Movie comments » Kino Reticulator

Komissar

Dec 182007

We watched Komissar several months ago; now I’m watching (and re-watching) the interviews on the “Bonus Material” DVD from Netflix.

The most puzzling one was actress Nonna Mordukova being harshly critical of Aleksandr Askoldov for not making any more films.

This, after learning on that same DVD how the Soviet cultural authorities had not only banned Askoldov’s film, but destroyed it (except for the one copy that somehow got filed away), forbade him to make any more films, forbade him to assist in the making of any more, got him kicked out of the Communist Party, prosecuted him as a social parasite, and may have done worse to him if not for Mordukova and actor Rolan Bykov coming to his defense at his trial. (Well, that last part I learned from Wikipedia, not the DVD.) Under those conditions it would have been hard for him to make any more films, no?

Mordukova doesn’t say so, but the only way Askoldov could have avoided all these banishments would have been to compromise on the making of Komissar. He could have omitted the scene of the vision of the Holocaust, and then the film could have been released back in 1967. But he refused to do that.

We learn that Askoldov was a stubbornly principled man. In her long career Mordukova played some roles that make me wonder whether she, too, tested the limits of the censors. I’ve wondered if there are any stories about that. But she apparently made enough peace with the ruling regimes to have a long career as a popular actress, and to receive awards from the likes of Vladimir Putin. Was she resentful of Askoldov for doing the right thing in the face of opposition, like some of us who never served in the military might be resentful of those who put their life on the line for their country?

I’m not sure when her interview was made. That part is in black-and-white and in it she doesn’t look very old, so I presume it was not as recent as the others. It seems to be part of a program like I’ve often seen on RTR Planeta, where an actor or actress takes questions from the audience and where film clips are shown. Maybe it, too, was her way of making peace with the regime.

I still like her work and look forward to watching other films in which she appeared (if any of them ever make their way to Netflix). I can understand that not everybody is going to buck the system to the extent that Askoldov did. It’s too bad Mordukova had to be critical of Askoldov for it, though. Or, maybe she was just faking her criticism. It’s hard to understand what’s happening in an environment where people can’t be honest with each other.

Easterns

Movie comments, TV No Responses »

Dec 092007

Every once in a while I try to watch whatever is on RTR-Planeta to get a dose of Russian. Every once in an even greater while the internet is uncongested enough that I can watch a non-news program.

After one one of those rare occasions a few weeks ago I told my wife I had seen a show that looked like our old TV westerns. It started with a young family traveling by horse-drawn wagon across a dry wilderness, the man with gun walking alongside the wagon until he was captured by some of the natives. We joked that it should probably be called an “eastern” instead of a western.

It turns out that that’s exactly what they’re called. Over at Arts & Letters Daily I found this article from the New Statesman about Soviet cowboy movies.

What Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo really wanted, however, was a home-grown product. So the Committee of Cinematography ordered screenwriters to create Soviet supermen who would gallop faster and pull the trigger quicker than the hero of any western. White Sun (1969) was the first big hit, paving the way for a genre of “easterns”. In some films, the backdrop is the steppes or Siberia. The Ural Mountains stand in for Monument Valley, the Volga replaces the Rio Grande and the heroes sport civil war-style budyonovka hats or fur-lined shapkas instead of Stetsons.

And I didn’t know until now that that type of cap, like the one worn by the officers guarding Gary Kasparov at his showtrial, was called a shapka (or ushanka). My father had one in the 50s when we lived in North Dakota. In fact, my brother and I had caps somewhat like that when we were kiddies, though I think they had a small brim rather than the fur on the front — and just fake fur on the earflaps, probably. Once parkas came into fashion we didn’t wear caps like that anymore.

The ones worn by the gulag prisoners in the movie Vokzal dlya Dvoikh are not nearly as thick and luxurious looking as the ones worn by the officers. And theirs are worn with the flaps down.

Vodka Lemon chairs

Movie comments No Responses »

Dec 072007

We finished watching Vodka Lemon tonight. I didn’t mean to watch all the way to the end, but it’s Friday night and we forgot about everything else for a while.

About the only movies I can stand to watch are foreign, non-English movies. I’m very pro-American but the shallow stupidity of almost all American movies drives me away. I sometimes make an effort to sit down and watch one just to be sociable, but usually can’t take it for long. Whenever there is evidence that the writers and producers come from very narrow, constricted backgrounds, with narrow ranges of experience and narrow ideologies to match (which is almost all of the time) I’m out of there.

There was a great Garrison Keilor radio skit about this, back in the days before Keilor started constricting his own self to this mold made himself fit this mold himself. It had to do with making a movie version of Heidi. Except the producers had some problems with the original concept and wanted to make a few changes. By the time they were done with their tinkering, Heidi was a helicopter pilot for the Los Angeles PD and the grandfather ran a deli in Long Beach. I’d give a lot to have an audio copy of that skit.

So why is it that in the foreign movies I like to watch, I focus on some of the most trivial details, like whether people in winter really act cold? Good question. I have no answer, just an acknowledgment.

Here’s another example. There is something I like about movies (and cultures) in which people take their good dining room chairs outside to sit and visit. Not on a patio or porch. Not even on a manicured lawn. Just on the grass or the dirt. Or in the case of Vodka Lemon, in the snow and slush.

It’s very unlike American suburbia, with its lawn chairs, patio tables, swimming pools and outdoor barbecues, and other outdoor parafenalia. But I do remember family get-to-gethers from my childhood like that, in which indoor tables and tablecloths were set up outside, and the good, four-footed dining room chairs were brought outside to supplement the wooden-slat folding chairs borrowed from church.

Old photos of pioneers on the sod prairie frontier often feature Ma and Pa sitting outside on the good chairs. In those cases, all photos were taken outside because that’s where there was light, and the family usually wanted to show off its valuable possessions.

We’ve sometimes taken our oak, slat-backed dining room chairs outside on the rare times we eat out on a table on the lawn, but it seems a little old-fashioned. And those types of chairs don’t rest easily on uneven ground.

So I like movies that show people doing that. We saw it in Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Moskva Slezam ne Verit) and in Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (Neokonchenaya Piesa dlya Mekhanicheskogo Pianino). And there is a lot of it in Vodka Lemon, except that the movie never made it all the way to springtime, green grass, and dry ground. The closest it came was some springtime melting and slush. But the chairs were out there. That as well as other things made up for the low quotient of spoken Russian.

Vodka Lemon

Movie comments No Responses »

Dec 062007

Tonight we started watching Vodka Lemon. I’ll definitely have to watch it twice to figure out how all the scenes tie together.

I had somehow not thought of Armenia as a cold, wintry place, but there are lots of good scenes of cold and snow. The characters are obviously living in very poorly heated houses. The concept is understood in a way that southern Californian filmmakers would never quite get.

So far not much Russian has been spoken, which is not making this one nearly as good for language-learning as was Mimino. I presume most of what I’m hearing is Armenian, but I understand not a bit of that.

I just now read on Wikipedia that there is supposed to be French in it. Well, the opening credits are in French, but if any has been spoken, I missed it. Wikipedia says the movie was forty-one French words short of enough to qualify it as French cinema; therefore the producing company went bankrupt.

Regardless of the language issues, this one is doing fine in the winter/cold department. I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of winter/cold temperature scenes in movies. One movie that was a huge disappointment in that regard was Krasnaya Palatka (The Red Tent). It isn’t a complete failure, but there are some scenes that are completely, off-puttingly unrealistic. Somebody who is naked and freezing to death is not going to do it the way it’s shown there. And there are other scenes at the end that come from glaciers calving, not the Arctic ice pack where the movie is supposed to take place. It was a poor editing decision to insert that stuff. The Russians usually do a good job on these things. Maybe that one would have been OK if Russians had been left to do the whole thing.

Nikita Mikhalkov wants Putin to be in charge of the Sun

Movie comments No Responses »

Dec 032007

It’s not surprising that Nikita Mikhailkov is a big Putin supporter. He’s long been accused of being a political chameleon. The Arts section of the New York Times reports on what he’s up to:

Mr. Mikhalkov, on the set of his next movie, which is a military base outside Moscow, responded to these predictions with disdain: “Listen to what’s on television and radio now and tell me, what limitations do you see?” He tried not to look exasperated. Artists are perfectly free, he said. “My view is simply that the modus operandi of Russia is enlightened conservatism,” meaning hierarchical, religion-soaked, tradition-loving.

Artists may be free, but how long is that going to last in a society where reporters and dissidents are shot and poisoned? Mikhalkov points to the freedom artists enjoy now, but the people he’s responding to are talking about what’s going to happen two years from now.

And if Russia is so comfortable with being hierarchical, why is it necessary to shoot dissident reporters? If Mikhalkov is appealing to what Russia is, why not let it be what it is?

And after reading this article, I’m more irritated than ever by that Burnt by the Sun movie Mikhalkov did. Some reviewers liked the symbolism of that sun. But it wasn’t a sun that got people burned. It was people who did it — people who were given too much control over the lives of other people. The movie avoids that issue. And now Mikhalkov is coming down on the side of a man’s ability to have more of that.

It could be shut down because it’s so up to date

Movie comments No Responses »

Nov 292007

I wish I could watch this on RTR Planeta. But it doesn’t sound like something Putin would like. Excerpt from the article about it:

That leaves Belinsky and Herzen with plenty to do. They have arrived on Russia’s shores just as the history of Russian thought is up for grabs, when a fight is raging for the country’s identity and for its past. Everything Herzen detested is being resurrected: censorship, the autocracy of the Russian state, a macabre union of Orthodoxy, nationalism and authoritarianism. After almost 15 years of a democratic experiment following the collapse of Communism, Russia’s middle class is voluntarily surrendering personal liberties for a notional stability just as the French did in 1848. As one of the audience declared, “I feel that this production is so up to date that it could be shut down.”

It’s from moreintelligentlife.com

I’ve been wondering why the country that produced the likes of Dostoevsky could also produce such shallow understandings of the cause of great events like that seen in Utomlyonnye solntsem. Maybe there are some clues to possible alternate outcomes here.

Utomlyonnye solntsem

Movie comments 2 Responses »

Nov 252007

We finished watching Burnt by the Sun last night — did it in two sittings. It wasn’t as good as I had expected it to be, given the awards it received and that I’ve seen what Russians filmmakers can do to portray the Stalin showtrial era.

On the one hand it’s good to show the humanity of the NKVD — that they were real people who could have a talented, artistic side and didn’t come out of the womb determined to do evil. And it takes some guts to portray it that way. Whenever anyone attempts to do a film that way about Hitler and the Nazis, there are some people who will object saying it makes light of evil, when in reality it’s just the opposite.

But even though this film is from 1994, it was not at all about the revolution eating its children, or eating its parents. It could have been from 1960s Soviet Russia with its tired old storyline of implicating the white russians in whatever evil there is.

And to show Colonel Kotov at the end, quickly broken down, his face horribly beaten up, in contrast to the idyllic life he and his family had been living until just moments before, is not as horrifying as the thought that people at the show trials could be made to confess to crimes they never committed without that kind of physical brutality being inflicted on them. Maybe I’ve read too many things like Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” But I think we need to learn more about how such things could happen, and this movie doesn’t help.

Once on RTR Planeta I saw a good part of a different movie about the Stalin show trials. Sorry, I don’t know nearly enough Russian to tell you much about it — there were no subtitles and I could pick out only a few words — fewer even then I would be able to now. But it seemed to follow the Maxim Gorky story in some respects, except the end was more like Darkness at Noon. I’ll bet it was the kind of movie that would help me understand the behavior, if I could understand the language. I’ll probably not see it again, because I doubt Putin would allow such a movie to be aired now.

After watching the movie, I went online looking for reviews. Here is one that’s impressively perceptive. It’s titled “No Soul” and is written by Alan A. Stone of Boston Review.

Mimino

Movie comments No Responses »

Nov 192007

Tonight we finished watching Mimino, a 1977 Russian movie. (We hardly ever have time enough to watch one of these movies in one sitting.)

It’s a variation on the tale of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, except that the country mouse is a Georgian aircraft pilot whose nickname is Mimino, the city is Moscow, and the country mouse ends up being friends with an Armenian truck driver.

I see (not from the movie) that Mimino means “sparrow hawk,” which gives me extra reason to like him. The name Macketai-meshe-kiakiak also means sparrow hawk — Black Sparrow Hawk, to be more exact. I’ve spent a lot of time bicycling and researching things related to the Sauk leader Black Hawk in the past 10 years. I’m not sure if a Georgian sparrow hawk is the same as an American sparrow hawk, though. The American one is also known as the American Kestrel (Falco sparverius).

The film was a great one for language learning, so as usual I have an excuse to watch it at least once more. There was also some Georgian spoken, of which I still understand not a syllable even though this is the 2nd movie for us in which that language is spoken.

One fascinating part was the way the judicial system was portrayed. I don’t expect it to represent the real workings of the Soviet system any more than American movies portray the real workings of our own system, but still, it presents a picture of how it was ideally supposed to work.

I say ideally because it’s obvious that this is yet another movie that dares not be critical of the police and judicial authorities, who are all good, virtuous, and competent. All that goodness and competence puts severe limits on the possibilities for comedy and suspense, but the movie manages to work with it.

I gathered that the trial system is more like the French or Roman system than the English/American adversarial one — which is not surprising.

When our protagonist met his court-appointed attorney, I thought I knew what came next. It usually means trouble for the defendant, whether it’s in the English or the Roman system. But this is a young woman who explains it’s her very first case and offers that he can ask for a different attorney. He declines, and puts himself in her hands. She works hard for our hero, doing extra detective work on his behalf, and in the end does a charming little dance upon exiting the court building, excitedly explaining to her waiting family that she got our hero off with just a small fine.

Who wouldn’t want a court system that worked that way, with cute young court-appointed attorneys to play Deus ex Machina and see that justice is done? But unfortunately, one realizes that there is no reward system to reinforce that kind of behavior, not in their system or in ours.

What one reads about now is articles like this one from the WSJ: “Living larger in the new Russia.” Vitaly Sarodubova and his wife support Putin wholeheartedly, even though things like this happen:

Vitaly was mugged walking back from visiting Svetlana in her concierge compartment one evening. He says a young couple he thought was waiting for the bus asked him for a cigarette. As he reached to get one, he was hit from behind.

He wasn’t carrying his cell phone, he says, so all the thieves got was the 800 rubles he had in his pocket. When he stumbled home, he didn’t call the police or a doctor. “The police will just accuse me of something I’m not guilty of,” he says.

They’re obviously not comparing this to an earlier time when the police and judicial authorities worked as portrayed in this movie. But the fact that Russian in the 1970s had the ideal that it ought to work as portrayed in this movie was new information for me.

The Idiot

Movie comments No Responses »

Nov 112007

Tonight we finished watching Kurosawa’s “The Idiot.” This was our 3rd Kurosawa film. The first was “Ikuru,” and the 2nd was “The Seven Samurai.” We enjoyed The Seven Samurai, but I was disappointed to learn that Kurosawa hadn’t done more films like Ikuru, and had instead found it necessary to go into action films in order to get an appreciative audience.

I don’t know how closely The Idiot was inspired by Doestoevsky, but this film didn’t seem plausible — especially the female roles. Not only was it not interesting for the character studies, it wasn’t very informative on a cultural level, either. On the plus side, it was interesting to see what winter and snow are like in northern Japan.

And the actors spoke clearly. Even though I had spent a little time with the first of the Pimsleur Japanese courses, I could recognize hardly anything the actors in the first two films said, even with subtitles. Their talk seemed to be all slurred, especially in Seven Samurai. However, in The Idiot, there are a lot of fragments of speech that are somewhat recognizable to me.

It made me think it might be possible to learn to understand some of the language, after all. It’s tempting to give it another effort. But I had put the Japanese aside so I could spend more time on Russian and some other European languages, so I will stick with that for now.

Ubiquitous national symbols

Movie comments 1 Response »

Nov 072007

nuchin12

Today’s WSJ told about the new CCTV building now under construction in China. It will be the 2nd largest office building in the world, after the Pentagon.

I wonder if it will become a ubiquitous symbol of China. If so, that will be some interesting symbolism — a communications building as national symbol of a country that tries hard to restrict certain types of communication.

Another country with a ubiquitous building as national symbol is Russia. The Foreign Ministry Building is everywhere. This photo of it is from Wikipedia. It’s also in the standard intro scenes on Mosfilm DVDs:

It’s shown on the background of some of RTR Planeta’s news broadcasts. Somewhere on my desk was a candy wrapper for one of the Red October brand of candies. It pictured the Foreign Ministry building. (The wrapper still may be on my desk, but I may never know for sure.) One sees it in movies whenever there’s an excuse to show it, such as in Tarkovsky’s graduation project, “Steamroller and Violin”.

It’s interesting that a country would use a foreign ministry building as such an important symbol. Here in the U.S. the State Department building gets no such status. For us, the U.S. Congress is more of a symbol.

Older Entries Newer Entries