EYES WIDE OPEN: Marlen Khutsiev's film IT HAPPENED IN MAY (1970)

Printed version appeared in the Telluride Film Festival publication Film Watch (2016)

Todorovsky and Arkhilovski in It Happened in May

Old films are like a message in a bottle, mysterious and enchanting, even more so if written in an hidden code to elude the censor. Sophisticated and committed to self-expression, Soviet film makers from Eisenstein to Muratova have made such coding part of their cinematic aesthetic, and as Soviet experience fades into distant past, lovers of vintage cinema would do well to keep this in mind. Marlen Khutsiev belongs to the Olympian roster of Soviet directors auteurs whose films transcend ideological regimentation. Few have more successfully incorporated this constraint, making it part of their cinematic expression.

Marlen Khutsiev

Marlen Khutsiev(his given name is a contraction of MARxLENin) was born in 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to a father who was a committed Bolshevik revolutionary and shot, like many, in the Stalinist purges in 1937. This year Khutsiev plans to release his thirteenth film featuring a dialogue between – appropriately for a nonagenarian director – two Russian sages, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Khutsiev is, perhaps, best known for his 1961 I am Twenty (a.k.a. Zastava Ilyicha) and July Rain (1966) – films that share the cinematic “vibe” with Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Blowup (1966). Like Antonioni’s, Khutsiev’s films became iconic for the 1960s generation.

It Happened in May (Был месяц май, 1970), too, is intensely contemporary. Released to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of WWII, it falls thematically within the range of government-sponsored topics: victory over the Nazi evil, war-time heroic sacrifices, and staying vigilant in the face of the uneasy coexistence with the former foe. In the USSR, by 1969, the victory in WWII has largely replaced the revolution of 1917 as the principal source of legitimacy for the Party and the state. Accordingly, movie houses, TV screens, theaters, bookstores, and media were saturated with war themes.

There was also a pernicious side to this enforced obsession: the Brezhnev regime used the theme as a cover for rehabilitating the war-time supremo Joseph Stalin and his party’s Gulag record. Like many among the intelligentsia, Khutsiev was appalled. Although not a dissident, he joined other prominent artists and scientists in 1966 who petitioned against creeping Stalinism. No wonder, then, that he approached the war theme from an unusual angle and introduced his own, subtly discordant, note into the official chorus of commemorative hosannas.

A war movie, It Happened in May is set paradoxically on a bucolic German pig farm, untouched by war, a few days after the Nazi surrender. But before the story begins, as if to get the requisite bravura out of the way, Khutsiev opens with a five-minute montage of war footage, replete with a deafening battle-field soundtrack overlaid with Tchaikovsky’s Manfred and culminating in the hoisting of the Red flag over the Reichstag. Then, all of a sudden, come the deafening silence and the indolent air of the opening scene: the protagonist, a young Lieutenant (Alexander Arzhilovsky) wakes up on a peaceful sunny morning in a clean and puffy farmer’s bed. There were more surprises to come.

G. Baklanov

Made for television, which explains its generous use of close-ups and a spare setting, the film is based on a short story by a war veteran writer, Georgy Baklanov (Fridman), entitled  “The Wages of Horror” (Почём фунт лиха,"1962). Baklanov (1923-2009) was a well-known chronicler of WWII much admired for his authenticity and honesty. In his story, an old veteran recalls how, as a young officer, he was stunned when coming face to face with the Nazi camps and ovens, concealed by the civilized surface of German life. On the face of it, the film, like the story, was meant as a message in a bottle from the WWII generation to be discovered by their carefree descendants a quarter of a century later. But while Baklanov’s narrative is straightforward, the film infuses the central moment of discovery with extraordinary resonance and depth.

A small detachment of Red Army scouts, led by a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant, is quartered on an idyllic German farmstead that appears untouched by the war. The soldiers are making friends with the farm’s German owners who are as eager as the Russians to put the war behind them. The camera focuses on the simple pleasures of peace: sleeping late, a hearty meal, sharing a carafe of cider, the soldiers making simple conversation in broken German, their clumsy courtship of the farmer’s pretty wife. The farm raises pigs, and the soldiers are eager to help the young-looking farmer’s wife in her chores around the well-tended pigsty. But come evening, the farmer, mindful of the soldiers’ gallantry, takes his wife and their teenage son to spend the night with relatives in a nearby village. The overall scene’s setting is serene but the inquisitive camera eye, awkward silences, strained exchanges, and the  scene’s flat, shadowless light lend the opening episode the air of the uncanny – a Gothic fairytale castle, its ghosts too shy for the light of day.

Early in the evening the young Lieutenant is summoned by his superior to a nearby estate where a group of junior officers are celebrating the end of the long war. The Lieutenant mounts a trophy motor bike and speeds to the party along a beautiful wooded alley. Within sight of his destination, an opulent German country house, he fumbles and crashes. For a moment he looks dead. This is how Khutsiev prepares him for a nocturnal encounter with the ghosts – readies him for the descent into hell.

The accident leaves the Lieutenant dazed but uninjured and he soon joins the partying officers, raising melancholy toasts in honor of fallen comrades and singing melancholy Russian songs. They have seen too much grief and lost too many comrades to enjoy their victory celebration. As the party comes to an end, the host, a Sr. Lieutenant (played by the film maker Peter Todorovsky wearing his own war-time uniform), invites officers to go for a ride in a captured German
convertible. Unexpectedly, they are stopped at a mysterious gate, not quite realizing they have arrived at the gates of hell, a Nazi concentration camp. Inside, still clueless, they enter the dark buildings. Illuminated by their flash lights, various objects come into view: mysterious empty cans (the gas Zyklon-B), mounds of abandoned footwear, spoons, and finally, heavy oven doors that the visitors take for the camp’s heating system.

Only later, when the Lieutenant encounters the camp’s former inmates, who wander onto the pig farm in the night, does he learn the truth about the death camp: the gas ovens, the burning of the victims, the use of human ashes to fertilize the nearby fields. When he finds out that their hosts had been complicit in having one of their Polish forced laborers gassed, the officers go searching for them in the nearby village. In vain. The family has disappeared. The farmstead is also empty, except for the pigs. The final shot is of the Lieutenant.
He is standing alone, dazed and bewildered by the revelation, while around him the farm’s well-tended pigs are crowding the yard, a fairytale visual substitute for the disappeared family.

The film’s final segment, like the introductory part, consists of a montage of documentary footage, but this time, the clips show street life of modern European cities – Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow – replete with well-dressed men, women and children hurrying on their way along avenues pulsating with traffic. Wearied by the horror, the eye feasts on these quotidian scenes. Without warning, the human traffic begins to flow onto the grounds of a concentration camp museum.

Now the moving images get interspersed with some of the most famous stills of the Holocaust. The knowing viewer is perplexed. The stills show what look like exclusively Jewish victims whereas those in the film are a Polish couple forced to work on the pig farm.
The camera lingers, moves on, and then returns to one of the iconic holocaust images – a seven-year-old Jewish boy from  the Warsaw ghetto, his arms raised in a gesture of surrender. The present-day footage resumes, and the camera picks out a charming boy of the same age and follows his gaze before fading into the credits.

This final juxtaposition – a Jewish boy victim and his happy and free counterpart of 1970 – invites the Soviet viewer, keenly aware of subliminal messaging, to recapitulate the film narrative mentally, thereby deciphering its other layer of meaning. Apparently the film functioned also as a silent protest against official Soviet anti-Semitism. Soviet propaganda habitually suppressed the story of the Jewish holocaust and denied the Jews’ singular status as victims of the Nazi extermination policies.

Baklanov must have been ecstatic for the way Khutsiev  “unpacked” the hidden, perhaps even unconscious, layers of his short story. In a rare tribute of one author to another, he renamed his "Wages of Horror" after the film.  In all subsequent publications the story appeared as “It Happened In May.”

August 2016
Berkeley, California

Remembering Bella Akhmadulina

News flashed the other day the death of Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina at the age of seventy-three. Growing up in Moscow, I remember her name cropping up among the poets who occupied the grey zone between the permitted and the impermissible: she could publish some of her poetry, the other, her muse’s contraband, she could voice at public recitals and enjoy its circulation in literary samizdat. That’s how most Russian intelligentsia lived then – in two worlds at the same time – call it schizophrenia or split personality, or double-think. A true poet, she embodied her age, warts and all, and the decades after Stalin’s death were nothing if not the age of poetry.

Inflected and melodically variable, the Russian language gives poetry an extra ordinary expressive force, further amplified by poetry’s mnemonic potential. If you happen to live under a repressive ideocracy like the Soviet Union, you are likely to resort to poetry as a preferred medium of public expression, since verse is easily memorized, harder to pin down as protest, and leaves little material evidence. Of course, mass terror under Stalin left little room for such niceties, but once Stalin died and the Soviet party-state abandoned mass repression, things changed, and poetry, for one, could really thrive.

The state-controlled publishing could not contain the burgeoning youth culture of Soviet baby boomers, and the minimal – and for that reason infinitely titillating – lifting of the skirt of Soviet censorship, rather than satisfy, only whetted the appetite for free expression. For us, who belonged the post-WWII generation, shaped by Nikita Khrushchev’s Stalinization campaign, cold war, and its other, “peaceful coexistence” (a grudging admission of the impossibility of the “last and decisive battle” against capitalism), this toying with the ideological hemline wreaked havoc with our imagination and set our minds on fire! Grim and sclerotic as the Soviet empire was in its decline, it became a Garden of Eden for poetry – and a purgatory, not to say a minor inferno, for the poets themselves. Some, like Brodsky, were exiled or jailed, others went through torments of hell in trying to combine the imperative of remaining true to their calling with the relentless and crushing pressure to conform. That was the cup that Akhmadulina, twenty and otherworldly beautiful in 1956, drank to the dregs.

In the sixties, I was too green and too much of a young snob to take seriously the poetry of my older contemporaries. Joseph Brodsky was the sole exception, but then, he never published in Soviet press, had gone through a crucible of a trial, incarceration in a mental hospital, and exile up north. Besides, the word had it that Anna Akhmatova herself bestowed the mantle of the Silver Age Heir Apparent on Brodsky’s shoulders. She knew a thing or two about legends, and remarked with her usual sardonic sense of humor about Brodsly’s persecutors: “Oh what a biography they are creating for Joseph!”

Akhmadulina, suffer as she did, could not come close: her poetry was permitted and not, pace Osip Mandelstam bequest, "stolen air." True, she had a front seat in “the little orchestra of Hope, conducted by Love,” as the chansonier Bulat Okudzhava described the true poets of his generation (they may have lost faith but still could love and hope). But for me and my Bohemian milieu, the world of poetry was dominated, not by orchestras, not even the much admired chamber orchestras (Rudolf Barshai and Adrei Volkonsky) but by the great solo players of the Silver Age. Tsveateva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mayakovsky (grudgingly), each had an oversize and fulfilled destiny and each was wrapped in a personal myth capable of enchanting their “grandchildren’s” generation. And that is who we were. Just think, we used to joke, Akhmadulina shared only two syllables with the regal Anna Akhmatova. Two syllables did not cut it.

But then, not long before my emigration from Russia, I had the occasion to change my mind. The transformation occurred in a Moscow theater while I was watching a hybrid feature film documentary with what for me was an unlikely title: Sport, Sport, Sport (1970). What moved me to the quick was a poem that Akhmadulina herself recited in her tightly wound girlish contralto. It was a voice-over of the final segment of the film. Directed by the celebrated Elem Klimov, with the original score by Alfred Shnitke, a star-studded cast, and containing the first ever in Russia tiny clip of the Beatles, the film was all the rage in Moscow when it was released into theaters in the spring of 1971.

The final segment with Akhmadulina’s voice-over consisted of a two-minute close-up of the great Ethiopian runner, Abebe Bikela, shot, no doubt, during one of his interminable marathons. The clip itself was slow-motion, decelerated to make Bikela’s strides coincide rhythmically with the iambic pentameter of Akhmadulina blank verse, itself resounding over a faintly audible organ continuo of Schnitke’s score. As Akhmadulina's voice receded, Schnitke's organ gained force until it crested over the film's finale. Seldom have any three celestial bodies been in a better alignment!

“Behold a man who has commenced his run,” Akhmadulina’s voice was reaching deep into the subliminal (and not so subliminal) desire to defy the boundaries of the constricted Soviet space,

way back, when dawn broke over

the whole universe; can’t calculate how many centuries

he has been running far and yon. Toward a blessed

and important goal. What triumph drives him on

to keep transcending space? …” 

Вот человек, который начал бег

давно, когда светало во вселенной,

не вычислить, какой по счёту век

бежит он вверх и вдаль. К благословенной

и важной цели. Что за торжество

манит его превозмогать пространство?

What a surprise it was to locate this clip on Youtube!

A few months later, in September 1971, I found myself transcending space, first on board an Aeroflot flight to London, then, a few hours later inside what I took for a Heathrow Airport movie theater but what turned out to be a PanAm 747 that, despite its girth, whisked me effortlessly across the Atlantic to JFK and into my wife's embrace. 

* * *

My sole personal encounter with Bella Akhmadulina took place some seven years later in 1978, when she came to the Bay Area as part of a poetry tour of the United States.  She had an appreciative audience at UC, Berkeley, but was nervous and visibly upset during the recital, a poor match, I then thought to myself, to Brodsky, who had not long ago cast his spells in the same auditorium and like a rock star held everyone in thrall for two hours. We agreed to meet for a nightcap. She was accompanied by her husband, a theater artist, Boris Messerer; I came together with Lithuanian poet and scholar Tomas Venclova, who had known her for years and who had just escaped from the Soviet Union and was then teaching Tartu Semiotics as a Regents Professor at my alma mater. Now, over three decades later, I have a vague memory that Czeslaw Milosz joined us later when we were about to break up or shortly before I left the gathering. He had just been awarded the Nobel Prize and must have felt he had an obligation to honor a fellow poet and visitor from behind the Iron Curtain (see Post-Script II).

We met at some dive on the north side of the campus, and the nightcap quickly evolved into a liquid supper in the Russian style. Akhmadulina complained bitterly about a minder from the Soviet consulate who was at once fawning and insulting to her and whom she blamed for her foul mood at the Berkeley poetry reading. She drank a trifle too much, and I remember being surprised by the quiet and indulgent smile with which her husband observed her progress with the bottle. Like a sand clock with its communicating chambers, the emptier the bottle became the more high-strung Akhmadulina grew. I recall saying to myself then that this was what Marina Tsvetaeva must have looked like in some cheap Parisian bistro or other some forty years earlier. A comparison with Nastasya Filippovna from The Idiot, too, crossed my mind. The conversation got jerky and moved in spurts. Filling a tense pause, I ventured to pipe in something about how much I was touched by her poetry in the 1970 film and how much she opened my eyes to the beauty and spiritual depth of athletics (a former boxer, I had valued sports for the ecstasy it afforded me in the ring and its utility in self-defense, but never spirituality or aesthetics). To my surprise, she took offense and with a touch of hysteria in her voice dismissed me, along with my heart-felt compliments.

I backed off. She looked like a wounded animal – a human animal, as she was also drowning in alcohol and self-pity. I sipped my drink in silence. For the first time, it occurred to me that even a star like Bella Akhmadulina, precisely because she was a star, had to live with fear, contempt, self-loathing, and then again, with more fear, contempt, and self-loathing. Now, eleven time zones from the Kremlin, she was yet again reminded  by a petty clerk from the Soviet Conuslate in San Francisco of her bondage to the state, and along with, all the innumerable lacerations she had ever endured. Oh what she had to go through for years and years, this marathoner with a tense girlish contralto, as she tried to safeguard her integrity while taking care not to cross the red line marked by the jealous and ever-vigilant party-state! The following year, she summoned enough courage to join the uncensored underground almanac Metropol. Her husband did the design for the volume. With a lot to lose, as it must have felt then, they chose defiance, at last.

I now wonder, if her reaction to my heart-felt praise may have been prompted by something else. Was she, perhaps, considering defection or some other desperate act and wished to talk it over with her old friend Tomas Venclova and felt constrained and irritated by my presence? Tomas, if you read this and remember that evening, please let me know. But one thing is clear now. In her generation’s “little orchestra of Hope, conducted by Love,” hers were some of the most memorable solos.

Stanford. December 1, 2010.

Postscript I. Looking for a Youtube link to Okudzhava's song, I came across a clip recorded not long before Okudzhava's death in the company of Bella Akhmadulina. She embaces Okudzhava and reminds the audience that the song was dedicated to her. Here is the clip:




Click here for Post-Script II.
Copyright © 2010 gfreidin@stanford.edu