Mar 042010
 

vlcsnap-00017

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.

Feb 052010
 

welcome

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.

Jan 282010
 

red-sit-luck

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.

red-riding-strangers

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

red-riding-cheburashka

It’s nice to see Cheburashka again.

Jan 252010
 

vlcsnap-00053

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.

1958

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

1962

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.

Jan 152010
 

visitor-future-verter

The guy on the left is Robot Verter, according to the credits. No wonder he talks so slowly and walks so stiffly.

BTW, is there any science fiction movie with talking robots who speak rapidly, perhaps slurring their words and cracking jokes? For that matter, is there any movie besides this one in which robots express a concern for future generations? I don’t watch much science fiction, so I could easily have missed it.

I don’t know if Robot Verter has a big role throughout this movie, but I hope he does. It’s easy to understand him, because he speaks so slowly and distinctly. Good for language-learning, I hope.

Jan 102010
 

election

I’m trying to understand the premise of this joke. Are there people in the Russian Federation, even the southern parts, who don’t know who Felix Dzerzhinsky was?

The movie (Den Vyborov – Election Day) is hillarious. I’ve watched it several times already. In this scene Kamil (played by Kamil Larin) is bluffing his way out of a situation by claiming to be FSB officer Felix Dzerzhinsky. Wouldn’t that be like someone in the U.S. trying to bluff his way out of a situation by claiming to be FBI officer J. Edgar Hoover?

In any case, it’s great fun to watch. I can even follow some of the conversation, though there are many words I don’t know that I presume wouldn’t be appropriate for all social situations.

Jan 092010
 

vlcsnap-00014

Rodnya isn’t turning out to be very good. We’ve watched two thirds of it. It still has a half hour to redeem itself, but I don’t have my hopes up.

Nonna Mordukova had a lot of good roles in her career, but maybe she and her director didn’t have any idea how to play a country woman. She wouldn’t have to have been a stereotypical country woman like we see in other movies, but if the filmmakers were trying to introduce us to a new type of person none of us has ever met, whether in real life or in fiction, they needed to do something to help us get to know her.

In this scene she’s practically getting into a wrestling match with her daughter on their way home from the airport. Her daughter lit up a cigarette, to the surprise and objections of her mother. There are a zillion ways the daughter-mother interactions could have been played to help us understand how the two relate people to each other, but this film didn’t know how to do any of them. So it got slap-stick about it. And the same happened with other scenes.

Would any real people act like they do? Maybe in a country where men kiss each other in greeting we shouldn’t expect the same kind of physicality (or lack of it) that we would expect in America. But I suspect it’s not done this way because things are different in Russia. I’ll bet it’s just that the filmmakers just couldn’t figure out how these roles should work, so they kept us from getting to know the characters. They kept the characters at a distance from us, the viewers, through roughhousing, through loud and fast talk, and through camera angles that hid the faces and postures from us. Even a scene between Nonna’s character and her new male friend is shown from a rough distance, probably because the filmmakers don’t know how to bring out the subtle interactions between the characters.

It’s sort of like Garrison Keilor’s radio skits. Sometimes they have wonderful insights into characters and situations. But I suppose there are weeks when ideas don’t come to him and/or his writers, but still he has to go on the air. So he makes word pictures about some slapstick situation. It’s good for a few laughs, but it’s not what makes Keilor good.

vlcsnap-00043

I hope there is a good explanation for this scene with Nonna’s ex-husband and a couple of motorcycles at about the 1 hour point. The film by this point has done a lot that needs redemption, and this has just added to the burden.

Next we’ll have to watch the rest of the film to see if, after all these burdens it put on itself, it makes something out of itself anyway.

Jan 042010
 

5evenings-workerslikeyou

To American ears, it’s a bit strange for Tamara Vasilyevna (played by Ludmila Gerchenko) to be asking the question, “Do the workers like you?” It’s not a strange thing to wonder about, but it’s a strange thing to be asking an old boyfriend about, or to be asking almost anyone. If an American did get asked that question, the answer that Aleksandr Petrovich Ilyin (played by Stanislav Lyubshin) gave would be a likely response.

Although slightly strange, I didn’t think much about it until I got to the latest part of a book I’ve been reading, “Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization : Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia” by David Priestland (2007).

In the late 1920s, when Stalin decided it was time to shut down the NEP, he was moving to a “populist revivalist” rhetoric and policy. (“Populist revivalist” is Priestland’s term for one of the various currents of thinking in Russia at the time. I don’t know if the term has been used or adopted by anyone other than Priestland, but it does seem appropriately descriptive.)

On page 186 I read that at the end of 1927, Stalin’s man Sergo Ordzhonikidze wrote a report for the fifteenth party congress.

While [Ordzhonikidze] rejected the left’s charge that the state apparatus was ‘alien’ to the working class, he was highly critical of officials, not merely for their inefficiency but also for their poor treatment of workers. Officials’ ‘treatment of people’ had to change, he declared. A cheap and efficient apparatus as existed in Germany was not enough: the apparatus had to be closely ‘linked’ with the masses and had to work together with the workers and peasant rather than to ‘command’ them. … Those officials who behaved arrogantly to workers and peasants were, the congress declared, guilty of ‘sabotage’ (pages 186-187)

In the next chapter we see how this concern for the relationship between workers and supervisors should not be taken at face value, but neither was Stalin just cynically making it up to hide his true intentions.

I think I can see how it’s leading to the purges of 1937, but I haven’t read a lot further than this point yet.

It’s a complicated story and I’m not going to try to summarize it here. All I’m saying is that given this context, it became less odd to me that a movie made in the 1970s, portraying the period of the 1950s, would have someone asking the question, “Do the workers like you?” Stalin had tapped into a populist sentiment that was current long before the late 1920s, and isn’t surprising that it would have persisted. It’s not completely different from the currents of populism that have existed in the United States, but it’s a slightly different flavor.

Jan 022010
 

baskervilles

The latest issue of Smithsonian magazine has an article about “Sherlock Holmes’ London.” In the print edition there are photos of some of the actors who have played the role, with the caption:

Holmes has enjoyed a stellar career on-screen (clockwise from top-left: portrayed by Basil Rathbone, 1939; Jeremy Brett, 1984-94, John Cleese, 1973; Michael Caine, 1988; Robert Downey Jr. in the latest film version).

Tsk, tsk. Not a word there about Vasily Livanov.

Late edit:   At the online edition there is a video clip that gives samples of some of the 50 people who’ve played the role.  But there isn’t a word about Vasily Livanov there, either.