Reticulator

Criminal jargon in the gulag

Mar 182008

Anne Applebaum talks about the gulag criminals’ slang, saying it was “so distinct from ordinary Russian that it almost qualifies as a separate language.”

I wonder if an echo of that jargon is in the movie Dzhentlmeny udachi (Gentlemen of Fortune, 1971). Applebaum’s book emphasises the 30s, 40s, and early 50s. The gulags were definitely gentler by 1971. But I wonder how much of that movie had gulag connotations for Russian viewers.

In Gentlemen of Fortune, the main character (played by Yevgeny Leonov) is a kindhearted kindergarten teacher who is recruited to impersonate a murderous criminal to whom he bears a physical resemblance. It’s so he can help the police find out where the stolen gold was hidden.

It’s a comedy, and it can be seen on YouTube, with English subtitles. Although he impersonates the tough guy complete with tattoos and scars, he can’t help but try to teach his criminal gang some good manners and getting them to straighten up their lives.

Like at one point in the movie (segment 4 of 9) he breaks up a fight and then tells the guys they shouldn’t use jargon. Is he referring to this same kind of talk that Anne Applebaum is referring to? I don’t know enough Russian to recognize it myself.

But there are other gulag references. At one point in one of the later segments, he has the gang playing word games on New Year’s Eve. One of them says Vorkuta, and he asks why Vorkuta. He had served a term there. Even before reading Applebaum’s book, I recognized Vorkuta as the far-north site of one of the nastier gulags.

As I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve come to realize that there are quite a few gulag references in the Russian movies I’ve watched. One of them I’ll save for later, but there is a scene in another comedy, Brilliantovaya Ruka (The Diamond Arm) in which the bad guys are at a restaurant table, and a passing stranger at the table with them says they ought to come visit him in Siberia. He meant it innocently, but they almost shudder at the idea, as criminals would have good reason to do.

Alaksandar Kazulin

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Mar 072008

Shortly after watching the 9th segment of Kalinovski Square last night, and learning for the first time about Alaksandar Kazulin and how he had received a 5.5 year sentence for his dissenting activities in Belarus, I read in the WSJ that he has been released along with a number of other dissidents. Luke Allnutt, editor in chief of Radio Free Europe, explains how President Lukashenko desperately needs friends now, and how we would do well to engage him. It would be a tricky business, because he’s trying to play Russia vs the west. But this may be an opportunity to do what little we can to promote political and economic freedom in what has been one of the most repressive regimes in Europe.

This would be a good issue to ask our presidential candidates about, and see if they’re able to give more substantive answers than, “I will assemble my experts, and we’ll figure out what’s the best thing to do.” President Bush was criticized for being too unilateral, too inconsiderate of European opinion. Well, here is a chance for his wannabe successors to show how they would be different.

And here is a link to that 9th segment of Kalinovski Square. I had watched most of the others multiple times already and somehow skipped this one. It’s a very important one, and does a nice job of showing how Kazulin used a run for the presidency of his country to raise an important domestic issue. The person running the camera may have had an inside scoop on what he was going to do.

More from Kalinovski Square

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Mar 032008

Elsewhere I said that the Kalinovski Square film, with its wry, detached approach, might be like what William F. Buckley would have done if he had been a filmmaker. But the person from Belarus who posted it on YouTube says the filmmaker (Yuri Chashchevatsky) did it in the manner of Michael Moore. Well, I’ve not seen any of Michael Moore’s work, so I’ll have to take his (or her) word for it. Can it be, though, that there are similarities between Michael Moore and William F. Buckley? It’s hard to imagine such a thing.

Here is the 8th of the 10 segments. It’s interesting to see how Dasha describes her experiences after the crackdown. Even though she was hauled away to prison and her boyfriend was beaten before being taken to prison, along with many other truckloads of protestors, she doesn’t sound like somebody who is beaten. It’s amazing that people who live under that kind of oppression can sound more optimistic about their future than I do about ours.

She is young. I hope her attitude doesn’t change as she grows older.

slight edit, 4-Mar-2008

Kalinovski Square

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Mar 032008

I found this while surfing YouTube, looking for Russian video with English subtitles. It does seem to be useful at my stage in learning the language — I understand some words and phrases, but I wouldn’t understand much of what is going on without the subtitles. And it gives some great shots of people and places, including those in villages in Belarus. The narrator gives us a wry look at President Lukaschenko and the political situation in Belarus. It’s entertaining but deadly serious.

I suppose this is the direction in which Putin is taking Russia, and in which we’re following at a long, long distance. Things like McCain-Feingold and extremely high rates of congressional incumbency are only baby steps in that direction, but that IS the direction.

Yuri Yakovlev

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Feb 072008

Ha. I wouldn’t have guessed that on my own. Yury Yakovlev, who plays Bi in “Kin-Dza-Dza” is the same person who played Ippolit in Ryazanov’s “The Irony of Fate.” I had immediately recognized Yevgeny Leonov, the actor who plays Uef, as the same guy who had played the old retired military officer who rescues our hero in Mimino. But I hadn’t recognized his sidekick at all. Goes to show he has a bit of range to his talents. Contrast that to someone like Nikita Mikhalkov, who plays the same character no matter what movie he’s in.

I had earlier commented on how I couldn’t tell what had made the movie difficult to get past the Soviet censors. Well, duh, I should have known because I’ve talked about this several times. Usually in Soviet movies, the law enforcement and legal authorities are portrayed as wise, kindly, omniscient characters (e.g. in Brilliantovaya Ruka, Mimino) unless, of course, they are pre-revolutionary characters (e.g. in Siberiade). In Kin-Dza-Dza, nobody on planet Pluk is a nice guy. They are all back-stabbing, manipulative, selfish, ordinary people that are your everyday companions and colleagues. But the ecilops (police) are especially easy to dislike — smarmy characters like some bullies we all knew in school.

Maybe the trick was to get the censors to think of these as pre-revolutionary characters. (It’s just a guess, though.)

Can we ask them?

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Feb 032008

I wasn’t sure what in the movie Kin-dza-dza would have made it a difficult one to get past the Soviet censors. Maybe this scene near the end would have been seen as subversive. It certainly would be subversive of a lot of what we’re getting from the most fascist elements (i.e. the leading elements) in our own political parties now.

Our protagonists are trying to get back to earth, but don’t want to abandon to a terrible fate the two characters from Pluk who’ve been with them for most of the movie. The sensitive, compassionate head honcho on planet Alpha tells our heros not to worry about those two: “To continue their lives in the form of plants would be a blessing for them.”

And by this time our protagonist cares about more than just taking advantage of the situation for his own ends. He asks, “Can we send for them and ask them what would be a blessing for them and what not?”

How about that? It’s a pro-choice message.

Here’s the YouTube segment these scenes are taken from. It’s the 13th of 14 parts.

Kin-Dza-Dza

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Feb 022008

Kino10

Here’s a movie that goes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris one better. Solaris itself was somewhat of a reaction against Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 featured gleaming high-tech on a massive scale. In Solaris, the space vehicle is somewhat run down and the protagonist goes around in a soiled shirt.

But that’s nothing compared to Kin-dza-dza, which came out in Russia in 1986. Two of the interplanetary space travelers are pictured above. (It’s a photo of the VHS cover. I cobbed it from Wikipedia.)

And here is their spacecraft. (Photo cobbed from the same source as the above one.) It’s a creaky rattle-trap rustbucket, but it does work.

This movie isn’t on Netflix. There is no official English-language subtitled version. But it’s on YouTube, with subtitles, in 14 parts. I happened upon it last night. I haven’t nearly finished watching.

I’m not a big science fiction fan, but small doses like this are great. It’s had me laughing. Wikipedia says it’s somewhat of an allegory of Soviet society, but somehow made it past the censors anyway. I don’t know about that — maybe it applies to tourist behavior and social relationships in general. Whatever it is, it’s fun to watch.

Here, for my convenience and that of anyone else who cares, are links to all 14 of the segments. It can be somewhat of a nuisance to find them in order using YouTube’s search.

Dersu Uzala and towel heads

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Jan 282008

We’re currently near the end of Dersu Uzala, I think.

I had remarked in a previous post that I wished Siberiade would have shown us more of Siberia. Well, this one does. There are great scenery shots of frozen lakes, spring breakup, deep forests. But so far there is not much of Siberian settlements and cities. For that, I guess I’ll have to settle for the news programs on RTR Planeta. They sometimes give clips from snowy winter streets in Siberian towns. But I’d like to see how the countryside transitions to town, and what kind of buildings one finds out on the edge, etc.

In Siberiade I had seen something I’ve never seen in the U.S. — people in the woods putting a towel under their hats and letting it flap around their ears and neck. Given the setting, I’m guessing it’s more to shoo mosquitos away than to provide shade from the hot sun. When Nikita Mikhalkov’s oil-drilling crew comes to Elan, several of the men are wearing these things. But later, in a scene in which Mikhalkov is wading through a deep swamp, he takes the thing off, and they are never seen again on anyone. I would think the swamp would be a place where he’d need it like in no other place, but I suppose it’s hard to get good camera shots of the actors’ heads with those things in the way.

Those things made an appearance on Dersu Uzala, too, underneath the soldiers’ military visor hats. But again, it seems they mostly went away, probably to make it easier to photograph faces.

I don’t know if there’s a word for it, so until I learn better I’ll just call them towel heads.

Exile to Siberia vs Stock Options

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Jan 262008

We finished Siberiade the other night. It had a lot of Nikita Mikhalkov all the way to the end, and while I still wouldn’t call him a great actor, he at least wasn’t annoying all the time.

I doubt it was the intention of the filmmakers to show the defects of an economic system based on central planning, though one never knows. In the movie, the way to save the village of Elan is to find oil underneath, which will keep it from being flooded for a hydroelectric reservoir. Most of the powers that be think it’s a waste of time drilling for oil, but two high government officials with personal roots in Siberia decide to buck the consensus and go for it, because if they fail, they can’t get exiled any farther than Siberia anyway.

Well, I suppose if you don’t have stock options to motivate you to take risks, the possibility of exile to Siberia as a reward for failure will motivate you to be entrepreneurial.

I would have liked to have seen a lot more of Siberia than just the forests and river that led to Elan. It was nice seeing that much, but I’d also like to have seen Siberian cities, and how the rural and wilderness areas transition to the cities.

We’re now watching Dersa Uzala, and it’s giving us some additional views of what I take to be genuine Siberian wilderness (though I don’t know if it was really filmed in Siberia or not).

I’m finding it useful for language learning. Dersa speaks a somewhat ungrammatical Russian, using the wrong forms of pronouns. But thanks to his limited vocabulary, he ends up saying some things that I can actually understand.

It’s disappointing that the army surveying party doesn’t do any actual surveying. They haul a big tripod around with them, but not once thus far have I seen them set it up and get out their chain and do anything that resembles surveying. I’d like to see some of how they actually did surveying in the 1st decade of the 20th century.

Russian movie categories

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Jan 212008

As a public service, I should make a database that categorizes Russian movies in useful and important ways:

Proto-bolshevik revolutionary — In pre-revolutionary Russia, there is the odd character who tinkers with explosives, befriends a youngster, is arrested and beaten by the police, and perhaps has some noble words about truth for the youngster to remember as he is hauled away.

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky
Siberiade
(One movie recently seen on RTR-Planeta that had three of them who conducted some caper on behalf of the motherland and were then hauled away to be executed by the ungrateful czarist government.)
Andrei Rublev — The setting is somewhere around 1400. In this case it’s Rolan Bykov as a dangerous jester rather than an explosive maker. He gets beat up by the police, like the others, but his words of wisdom are in his jokes.

Revolutionary man scorns woman — Beautiful young woman tries to seduce/charm a man who ignores her so as not to get distracted from his revolutionary mission.

In one movie I saw on RTR-Planeta, the guy politely ignored the advances of the young woman who somehow ended up in the camp of revolutionaries, but took interest when it turned out she was an excellent shot with a handgun.
In the RTR-Planeta movie with the three-musketeer types, one of the three resists the advances of a beautiful woman who undresses in his hideaway before realizing he is there, too. She wants to be kissed; his facial expression says no; he goes on to complete his mission.

Indoor chairs used outdoors

Moscow does not believe in tears
Unfinished piece for player piano
Vodka Lemon (not a Russian movie, but some Russian is spoken)

Nikita Mikhalkov in a tanktop – (He seems to favor horizontal stripes)

Railway Station for Two
Burnt by the Sun
Siberiade

Tonight as we were watching Siberiade , Mikhalkov appeared once again in that tanktop with horizontal stripes. That’s what motivated me to finally start compiling this list.

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