№27/28

REVIEWS Crossroads»

The characteristic feature of the review bloc in this issue is that new films are not only reviewed, but are matched with old films made by the same authors, made during the 1990s. The nineties and the 2000s, youth and maturity, a sort of synopsis of the evolution of directors who made new films in 2005–06. Representative films have been selected, which are symptomatic both for the nineties and for the 2000’ s: Brat [Brother] and Zhmurki [Blind Man’ s Buff] by Alexei Balabanov (Stanislav Zelvensky); Papa, umer Ded Moroz [Dad, Father Christmas is Dead] and Pryamokhozhdenie [Straight Walking] by Evgeny Yufit (Oleg Kovalov); S dnyom rozhdeniya [Happy Birthday] and Trebuetsya nyanya [Nanny Required] by Larisa Sadilova (Elena Gracheva); Mama ne goryui [Mum, Don’ t Be Sad] and Mama ne goryui-2 [Mum, Don’ t Be Sad-2] by Maxim Pezhemsky (Lidiya Maslova), Chekist [The Cheka Officer] and Svoya chuzhaya zhizn [Own Unfamiliar Life] by Alexander Rogozhkin (Alexei Vostrikov); Muzyka dlya dekabrya [Music for December] and Vdokh-Vydokh [Breathe In — Breathe Out] by Ivan Dykhovichny (Maria Kuvshinova); Monolog. Chastnye khroniki [Monologue. Private Chronicles] and Anatomiya Tatu [Tatu Anatomy] by Vitaly Mansky (Veronika Khlebnikova); Na krayu zemli [At the Edge of the World] and Alyosha Popovich i Tugarin Zmei [Alyosha Popovich and Tugarin Zmei] by Konstantin Bronzit (Elena Gracheva); Oblako-rai [Cloud-Heaven] and Kolya-perekati-polye [Kolya-Tumble-Weed] by Nikolai Dostal (Dmitry Savelyev); Vsemirnaya istoriya. Bank Imperial [A World History: Bank Imperial] and Dnevnoi dozor [Day Watch] by Timur Bekmambetov (Dmitry Bykov) and, as an afterword, Burner [Boomer] and Burner. Film vtoroi [Boomer. The Second Film] by Pyotr Buslov (Mikhail Trofimenkov). Despite all the differences in style and concept, the leitmotif of the reviews of these films is one shared by all, and an unexpected one. The nineties, which it has become commonplace to scorn for their lack of real films, turn out to be the time when significant figures in the contemporary film process made their real contribution to cinema. The films made by the same directors in the 2000s, with rare exceptions, are assessed as pale shadows, or the product of opportunism. The general feeling of almost all the reviewers was that of a complete change of genre. A transposition of tragedy to trash, comedy to comics. Psychological cinema has either been formatted by the iron hand of the producer, or shoved out the window altogether. Genre films exude glamour, and give off a scent, not of blood, but of popcorn. Cinema in the 2000’ s turns away from reality, towards metatext and/or illusion. If the films of the 1990s still feed off freedom, the films from the 2000’ s demonstrate, for the most part, the very fierce discipline of the project. Exceptions are gratifying, but rare in the extreme.

VERTIGO «My nineties»

The «Nineties» section contains memoir essays and interviews with writers, critics, directors, translators and musicians (i. e. all those people usually referred to as «people in the creative professions»), who try to verbalise their experience and way of life during the era of the nineteen nineties. What was this decade all about? The chaos out of which the cosmos was born, and at the same time the blood-spattered collapse of civilisation; a time of desperate rejoicing, and of joyful despair, of unbridled freedom and of equally unbridled violence… The principal concept behind the section is to bring together, in a common whole, the feelings and interpretations of a feverish time, which belonged to utterly different (in terms of age, background and predilections) people, and thus to capture an epoch in all its fullness and colour. The following contributors gave their answers to S? ance: stage directors Genrietta Yanovskaya and Anatoly Praudin; director of the State Hermitage museum Mihail Piotrovsky; documentalist and stringer Eduard Dzhafarov; writers Dmitry Prigov Ludmila Petrushevskaya Alexander Goldstein, Mikhail Berg, Eduard Limonov Sergei Kuznetsov Konstantin Murzenko Dmitry Bykov, Lev Rubinstein Victor Toporov Dmitri Galkovsky Pavel Kuznetsov Sergei NosovTatyana Moskvina; film director Ivan Dykhovichny; journalists Leonid Parfenov and Valery Panyushkin; Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky; musician Evgeny Fedorov. Interviews taken by Lyubov Arkus and Konstantin Shavlovsky. For each of the authors of this section, the nineties became in many respects a time of reckoning — if no’ for their whole lives, then at least for a new life; an impassable border dividing the Soviet era from the Russian. Each person had their own minute details, tokens of life, day-to-day elements that coalesce to form the «clamor of the age» — the «last breath of the century». And it transpires that the nineties are, in oui consciousness, defined by epoch-making events, such as: perestroika; the putsch; the bloody events ii Vilnius, Dushanbe and Baku; the tank shots fired at the White House; the storming of the television statio at Ostankino; — alongside the personal experience о new words and items, more specifically; pagers and mobiles; «Euro»-quality refurbishment; luxury; supermarkets and vouchers; ration cards and Mercedes’ limos; cooperative cafes and stalls; black raincoats and tracksuits with stripes down the sides. The eternal birth of children and the departure of parents. A reassessment of all values. In other words, everythin that makes up a Historical Epoch in the minds of those involved in it — who lived through it.

NEW HERO «The Servant»

Marina Drozdova’ s article A Crowd of Prototypes starts with a list of classic servant roles created in European culture, and the qualities ascribed to them according to character type: «the bitter lot of the Victorian major domo, the self-interest of the French maid, the sycophancy of the Slavic shop clerk, the demonism of the subject of a totalitarian regime, the dull misery of the serf…» Russian modernity is unlikely to be capable of contributing to this list: on account of the lack of any stable social class system, the roles of «master» and «servant» lose their clear and defined borders: the masters and the servants may change places at any moment. Professional servants have made their entrance to Russian cinema very recently. The author of this article could count only two nannies: from the TV series Moya prektasnaya nyanya [My Lovely Nanny] and from Larisa Sadilova’ s film Trebuetsya nyanya [Nanny Required]; two half-baked «creative types» cum «demons for hire» from Maxim Pezhemsky’ s Mama ne goryui-2 [Mum, Don’ t Be Sad-2]; two bandit gophers from Alexei Balabanov’ s Zhmurki [Blind Man’ s Buff]; and a lonely general’ s chauffeur in Pavel Chukhrai’ s Voditel’ dlya Very [A Driver for Vera]. If one excludes the «Lovely Nanny», who is of American origin, then none of the remaining servant types perceives him or herself to be such: for each of them the servant role is a temporary one, and the heroes are all in a state of expectation, waiting to be able to abandon their despised social pigeon hole with the maximum benefit to themselves. Essentially, the relationship between «master» and «servant» remains not only unresolved, but even unconsummated. In Igor Mantsov’ s article — which calls upon the broadest of cultural spectra from Denis Diderot to Emile Benveniste — the interrelation is examined between the occurrence of stable ’ master-servant’ archetypes and a developed self-reflection on the part of an established class system. The character of servant appeared in Russian cinema literally only in recent years, after an extremely long absence. In a country where «every cook needs to know how to run the country», this social role was eradicated. Igor Mantsov reaches the conclusion that restoring the stock market, returning private ownership and free trade are considerably more straightforward challenges than restoring the social roles that were eliminated under a totalitarian regime. In politics, and even in the economy, it is possible to introduce changes from the top down, while in social psychology the process is much longer and problematical. In the author’ s assessment, it is for this reason that films containing such a long-forgotten character type cannot be considered to be artistically truthful. In Alexei Gusev’ s article The Servant: A History of the Issue, he examines in detail twelve films from world cinema (the earliest from 1915, and the latest from 2001), in which servants play the crucial role. The servants are highly varied: from a black slave on a plantation who has sensed freedom, to a classic British butler; from a saintly peasant girl to a murdering schizophrenic. The cinema provides roles to nursemaids, maids, lackeys, drivers, governess’, nannies, and even the not-quite-alive Golem. It is not only the universal archetypes on which the relationship between master and servant are based that are outlined with thoroughness in the article, but also the national cultural paradigms, and the exclusive authorial concepts in each case, the colossal factual material of the article is tempered by its strict composition and succinctness.

ANNIVERSARY Sergei Gerasimov

The Man, the Answer article is devoted to the centenary of Sergei Gerasimov, film director and teacher, and could be termed «anticelebrational». The article presents a psychological portrait of one of the most renowned and titled personalities in Soviet culture. Having started his film career in the 1920s as an actor in the avant-garde group fex, Gerasimov became one of the classics of Socialist Realism. In the 1960s and 70s he confirmed his reputation as a master of serious, authorial cinema. However, according to the article’ s author, Gerasimov’ s films consistently remained within the limits of the general party line, which overlapped to a remarkable extent with the aesthetics of contemporary western film. The paradox of Gerasimov as a teacher was that he was able to make a firm professional out of absolutely any student at the VGIK Film School, but was incapable of identifying, let alone developing, the bright creative genius of any of them, indeed he neither knew how, nor wished to do so. There were only rare instances in which Gerasimov’ s films took on an authorial tone -when the director touched upon the theme of the impending doom of the generation. Moreover, whichever generation it was that Gerasimov was addressing, he always had his own generation in mind. This was the case, because even once he had become a dignitary and a grandee, he still remained one of the «men of the 20s, with that bounce in their step».

BLOW-UP «Killed While Trying to Escape»

In the article a curious discovery is recounted, relating to Jean-Luc Godard’ s film Au bout to souffle, which illuminates to a great extent the internal pathos of the picture. In a light and elegant style, without overplaying the facts, and yet without avoiding them, the author demonstrates that one source of this film was the biography and work of the French writer and adventurer, Maurice Sachs. The situation of the tragic death of Maurice Sachs (who died in a Nazi concentration camp while trying to escape) is reflected in parody in the killing of the film’ s hero, Michel Poiccard (shopped to the police by the woman he loves, whose name — Patricia Franchini — is a clear symbol for France the Motherland).

PORTRAIT Lars von Trier

The prelude to this section is a selection from interviews by Lars von Trier from various years under a heading that is interpreted as a provocation «I’ m a nice guy». This comment is immediately refuted by a list of all the attributes of von Trier as penned by critics, all edited together: magician-agent-provocateur-genius-wheeler-dealer, etc… The next edited collection presents two documents: the Dogma manifesto from 1995, and the Statement of Revitality from 2006. In addition to this, we present the most interesting comments on von Trier from the European and American press starting from 1995 up to the present day (totalling approximately one hundred comments). This contrast determines the composition of the section: the internal progress of the director through time, and the external reaction to this progress by an astonished public. There is not a single contemporary director whose creative work is viewed with such rage: on the one hand as constant provocation, and on the other as straightforward moralising. On the one hand as frenzied innovation, and on the other as a calculated exploitation of methods invented at the dawn of the avant-garde. On the one hand there is subtle intellectualism, and on the other — pure na? vet?. The essays by Roman Volobuev, Thomas Beltzer, Peter Schepelern, Jean-Michel Frodon (editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cin? ma) are devoted to the phenomenon of poeticism and pragmatism in the films of von Trier. The section closes with a conceptual article by Alexander Sekatsky Theology of Straight Action. Sekatsky examines von Trier sequentially as the successor to the existentialist Kierkegaard, and at the same time as an heir to the furious moralist Savonarola. In the opinion of the critic, in each of his films von Trier creates a ’ rehearsal’ for the Day of Judgment: an existential test, in which a person is transported through a fire of ordeal, the shell is burned entirely off, and only the person’ s true core remains. According to the critic, it is possible to interpret the results of von Trier’ s cruel moral experiment in the following manner: «As soon as the fake goodness of the good Samaritans disappears, all becomes clear: they are nothing but scum.»

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