Russia » Kino Reticulator

Easterns

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.

Nikita Mikhalkov wants Putin to be in charge of the Sun

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Ubiquitous national symbols

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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.

Sudba Cheloveka

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Nov 052007

I’m now re-watching portions of “Subda Cheloveka“, aka “Destiny of a Man”. It’s a Sergei Bondarchuk movie which came out in 1959. Bondarchuk not only directs, but is the lead actor.

Over at Netflix some of the reviewers take issue with the notion that this movie is propaganda. Well, it isn’t ideological propaganda. You could say it’s patriotic propaganda of a very human kind.

I actually enjoyed this movie a lot more than Bondarchuk’s War and Peace that came out in the following decade. The War and Peace extravaganza seemed to be one that was more intent on touching important points that an audience familiar with Tolstoy’s book would expect to see. Some coherence was lost in the process. This seems to be often the case with literature made into movies. Subda Cheloveka is based on a novel, too, but for whatever reason, didn’t seem to suffer from the usual malady.

Bondarchuk’s character, Solokov, goes through a long series of war-time horrors, and loses his family while in a German prison camp.

One part that was amusing to me was the part where Solokov gains the respect of his captors. And how does he do that? If it was an American movie, the conceit might be that American cinema is the wonderful thing that will open up the hearts of the foreigners. That’s how it worked with Brad Pitt and the Dalai Lama in “Seven Years in Tibet.” But the Russians have something different to offer: their drinking prowess. The Germans were about to shoot him for an impolitic remark when Solokov showed them how he could put down the liquor. So they instead ended up admiring him as a good soldier, making him a trustee and giving him the job of chauffeur to one of their officers. I suspect it tells us more about the Russian self-image than anything else, just like that stupid Brad Pitt movie tells us about the peculiar conceits of Hollywood movie makers. (I say this because I’ve seen both themes more often than in just these instances.)

And that leads to a question. Did such things really happen? No, I don’t mean the part about the Germans being so impressed by his ability to chug hard liquor. I mean the part about making him a chauffeur. Could such a thing have happened, that they would trust a prisoner to that degree? Was the ability to drive a vehicle so rare and the manpower shortage so severe that they would have dared let a Russian do it for them?

That’s my main question about historical accuracy. I also have one about human behavior. At the end the war is over and Solokov has lost his entire family. He ends up pulling himself together when he adopts a starving, homeless urchin. When he “reveals” himself to the boy as the father he had hardly known, I’ll bet a real-life boy would be somewhat reserved at that point. Even under those circumstances, real-life affection would take some time to grow.

But for real-life enjoyment, it doesn’t matter a lot. The movie is an obvious tearjerker, and that’s just fine. I liked it. There were some good scenes of the Russian countryside and of life in pre- and post-war Russia to help it along.

Brideshead?

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Sep 202007

From a review at The American Spectator:

The excellent 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was re-run on my local TV recently. … From the religious point of view, the themes it dealt with included one that few writers in modern times have tackled — the fact that Salvation is offered to all and by Divine Grace the rich may be saved as well as the poor.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as an American or British TV series I could ever stand to watch, but this sounds interesting. How do I break the news to my wife, though, that I’d like to watch some television someday?

The description in that review reminds me somewhat of one of the Russian movies we watched several months ago: Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, based on a Chekov work. At first I considered sending it back to Netflix and trying something else. Why did I want to see a movie about superficial, degenerate aristocrats? But in the end I gave this one a 5. It wasn’t really a religious film, but it was surprising to us to see a respectful, non-superficial treatment of religion in a Soviet-era film. Granted, it wasn’t a pre-WWII Stalin film, but still, where would you have seen something like that in a U.S. made film?

Which reminds me, I wonder what director Nikita Mikhalkov is up to lately. The knock on him is that he is a political chameleon, taking on the coloration of whatever regime is in power. So what is he doing for Putin now? Or is he getting too old for movie-making anymore?

Stop it from happening again

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Sep 042007

Interesting closing paragraph to a WSJ article about the new Museum of the Soviet Occupation in Georgia:

The story goes that Vladimir Putin considered the display highly provocative and asked President Saakashvili why Georgia would do such a thing. After all, the most prominent butchers were themselves Georgian, such as Stalin and Beria. Mr. Saakashvili responded that the Russians were free to open a museum about how Georgia had oppressed them. The Georgian no doubt knew well that such an exhibition would offend his menacing northern neighbor with a former KGB officer at its helm, but he went ahead anyway. Perhaps he calculated that it was the best way to stop any of it from happening again.

Which reminds me, well over a year ago I used to see some interesting movies on RTR Planeta about the bad old days of Stalin and his executions. I seldom get to watch that station on the internet anymore, but sometimes I do. I wonder if Putin still allows that kind of thing to be shown any more.

Nonna Mordyukova

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Aug 312007

Maybe I didn’t give Brilliantovaya ruka quite enough credit. I only gave it a Netflix rating of 3, but there is an interesting part played by Nonna Modryukova.

It took me a while to remember where I had seen her before. She was the Komissar in the movie Komissar, and did a great job in that film. Some googling informed me that she had also been in the film Vokzal dlya Dvoikh. Of course. Now I remember. She was the “Uncle” who gave that subversive little talk about the virtues of private property and private enterprise.

In this film she plays a “house manager”, where she is a busybody pest who minds other peoples’ business, looks out for residents who are living beyond their means, and puts up public denunciations of people who don’t live properly (in the form of signs posted in front of the buildings where they live). Is she a parody of a type of character who was extant in Russia in 1968? I don’t know, but wish I understood more of how that worked.

I previously said the movie managed to show the police and other authorities as noble, virtuous people — very competent at what they were doing, and almost omniscient. It’s kind of hard to make a comedy/James Bond-type movie if you have to play the cops that way. But if this house manager was an authority figure, then we can say that not all authority figures were portrayed sympathetically. (Her response to the statement that a dog is a man’s best friend. “Man’s best friend is the superintendent.” I presume that’s another term for her character’s job.)

Was this part of the movie a bit subversive for 1968? I don’t know. But it’s fun trying to learn about things like that. I do know that I’ve enjoyed watching Nonna Mordyukova every time I’ve seen her so far.

I’m not sure if she is still alive or not. I saw one news item from a couple of years ago that suggested she was in bad health then.

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