The snow packed down on a footpath forms ice that is the last to melt in spring. Scenes like this are one of the superficial reasons for liking Russian movies. You can’t do something like this with fake snow in California.

The movie is Kalina Krasnaya. I just started watching it.

The Evil Spirit of Yambuy was enjoyable to watch even though the plot was nothing special. The scenery was good and would probably look even better if we had a high quality version of the film. Some of the characters are interesting, though there isn’t much in the way of character development. It’s the novelty of the setting and the culture that held our attention.

A team of surveyors is finishing up its work in eastern Siberia in 1949 and heading home when they learn of the disappearance of other surveyors in the region of the Yambuy mountain. They go back to look for them. Some of the native Evenki herders offer advice, such as “Don’t be stupid, there is an evil spirit there.” The old woman, Yangara, especially has a charming way of dispensing advise and information. The Evenki knowledge of the region and its inhabitants proves to be indispensable to the Russians, who are far from home.

I liked the inevitable bear-human encounters in this film better than those in adventure movies that we used to take our kids to see on Saturday afternoons, mainly because the violent encounters are not drawn out to wearisome length.

More interesting than the bears are the reindeer. I had known that reindeer could pull a sleigh (and not only on Christmas Eve) but had no idea that they could be saddled and ridden. I don’t recall that the movie ever showed anyone climbing into the saddle, but the dismounting technique is very graceful, considering that it’s done without first bothering to bring the animal to a stop: Swing your left leg around in front of you and step off in one quick and easy motion. It went so quickly that it was hard to get a screenshot of the above woman doing it. Here she is shown almost at the end of the motion.

After watching the film, I went to google to learn more about reindeer and the people who live with them. How domesticated are these caribou, really, and how does one go about training one to be useful? That led me to a fascinating book, “The reindeer people: living with animals and spirits in Siberia” by Piers Vitebsky (2005).

One thing I learned is that although domestication of caribou has taken place only recently, i.e. over the past 3000 years, good luck trying to domesticate a caribou now and turn it into a reindeer. It won’t happen.

The two are a single species and can interbreed. Caribou males can and will come in to camp to impregnate reindeer females. Reindeer can run off and join a caribou herd, never to be seen again. But nobody has succeeded in taming a wild caribou in recent times.

I also learned that different peoples in northern Asia and Europe use reindeer differently. The Sami people of northern Scandinavia don’t ride theirs. The people who do ride reindeer don’t all use the same methods. Some groups ride on their backs, using a saddle and stirrups like are used on horses. But the Evenki people in this film place the saddle on the shoulders of the animal. Instead of stirrups, they tap the ground with a long staff to help keep their balance. The reindeer can carry loads on their shoulders much further without tiring than they can on their backs.

Piers Vitebsky spent some time among Eveny people, who are similar to the Evenki in the film. When perestroika first came to the Soviet Union, he took the opportunity to go and learn how their subsistence economy and shamanic worldview had adapted to Soviet rule.

It’s not as though opportunity came in the form of an open door and eager invitations, though. It took years of preparation and great persistence in dealing with recalcitrant bureaucrats. In Vitebsky’s telling, he seems to be what Indiana Jones would have been if he had been a real person (and if he had been an anthropologist instead of an archaeologist). One of my favorite passages so far is this:

We camped on a stony riverbed the first night and I found time to stop being frightened and look around at the wiry figures of my companions in the flickering firelight. After my years of fieldwork in India, their weather-beaten North Asian faces seemed completely new and exotic. Some wore flat caps and some headscarves tied around the backs of their heads. With their rifles and padded cotton convict jackets, they resembled brigands or mountain guerrillas. The vet asked if I had really ridden a horse before.

‘Actually, no,’ I said, ‘but I was afraid you wouldn’t take me if I said so.’

The men roared with laughter. This was my first inkling of the self-reliant and anarchic spirit that coexisted with the delicate discretion of traditional Eveny culture as well as with the nervous fear under Communism of doing anything that was not officially authorized.

I’m getting a real copy of the book so I can read the rest of it, including the parts that aren’t available on Google Books.

I challenge Mr. Klepp to watch Tengiz Abuladze’s 1984 movie, Pokayanie (Repentance) and then continue to speak of Beethoven’s Ninth as freedom’s symphony. If that isn’t enough, think about the totalitarian overtones in the Ode to Joy, in which all men become brothers. And those who don’t? Well, tough for them.

The part I was thinking about is what I blogged about over a year ago: http://kino.reticulator.com/2009/04/26/music-for-pokayanie/

Here is a YouTube clip of the segment of the movie that features the Ninth Symphony. Naturally, it doesn’t have the same impact out of context.

Well, that was a waste. Last October I quit watching Voditel dlya Vera at this point, where the tension was too much to take any more. I was waiting to get up enough nerve to watch the rest of it.

Myra and I just now watched the whole thing, all the way to the end.

What a letdown. It’s a great movie up until this point. But it’s as if the filmmaker (Pavel Chukhraj) lost his nerve at this point, too, and tacked on an ending that’s out of character with what had happened to this point. I wish I could ask him what happened. His other movie that I’ve seen (Vor) didn’t suffer from a weak ending, so I know it’s not due to a lack of ability. After seeing Voditel dlya Vera and Vor I would gladly watch (and probably rewatch) anything else he’s made. But he lost his way here, or something.

BTW, one of the best movie endings ever is the one in Vozvrashcheniye. IMO.

When I first started watching Russian movies a few years ago I wondered to myself, Where do they get all these good child actors?    I have since learned that Russia has plenty of not-so-great child actors, too, but about half way through this movie I found I was back to my original question:  Where do all these great child actors come from?  How is something like that taught to people who are so young?

I’m not able to follow this movie very well (no English subtitles) and I’m only about 2/3 of the way through.   But the young woman in the center is putting on quite a good performance.    Her name is Oksana Dackaja.   I haven’t been able to find that she ever appeared in another film after Личное дело судьи Ивановой.

This  makes me wonder, have there been any good child actors in Russia who went on to successful acting careers as adults?    It’s probably a rarity for that to happen in any country.

While watching Meri Poppins, do svidaniya, Myra commented that Miss Andrew looked like she was played by a man. I hadn’t noticed that. But it turns out that she was — by Oleg Tabakov, who we’ve also seen in several other movies. As in Mary Poppins, he often plays an obnoxious character.

In a post a few months ago about his role in Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, I had wondered if he ever played a sympathetic character. I still don’t know. We’ve seen him in Moskva slezam ne verit, Neskolko dney iz zhizni I.I. Oblomova, and Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesny. But those are just a few of his many roles. So maybe we’ll find one yet where he played a nice guy.

I’ve still been watching Russian movies almost every evening, some of them together with my wife, Myra. I just haven’t been blogging about them.

Tonight I watched The Lady with the Little Dog (1960), a Chekov adaptation. One of the most superficial things I learned was at about 8:40 in the YouTube version that you can see by clicking on the above screenshot. I liked the way the driver of the sleigh in the right foreground reached back to pull up the blanket for his passenger and then, when the passenger was seated, put it back as a covering for his legs. He did it all in one motion as if this was the millionth time he had done it.

It’s something I had never seen before, either in real life or in the movies.

There are a lot of nice touches in this film. Good cinematography all the way through.

At this point I was puzzled. This can’t be a Soviet movie from the 1960s, I thought. It’s a good movie with good acting and good cinematography, not like a lot of American movie crap. But that kid, a sympathetic character, is acting like a kid you might find in an American movie. I’m thinking of the younger brother in A River Runs Through It, for example. That kind of individualism, nonconformity, and resistance to authority is not something that would have been seen in a Soviet movie from those years. Or so I thought.

But from Wikipedia I learn this movie actually was considered subversive in Russia, and almost didn’t get released. It seems there is disagreement about just how it managed to get released, but it’s something that happened about the time that Khruschev was ousted.

This fairy tale is fun, but it wasn’t until the 4th or 5th watching that I understood this part. Now I recognize it. It’s a custom I’ve seen in many other Russian movies where those leaving as well as those seeing the travelers off sit down quietly for luck before the parting.

This wikipedia article lists a bunch of things like that, but except perhaps for some of the drinking customs, I don’t think I’ve seen any of the them in movies. Now I know some to watch for, though.

A little poke at what Blanch DeBois said in “A Streetcar Named Desire”? It works that way in English, anyway.

It’s nice to see Cheburashka again.

I’m trying to figure out if this footage of Van Cliburn shown on the TV in Pyat Vecherov is really from his famous 1958 visit to Russia for the Tchaikowsky Competition, or if it’s from some later visit in the 1960s. Nothing in the movie or the clip says outright that it is from 1958, but 1958 is a year that would fit the setting of the film.

Here is a YouTube clip that contains some footage from 1958.

Here is some from 1962.

At first it seemed to me that the TV in the movie showed an older Van Cliburn than the 1958 one. It seemed he had bigger hair in 1958. But it’s hard to say for sure.

I like to have my memories calibrated accurately about these things. We didn’t have TV in our house until 1958, though everyone else of my age (that I knew of) had one in the home long before that. We did have a phonograph, though, with a 45rpm and a 78 rpm turntable. We didn’t have 33rpm records at our house until 1963. I thought I had remembered that even before 1958 we had a recording on 45rpm records with Van Cliburn playing some Rachmaninoff. I called my father tonight to ask. He remembered those records (which he no longer has) but said that pianist was Arthur Rubenstein. But I did hear talk about Van Cliburn back then.

On the TV he is trying to speak in Russian. Was he just just reciting those words for the occasion, I wonder? Or was he really trying to learn some Russian? So far Google hasn’t helped me find an answer.