I’m looking forward to this. I watched the first segment tonight.
I’ve made some remarks about how the police are portrayed in Soviet movies in the post-WWII era. I’m wondering if this is going to show me that my generalizations were wrong, or if it’s going to confirm them. We’ll see. It looks good so far.
Oh, the English title is “The Meeting Place Should Not be Changed.” I rely on the English myself, but I like to keep the original Russian language titles in my head. It helps me learn.
Yesterday we finished watching “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”. Tonight I read about it on Wikipedia and elsewhere. It seems other people have a lot higher opinion of it than I do. It has its good points, but I’m going to ignore those and talk about something else.
The puppet emperor in one scene is shown gorging himself on delicacies while the rest of the crew are reduced to rationing out the last few grains of corn to eat. (It’s not in the scene in the above YouTube clip, though, even though it’s the same character. I wasn’t able to find a clip of the one I’m talking about.) BTW, All the actors look pretty well fed, the starving ones as well as the upper crust.
Up to this point the movie hadn’t done a good job of portraying the social differences between the classes in any way that would seem to engender resentments, then all of a sudden it shows this scene of stark contrast. It’s a very crude way of putting it, and it’s not a theme that was developed very carefully in the movie.
It reminds me of one of the things that has been surprising to me about Soviet era Russian films. They portray the social differences of the pre-Revolution era in a much more subtle, human fashion than I ever would have expected. I’m talking about post WWII films, not those of the Stalin era. I’ve seen a few of the Stalin-era ones on RTR Planeta, and they are about as crude as you might expect in demonizing the aristocrats. But some of the post-Stalin ones do a nice job. The message is subtle.
I’m thinking about movies such as Siberiade or Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, or even Oblamov. Yes, there is class conflict and there is a social distance, but the movies don’t overplay it. The human relationships seem real, plausible, and very ordinary.
I’m not keeping up with my movie-watching lately. But I enjoyed this segment of White Bim Black Ear. (And did I really call it Black Bim White Ear a few posts back?).
Here are the parts I liked:
The storyline? It’s so-so. A bit Rousseauian in that the kids are all virtuous and some of the older people are corrupt meanies.
The conflict in Georgia got me thinking about Russian movies that feature Georgians. Are there any insights to be gained about Russian attitudes towards the people?
Mimino is a big one. The main character is Georgian. He is played as a good-hearted country bumpkin — he talks loudly on the phone, is quick-tempered, carries on an honorable feud, and is an all-around good guy. But now I wonder how the Georgians feel about this movie. The Georgian characters are treated sympathetically. Or is it condescension? It can be hard to tell the two apart in my own culture, so I wouldn’t dare to say how it comes across to someone else. Regardless, I thought it was a great movie.
There are a lot of other movies that deal with the Caucasus, but I don’t know if the Caucasians in them are Georgians. For example, there is “Kidnapping, Caucasion Style.” Those people in it — are they Georgians? And are the filmmakers having fun by stereotyping them? They wear some of the same style hats, if I remember correctly. Again, what do the ethnic groups being portrayed think of the movie? (Not that everyone should have the same opinion.)
“Depuis qu’Otar est partir” features Georgians and Russians, but that one is not a Russian film.
But in keeping with this blog’s mission to deal with the most trivial aspects of movies, I have to wonder about a Georgian references in Kin-dza-dza. One of the two main characters from planet earth is supposed to be Georgian, but what are we to make of that scene toward the end where Uef of planet Pluk says he had a Georgian mother? The two worlds are so different from each other, and had known nothing about each other. All of a sudden Uef says comes out with that line, but it generates no big surprise. I suspect an inside joke.
(Late edit – changed the title to make it more grammatical)
Tonight we started watching Aguirre – The Wrath of God.
I’m not quite sure why we got this one from Netflix. It definitely was in my queue, but I had thought I had a Russian film at the top. Maybe it has something to do with a big mailing mixup Netflix was trying to tell us about, but that doesn’t quite make sense, either.
Oh, well, it’s something I had wanted to watch anyway. But then I was surprised to find that it’s a German film, not a Spanish one. That’s OK, too. I do have a very few German films in my queue.
But I got to thinking again about when I started with Netflix two years ago, it was because an Argentine woman told me that if I was serious about learning languages, that I should watch movies — over and over. At the time Russian and Spanish were at the top of the list of languages I was trying to learn. But the problem is, there are hardly any Spanish movies that I care to watch, while there are a lot of Russian ones. If there were more good Spanish movies, maybe I’d be putting more of my time into learning Spanish than Russian. It’s certainly a language I could make use of where I live. But Russian is at the top now, largely because of the good movies.
The clip above shows an opening scene from Aguirre. It shows more than that, too, but I didn’t want to look ahead on this one just yet. So far I’d have to say the photography and setting area good.
While watching it I got to wondering if the movie is an outgrowth of the German fascination with Native American things. Ten years or so ago we were visiting an exellent historic park in Canada — Ste. Marie among the Hurons. Among other things, I learned that the place gets more visitors from Germany than from the United States. Does their interest extend to Indians from South America, too?
This segment of Black Bim White Ear reminds me that I’ve been somewhat surprised by the portrayal of people’s interactions with police in movies from the Soviet era.
I wasn’t surprised that in Moskva slezam ne verit, Katerina tells her daughter that they shouldn’t call the police about some bullies who have been harassing her boyfriend, that they should handle the situation themselves. That’s kind of what I would expect in a police state. Even in the U.S. people sometimes have the idea that you should never talk to the police — which is not quite the same thing, but it’s not completely different, either.
But there are movies like Black Bim where people are quick to call the police (who seem to be always nearby, unlike in the U.S. where you can call 911 and sometimes wait a long time before anyone comes). And they are quick to berate the police for not doing their jobs.
Officer: “Who shouted?”
Man: “Why don’t you watch? Dogs at a street crossing of a regional center.”
I might think this was taking place in a Potemkin village, except the same sort of thing happens on planet Pluk in Kin-Dza-Dza.
There are of course people in the U.S. who will mouth off to the police. (I remember seeing the bumper sticker on a car that would tend to attract police attention even without it, “Bad cop. No Donut.”) But there are Russian movies in which “respectable” people do it, as happens on the street and at the police station in Belyy Bim.
So I wonder if that sort of thing was portrayed realistically, or if the sort of relationship in Moscow Has No Room for Tears was more realistic, or if both were realistic, depending on time and place.
I enjoyed the city street scenes in this and other segments of White Bim Black Ear. I’m not completely sure why, but I think it’s because of the nostalgia. I remember when people wore clothes made of fabrics like that. There seems to be a mix of 50s, 60s, and early 70s styles, not as seen on Hollywood-type places and TV, but in the places where I lived. But it’s the fabrics that really caught my eye and made me remember. You won’t see that sort of thing in modern Russian movies, but I don’t remember seeing people dressed like that in any street scene in any American movie. In the past when I’ve made such statements I have sometimes been corrected, so I’ll say no more.
In keeping with my policy of making superficial comments in this blog, I need to ask, why this movie convention of portraying a babe in arms as some stiff-as-a-board object covered up in baby blankets? The above scene is from the wonderful musical film, Obyknovennoye chudo, but I can’t think of a Russian movie that doesn’t portray babies this way. There may have been an attempt in Komissar to depart briefly from this convention. But even there, the mother is holding some lightweight object that certainly doesn’t have the heft of an actual baby, nor does it have the flexibility and fragility of one.
There is a scene in Brilliantovaya Ruka that parodied this convention, so I don’t think it’s only outsiders who notice.
What do they actually wrap up in those blankets? A stick of styrofoam? Balsa wood?
Aside from the babies, it’s too bad that the subtitles go away for a while in this YouTube segment, just at a point where there seems to be an important explanation that would help make such sense of it as can be made. I can understand a few words of what is being said, but not enough to catch the meaning.
Even without that, I am coming to view Obyknovennoye chudo as one of the great movies. There are stories within stories and well-done acting and musical touches that make it good for repeated watching. There is more to learn and appreciate each time.
I’ve started watching White Bim the Black Ear. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a sort of Lassie Come Home movie.
When I got to this segment last night, I was surprised. People carrying on about dogs having the proper pedigree? In a socialist country? Doesn’t that seem rather Ancien R�gime to be worrying about proper bloodlines and conformation instead of the dog’s ability as a worker?
I puzzled over that several minutes before I had my Duh moment, when I realized that maybe that’s the point. Those aren’t the good guys who are carrying on that way.
Sometimes I’m pretty slow to pick up on the political subtexts in a movie. This wasn’t the first time.
(When we had a dog at our house, it has always been a mutt. No dog aristocrats for us. But we’ve had no dogs at all since T�lpel died after a long dog-life.)
I haven’t found any good obituaries in U.S. newspapers for Nonna Mordukova, who died earlier this month. The one in the Washington Post pointed out that she appeared in some government propaganda films: “Throughout a career that spanned half a century, Ms. Mordyukova appeared in dozens of films, including some textbook examples of Soviet propaganda.”
Well, everyone knows that there were a lot of Soviet propaganda films. But what was surprising to me when I started watching Russian movies was the parts that were subversive of Soviet propaganda, including three roles I can think of that were played by Nonna Mordyukova. If the Post wanted to talk about the political aspects of her work, it should have made that point. These are in three films that are readily available to U.S. viewers via Netflix.
In Vokzal dlya Dvoikh she played the part of an “uncle” who gave an entertaining little lecture on the virtues of private property and free enterprise. I’ve never seen anything like that in a popular U.S. film. In Brilliantovaya Ruka she played the part of a meddlesome building superintendent — in a way that provided social commentary which I suspect was not comforting to all the authorities. And the biggest role was of course as the Commissar in Komissar — a film that was suppressed for 20 years and which even under glasnost was released with extreme reluctance, seeing the light of day only thanks to outside pressure. In an interview, the director Alexandr Askoldov pointed out that even today it is rarely seen in Russia. Nonna Mordukova was one of the actors who interceded on his behalf at the time when the film was suppressed, when Askoldev was facing the possibility of a fate worse than that of being kicked out of the Party and of being prohibited from directing more films (which is what did happen to him).
It’s not that Mordyukova was a political dissident. As far as I know she wasn’t anything of the kind. She even seems to have preferred that Askoldov give in to the censors on the parts of the film that he refused to edit out. (You can see this on the Komissar DVD that contains “extra” material.) But she played a role in conflicts that we would do well to know about.
Here is a page about Mordyukova that gives better information about her work:
Komissar is an interesting case. Most web pages that talk about her work mention her big role in Komissar. But I have found Russian sites that tell about her career without mentioning that film. Same for Rolan Bykov, who played the male lead (see clip below). There are Russian web sites that tell all about his work, except for their silence about that movie.
And now I’ve learned that Komissar is still censored, even at Netflix. The clip below includes several minutes that were not on the one we got from Netflix. I am suspicious of why they were removed, because it seems they are important in leading up to the famous Holocaust scene that got Askoldov in such big trouble. Maybe the producers didn’t want to touch the Turkey-Armenia genocide issue, which is mentioned in this clip. But there are also parts that seem important in developing the character played by Mordyukova — in which she explains some of her views on war service and the political aspects of the wars.
25-Jul Slight edits to remove awarkdness, I hope