers in Turksib were no different to seventeenth century English landowners: they were proud of their prize cattle.
Animals have a huge symbolic significance
in Soviet/Russian cinema – a visual medium embraced by the state to communicate
with a huge, scattered population who spoke (but couldn’t read) many different
languages. Each animal represented its own strictly defined human
characteristic in children’s literature. These were perfectly realised, in
cinema, by Yuri Norstein’s many animated short films, such as the totally
charming Hedgehog in the Fog (1975)
and the none-more-highly regarded Tale of
Tales (1978).
Horses turn up all the time in Russian
movies. In Slavic mythology, the war and fertility deity Svantovit rode a white
horse. A horse narrates Tolstoy’s short story Yardstick. For centuries the troika was the fastest vehicle on
earth. Horses symbolise hard work. Tarkovsky deploys horses as the supreme
symbols of the natural world.
There are two types of Tarkovsky film:
those you have seen and those you are yet to see.
Borderlines is screening all seven of his feature
films: Ivan's Childhood (1962); Andrei Rublev (1966); Solaris (1972); Mirror (1975); Stalker
(1979); Nostalgia (1983); and The Sacrifice (1986).
The intervals between them can be explained
by the fact that Tarkovsky also wrote, or co-wrote, the screenplay. It takes
that long. He believed that realising someone else's screenplay leads to dead
and monotonous films.
I attended a public lecture about war
photography last week. The lecturer removed every graphic image from his talk
and retitled it ‘Aftermath’. It became a sequence of deserted battlegrounds,
from Roger Fenton’s iconic image of the Valley of Death, Crimea, 1854, to Srebrenica,
site of the latest genocide in Europe, 20 years ago. I was reminded of Ivan’s Childhood. War is not far, in
time or distance, from these landscapes. A 12-year-old boy should not be there.
Of course, if he was 17 it would be a different film entirely: Paths of Glory (1957) perhaps. In some
ways orphan Ivan is the perfect warrior: whatever person he was becoming has
disappeared. No parents, no childhood, no friends, no stopping him – he’s a
product of war.
This festival has addressed identity in a
number of films. Charlotte Rampling’s character, in 45 Years (2015), asks herself if her well-ordered marriage was all
it seemed. The landscape outside her kitchen window, woodland and fields tended
for 2000 years, almost mock her. In The
Pearl Button (2015) hunter-gatherer Jemmy Button takes a Gap Year in
nineteenth century London. In Room
(2015) Ma constructs one reality, to maximise their chances of survival, then
has to adjust to normalcy. Her son has to cope better with a brand new world
than Jemmy Button did.
In The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film Andras Balint Kovacs presents
Tarkovsky’s seven feature films as his continued exploration of a particular
philosophy, Russian Christian Personalism: “It splits man into two antagonistic
entities. […] The individual is determined by biological and social factors and
is a product of those, while the person is independent of these factors and
communicates only with God. […] The person is not born automatically with a
human being; it is not a given. It is rather a human being’s task; it is a
mission.” One task is to eradicate the evil within. This notion informs Solaris, Tarkovsky’s most accessible
work.
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| Solaris |
George Clooney starred in Steven Soderbergh’s
2002 remake. Philosophy is far easier to digest in a sumptuous space station
setting, Fine Art in the study, especially when expressed in the form of an
attractive young woman. Here’s an article about Natalya Bondarchuk’s dress
designer -
Donatas Banionis (Kelvin) was cast, not
because he resembles an astronaut but, because he was the best actor in Russia
at the time. The space station is in orbit around the planet Solaris. The
planet is ‘reading’ the scientists’ subconscious and forcing them to live with
the ghosts of their pasts.
I think Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) tried to capture
the texture of Mirror. Tarkovsky quotes the symbolist poetry of his father,
Arseny Tarkovsky. [Poets also feature in The
Pearl Button (2015) and David
(1951) this festival.] Mirror presents the narrator’s memories, fantasies and
insights. For example, two scenes recreate Johannes Vermeer’s art. If the
camera moved quicker we might catch him painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The narrator is a sensitive, cultural,
thoughtful man – but is this enough for his state of mind?
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| Stalker |
Many films would like to be Stalker, the last film Tarkovsky made in
the Soviet Union. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomania
(2013) pays respect, by showing a bracelet of nuts (sans bolts), in an early
scene. Three men – Writer, Scientist and their guide, Stalker – visit the Zone,
a place just about recognisable as somewhere on Earth. This excursion is
forbidden by the authorities because the Zone is beyond their control. In the
Zone is the Room. Whoever enters the Room will see their deepest desires,
conscious and unconscious, fulfilled. It is a journey to one’s true self.
Stalker has already made this journey; his purpose is to convert others. Are
the representatives of art and science interested in his spiritual guidance? Stalker
is as single-minded as Ivan but his mission is different. This is little
consolation to his wife. One consequence of eradicating the evil within is
loneliness: there aren’t many other people who have made the effort.
Stalker turns up in lots of Best Ever Movie lists and other places. In the
much-honoured Uzak (2002, aka Distant) Mahmut puts on the DVD in the
hope that his cousin Yusuf will leave – but he’s gripped. The author Geoff Dyer
became so obsessed by Stalker that he
wrote a good read, Zona, just about
watching the film.
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| The Forbidden Room |
Finally, Guy Maddin, director of The Forbidden Room (2015), screening at
this festival, made an exhilarating six-minute short The Heart of the World (2000) in the style of early-1920s East-West
cinema: Eisenstein meets the German expressionists in eight hundred and fifty
edits. The internet has it. The pounding piano score by Georgi Sviridov Time, Forward! is wonderful. I wish it
was available as an alarm clock.
Robin Clarke
