Music for Pokayanie

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Apr 262009
 

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Pokayanie has some really strange musical references. Here Yelena breaks into a singing of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” in German. The effect is sinister. It comes after she tries to “comfort” Nino by saying the following:

Of course, the arrest of Sandro and Mikhail is a mistake. We must summon up patience, both you and I. You’ll see, Nika will do everything.
They’ll look into it and free them. You must be strong, Nino. Don’t forget that you have Keti. I’m sure it will end well, everything will be all right. They’re bound to find the truth and set Sandro free. I’m sure of it! Nino, I’m thinking now of your girl. Keti must become a good citizen and an honorable woman. Your misfortune must not lead her astray. Don’t forget that we’re serving a great cause. The future generations will be proud of us. But since the scale of events is so grand, big mistakes are inevitable. It may even happen that innocent people are victimized. But I can already hear our favorite “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven which will surely sound all overthe world very soon.

I can almost understand what that music is doing there, because of the totalitarian overtones in Schiller’s poem. I had only a vague idea of what was totalitarian about it, though, so I went to google to see if anyone else ever had the same thoughts. In doing so, I found the following in the book, “Sound matters: essays on the acoustics of modern German culture” By Nora M. Alter, Lutz Peter Koepnick (2004).

It talks about the “Enlightenment project of universal harmony [which] at once needs and loathes the dissonnant in order to define itself. The construction of hegemony through harmony cannot do without separating the world into friend and foe, self and other… “[T]he passage from Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ in which those who are not accorded all-embracing love are banished from it, involuntarily betrays the truth about the idea of humanity, which is at once totalitarian and particular.”

“At once totalitarian and particular,” it says. If that isn’t a good description of what’s in this movie, I don’t know what is.

But what about the other music? How about that brief showing of partygoers arriving with music and booze, to the accompaniment of Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny.” Is that merely meant to be ironic, given what’s happening? Or am I too dense to catch a deeper meaning?

And what about those Italian opera segments sung by Varlam and his flunkies. Those, too, are in a sinister setting. But I don’t recognize them from anywhere, mainly because I’m ignorant about opera. What do they mean?

And what about that Wagner duet on the white piano? I’ll bet there is some meaning to it, but I don’t know what it is.

The end of Pokayanie

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Apr 232009
 

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Tonight I finished the first watching of Pokayanie.

If I hadn’t been told that this film was produced in 1984, I would have guessed it was a production from the mid 1990s or so. It’s that prophetic.

Most of the way through, while being surprised that such a film had been produced at all, I kept telling myself that it certainly wasn’t subtle. Yes, the guards are dressed in medieval armor, the jurors and lawyers have medieval clothing, and there are other surreal elements to keep this from being any kind of docudrama. But it was pretty obvious what piece of Russian history was being represented here. In fact, the above scene sounded just like something I had read in Robert Conquest’s, “The Great Terror.” The character has confessed to being a spy and to being in charge of building a tunnel from London to Bombay. He thought that if the prisoners made their confessions even more ridiculous and outlandish than they were being tortured and manipulated to make them, that it would somehow bring it all to an end. (It didn’t work.)

Then, the last scenes in the movie started to reveal that maybe it’s more subtle than I had thought. And the final scene went a step further and made it all more complicated. And instead of my viewing it as an outsider — after all I’m not Russian — all of a sudden it seemed I was drawn in to be part of that story, too, even though I’d rather not be.

I’m not sure everyone would have the same reaction.

The end of that movie upset a lot of things. I’m still not sure where they all landed. I need to think about it more before I try to explain.

Repentance

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Apr 192009
 

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I’ve started to watch Repentance (Pokayanie). Unfortunately, the language spoken is Georgian, not Russian. Nothing wrong with that, but I understand not a syllable of Georgian, so I’m listening to the Russian overdub while reading English subtitles. I’ve had a little practice in watching movies this way, but not enough to be entirely used to it.

I got about as far as the above scene, at about 41:50. A delegation of people has come to the mayor (a Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini character) complaining that the scientific experiments are destroying the church. The mayor is all smiles and accommodation, and then asks the young father in the delegation:

You live on the town square in a two-story house, don’t you? During the ceremony a girl was blowing soap-bubbles from the window. Was that your apartment?

Yes.

I see everything, I notice everything. So beware of me, be careful.

And if he saw that, he of course also saw what isn’t stated, that the father pulled the girl back and shut the window.

(It reminds me that in the early days of the Clinton administration it was announced that the President would be coming to Battle Creek. On a local online forum I said it would be a good time to bring the family inside to safety, shutter the windows and lock the doors until he had gone. I was surprised at the number of people who were extremely offended that I would talk that way. Maybe they had been characters in this same movie, which btw was released in 1987, after being suppressed for a few years.)

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The mayor notices everything, but during that ceremony, nobody dared spoil the festivities by noticing that workmen had accidentally broken a water main which was drenching the speakers who were honoring the mayor, as well as the typist-clerk who kept on typing.

It kind of reminds me of how nobody is supposed to notice the government policies that brought on our current financial crisis, and that we are expected to respond by enacting more of the same.

There is very little about this movie on Wikipedia or any of the usual places. Anna Lawton wrote about it in one of her books, but I’ve already forgotten much of what she had to say. After I finish watching I’ll go back and find what she had said.

I understand it’s the third in a trilogy. I suspect I’ll want to watch the two movies that preceded it, too.

Russian Exceptionalism

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Apr 132009
 

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In Dvenadsat (12), this juror is almost the last holdout to insist that the Chechen kid is guilty. He sarcastically criticizes the previous juror’s emotional personal story, saying, “Uncle Vasya the city prosecutor turns a blind eye. And the criminal remains at large! And meanwhile the entire civilized world has lived for centuries according to the law.”

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The juror who responds to that is a cemetery director who in the movie has several things to say about the rule of law. This time he says, “A Russian man will never live by the law.”

“Why not?”

“The law bores him. The law is dead. There’s nothing personal about it. And a Russian man without that personal touch is an empty shell.”

He makes it sound as though it’s a peculiarly Russian issue. I, on the other hand, would argue that the tension between the “law” and the “personal” is not at all just a Russian issue. It’s a tension to be found in every society where you have a system of laws.

But before getting into all that, I was going to make a snarky comment about “Russian exceptionalism.” In our country there has been an occasional debate about American Exceptionalism. But I was going to use this scene as an example to point out that there is nothing exceptional about American Exceptionalism. There is also such a thing as Russian Exceptionalism.

I thought I was being clever, but a quick google search shows me that I am far from the first person to use the term “Russian Exceptionalism.”

Oh, well.

When first we practice to deceive

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Apr 062009
 

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Warning: The following contains a spoiler for the film Depuis qu’Otar est parti. Go away if you want to see the film first.

I’ve long been bothered by the part near the end after Eka learns that Otar is dead. I was content to just let it go as one of those open-ended things that make the movie like real life, until I read the explanation on Wikipedia:

Eka breaks down with the initial shock, but soon recovers and returns to meet Ada and Marina, as they are due to return to Georgia. In a reversal of roles, and to the bemusement of the two younger women, Eka decides that it would hurt them to know of Otar’s death, and pretends that he has gone to America without telling them.

But it can’t be just a role reversal. Because now Eka knows, not just that Otar has died, but that he died some time ago. What then about all those letters she had received from Otar since he died? She has to know at this point where they came from.

In the first big lie, Marina and Ada were keeping the truth from Eka, who truly did not know that Otar was dead.

But in the 2nd lie, Eka has to know that she’s not fooling anyone. I took it to mean she just found a way to decide that even though she knew what had happened, and they knew she knew, and she knew that they knew that she knew, that they were all going to pretend it didn’t happen.

I also found it interesting that the filmmaker (Julie Bertucelli) also saw fit to introduce the topic that during the Soviet days they had been living a lie. Marina’s boyfriend Tengiz explains this to Ada as part of an attempt to convince her not to be too hard on her mother. So living a lie during the Soviet days may have influenced the characters to play these games now in which they lovingly tell big lies to each other. I’m going to have to listen to that part again, though, to see if there was something more profound that I’m supposed to learn.

BTW, I liked how all the characters grew in the movie, including Eka. She is a sweet old grandmother who is much loved by her granddaughter, but she is also somewhat selfish. But she finally learns to let go of Otar and also to let go of granddaughter Ada, whom she always preferred over her own daughter Marina. She is willing to go back to Georgia to life without her beloved Ada, where she will have to get along with Marina, with whom she had always clashed. And it’s all accomplished without any histronics. It’s just the right touch.

Right-sized slices

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Apr 032009
 

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Due to a Netflix accident, we’re watching Depuis qu’Otar est parti again. We’ve not dropped Netflix entirely, even though it’s gotten a lot more difficult to get Russian films from them. So many are now marked “short wait,” “very long wait,” and “unavailable.” We hung on to the subscription so Myra can get some English-language movies while I get Russian ones from Memocast. But the movies Myra had at the top of our queue were also unavailable, and somehow Otar was next in line. This is not at all a disappointment.

Myra enjoys watching a lot of the Russian or other non-English movies me, but usually only watches them one time. I watch them multiple times if they’re good for language-learning, but Myra usually finds something else to do the 2nd or 3rd time through. Occasionally she’ll watch one twice. This one she’s watching a 3rd time — perhaps a first for her. It’s that good.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I like it so much. In my mind I put it in the same category as Vozvrashcheniye. Anna Lawton in one of her books referred to “slice of life” films. Maybe this one and Vozvrashcheniye could be categorized that way.

Wikipedia says this about slice-of-life stories:

A slice of life story is a category for a story that portrays a “cut-out” sequence of events in a character’s life. It may or may not contain any plot progress and little character development, and often has no exposition, conflict, or denouement, with an open ending. It usually tries to depict the every-day life of ordinary people, sometimes with fantasy or science fiction elements involved. The term slice of life is actually a dead metaphor: it often seems as if the author had taken a knife and “cut out” a slice of the lives of some characters, without concern for narrative form.

But these films do have some plot progress, character development, conflict, etc. Maybe the thing is that they don’t try to do too much of any of these elements. They tell us about people and relationships, but don’t try to tell more than movies are capable of telling. Some of Tarkovsky’s work, great as it is, suffers from trying to do more than is possible to do with film, IMO. His work becomes overly symbolic, because how else can you use a camera to deal with such grand topics?

It’s not that the makers of Otar and Vozvrashcheniye were slackers. It’s obvious that an enormous amount of attention to detail and nuance went into them. The acting is excellent throughout. And because their reach does not exceed their grasp, they end up being great works of art.

[Sunday afternoon spelling correction]