Gennady Shpalikov's A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE and the Mel Novikoff Award for TOM LUDDY

Tom Luddy

My friend and long-time mentor in film arts Tom Luddy is receiving the coveted Mel Novikoff Award st the SF Film Festival on April 9 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Luddy, a co-director of the Telluride Film Festival, has been associated with American Zoetrope since 1979. Join SFFILM Festival for this program (4 PM) featuring a conversation with Tom followed by Tom's choice of two films: a rarely screened Godard short and Gennady Shpalikov's landmark A Long and Happy Life (1966).


Gennady Shpalikov's A Long Happy Life (1966)

Kiril Lavrov and Inna Gulaya in A Long and Happy Life

See the trailer here

In the history of Russian, perhaps, even European auteur cinema, “A Long Happy Life” (1966) is unique. Now a classic, this autumnal drama of love and disenchantment (with strong autobiographical overtones) marks the debut of Gennady Shpalikov’s career as director. It also marks its end. Acclaimed abroad but barely appreciated in Russia, he was never allowed to direct another film, even though he continued to write for the screen until his suicide in 1974 at the age of thirty-seven.

Inna Gulaya and Gennady Spalikov

The film begins on a fall Saturday, at dusk at a construction site outside Novosibirsk. A group of young men and women – the beautiful Lena (Inna Gulaya, Shpalikov's wife) among them – are boarding a factory bus at dusk for a long ride to the big city to catch the Moscow Art Theatre production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Half-way there and after night fall, they pick up a hitch-hiker Victor (Kirill Lavrov), who takes the seat next to Lena. A geologist with a roving eye, Victor, who is in his early thirties, is making his way home in European Russia; Lena, in her early twenties, is beautiful, naïve, and dreamy.

Inna Gulaya in A Long and Happy Life

They “click.” Before long, they exchange confidences about their childhoods. Lena remembers her heart break from a crush on a fireman; her flashback is the film’s first homage to Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante.”

A Long and Happy Life

Jean Vigo, L'Atalante (1934)

What began as a bus ride flirtation ascends to dizzying heights in the theater. Emotions swell against the dialogue of the two last acts of Chekhov’s play and intensify in the intermission, set up as a social mixer, replete with drinks and dancing in the foyer. Unable to resist, the two soon retreat into the dark recesses of the theater house and begin to kiss.

But it is not their embraces but their dialogue after they leave the theater that marks the emotional high point of their relationship: poetic chatter of a young couple in love, interspersed with mutual declarations of undying love and everlasting loyalty. 

The mood changes in the bleak light of the following morning. Lena, a modest suitcase in hand and an eight-year-old daughter in tow, rouses the hung-over Victor from his bed in a riverside floating guest house. She is ready to begin a “long and happy life” together.

What follows is a painful denouement terminating in a drawn-out coda (another tribute to Vigo’s Le Chaland qui passé, a.k.a., L'Atalante): a barge floating down the great Siberian river Ob. The film's soundtrack (composer Vyacheslav Ovchinnkov) ends on a pure accordion melody, reminiscent of L’Atalante’s closing tune.

Elena Chernaya, A Long and Happy Life

Like all gifted artists, Shpalikov was in a dialogue with his great predecessors and contemporaries. An admirer of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante he turns Vigo's cinematic fairy tale about simple bargemen who live happily ever after into its opposite—a Chekhovian drama about the solipsism and narcissism of modern characters, amplified in the infinite echo chamber of the vast Eurasian plain.

A poet, Shpalikov, not unlike like Cocteau or Pasolini, was a master of subtle moods and resonances that fill the soul in moments of erotic intoxication or despair. A consummate master of monochromatic chiaroscuro, cinematographer Dmitry Meskhiev brought this poetry to life, encouraging the director to develop his own script, originally an ordinary melodrama, into a powerful existential cinema.

By grafting Chekhov’s pessimism onto sunny and irreverent Vigo and setting his action in the haunting dusk and darkness of Siberia, Shpalikov seems to have also produced a Russian take on the archetypal road film, Fellini’s La Strada, with his wife Inna Gulaya assuming the role of Gelsomina—in her husband's art, as in life (she is rumored to have died of an overdose in 1990).

Lena's childhood flashback. A Long and Happy Life.

Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) in La Strada

For many in Russia, A Long and Happy Life marked the closure of the 'Thaw" cinema that flourished in the Soviet Union during the years of reform following Stalin's death.

* * *

Plays with Une bonne à tout faire (Jean-Luc Godard, 8 min, 1981/2006), a rare short filmed at Coppola’s American Zoetrope and revolving around a tableau vivant of a Georges de La Tour painting.
Not to be missed!

— Grisha Freidin

For tickets, click here.

My Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932-2017)*

Yevtushenko in V. Khutsiev's film "I am Twenty" (1962-64)

I saw him for the first time at the Kafe Molodezhnoe (Youth café), the only establishment of its kind in the true, Parisian, sense of the word in Moscow circa 1962. If you made it through the door early enough, you could spend the whole evening there listening to jazz while nursing a cup of coffee and/or a bottle of wine… This was my first and only visit there. Yevtushenko appeared late, and there was a palpable stir in the cafe as he briskly walked across the room and settled in at a table already crowned by a circle of beautiful people. After some minutes, he got up and stepped onto the slightly elevated stage. A wave of admiring murmur lapped at his feet. He began reciting his poetry.

I did not really know his work and could not make out a single familiar poem but the recital lasted for awhile. Sixteen or seventeen at the time, I had already been "turned" by the forbidden poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, and what I was hearing did not impress me. Yet, I, too, was dazzled by the glow and the vibe that emanated from this man, still young looking, tall and handsome, and dressed to a T with chic informality. Every item of clothing on him came from "over the hill" (из-за бугра) and was the envy of every kid, bitten, like me, by the 1960s bug of Western individualism, youth culture, and craving dignity in appearance. Around that time, someone offered me a ticket to go and see him recite at what was then the newly-minted Luzhniki Stadium. I passed. And why would I go? I preferred the secret private cult of opaque modernist poetry -- the "stolen air," in Mandelstam's phrase -- to the mass craze for the uncomplicated verse of the official Soviet Fronde, the poets who accepted compromise in exchange for permission to publish, make money, and, coveted most of all, travel abroad.

Many years later, already in the U.S., I remember Joseph Brodsky referring to Yevtushenko in disparagement as "poetry's prostitute" while apologizing to the actual practitioners of the world's oldest trade for using their metier as a qualifier for this sullied name. Someone then asked me if I agreed with Joseph. I shrugged. What I knew of Yevtushenko's poetry did not impress me but it belonged to its time and had an impact. As much as it was hard for me to dismiss Yevtushenko, it was hard for me to suppress my distaste for his verse and his public style.

Still, there were two fragments of his poetry that stuck in my memory like a fly in a piece of amber and are probably part of my generation’s urban lore:

1. "He wore slim pants and read Hemingway" (Он брюки узкие носил, читал Хемингуэя) – the phrase pretty much defined me as a type in my teen years, despite the fact that I didn't quite vibrate to Hemingway (that came later).

2. "And what comes next? And what comes next? / You whispered <to me after sex>" (А что потом, а что потом / Ты говорила шепотом). In the Russian original, "sex" is implied but it needs to be there in English to render the post-coital vibe of the verse:  the young woman, a virgin, is asking the young man with whom she had just had sex what will happen next to their relationship (in Russian, past tense singular has a gendered ending). These lines, too, were emblematic of the generation, one before the pill, that was destined to making out under the Damocles' sword of unwanted pregnancy.

Perhaps my last direct encounter with Yevtushenko's verse occurred in 1963 at the Moscow Conservatory — at the premiere of Shostakovich's Thirteenth, "Babii Yar" Symphony, set to Yevtushenko's 1961 poem that had apparently enraged Khrushchev. In my young and heavily Jewish bohemian milieu, the poem, a sharp condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism, was too straight-forward, almost agit-prop, to rank as serious poetry.

With D. Shostakovich at the premiere of the 13th Symphony

But there I was standing in the foyer of the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, trembling with excitement: I was about to hear the world premiere of the “Babi Yar” Symphony of my beloved, saintly Shostakovich. Doubt crept into my mind: perhaps, I did not understand something about Yevtushenko? The poem was good enough for Shostakovich who, we all knew then, had withstood enormous pressure from the Kremlin to bring about this first performance. Could Shostakovich have redeemed Yevtushenko?  To my snobbish mind, however, the music completely overshadowed Yevtushenko's verse. I was soon confirmed in my prejudice. In an odious move, Yevtushenko backed down and produced an anodyne version of "Babi Yar" to please Khrushchev's cultural watchdogs. No, I was not surprised...

With Minister of Culture E. Furtseva and Ernst Neizvestny, 1960s

Unless challenged, tastes and opinions acquired early in life stick to your mind like barnacles to the hull of the ship, and I have never had the occasion to reconsider my attitude toward Yevtushenko. To me, his poetry is a form of art that is compromised by its government permit, and it is too late for me now to change my mind. And yet, I must acknowledge, his was a lifelong service to the Russian poetic tradition in which the poet, in Yevtushenko’s own, somewhat tinny, phrase, is “more than just a poet.” And sometimes, I should add, a poet can be less than one, too.

If Brodsky was right, and we should see Yevtushenko as a poet who had his Muse ply the world’s oldest profession throughout his career, we must remember him as a holy prostitute - sacred to the cult of poetry that swept the Soviet Union in the decades after Stalin's death. This cult was as diverse, ambiguous, and full of contradictions as was Russia itself during Yevtushenko’s long lifetime.

The archetypal Soviet "cult" poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose art encompassed many political compromises, committed suicide at Eastertide, 14 April 1930, at the age of 36. Yevtushenko died on April Fool's day at the ripe old age of 83. RIP.

1 April 2017
Berkeley, CA

* First appeared in Truthdig.com on 2 April 2017.

Remembering Carl Weber 1925-2016

Carl Weber. Photo: Chris Randle.

Today came the sad news about Carl Weber! He died on Christmas Day in Los Altos at the age of 91. Cynthia Haven put up a notice on her Stanford blog with a reprint of her 2010 piece on Carl. What a big loss it is for all of his friends, students, and colleagues. A giant passed away, and with him, so much mastery, so much rich and unique history is gone forever. I came to know him in 2003. It never occurred to me he was eighty one: he had more verve and and a firmer grasp on art and life than many of my much younger colleagues. I would like to offer here a few words about our one-time friendship and collaboration that touched my own work and life.

We became close during the big Babel events that I organized and participated in in 2003-04 (a conference, and exhibition, and play production). Carl, who had started his theater career under the tutelage of Berthold Brecht in the Berliner Ensemble (he headed it after Brecht’s death in 1956), had his eye on Babel’s play Maria (1933) since the 1960s, when Babel's posthumous career took of in Russia and the West. The play is full of young people, and this, as he explained, made it perfect for a university casting. Until then, I had not put much stock in Maria; I preferring the earlier Sunset (1926), based on Babel’s famous Odessa Tales. Maria seemed to me then like an outlier in Babel’s oeuvre. It is set, not in his beloved mythical Odessa, but in the dark and cold Petrograd of 1919; its characters resemble more those in Uncle Vanya than Babel’s own colorful Jewish gangsters or Red Cossacks. But Carl convinced me that casting Sunset at Stanford would be a real problem, and I, a babe in the woods, agreed to undertake with him the production of Maria (1933). Another condition: he wanted me to be there with him all the way and serve as the dramaturge (I had to look up the word).

The U.S. premiere of Isaac Babel play Maria at Stanford (2004)
Tom Freeland, left, as General Mukovnin, Audrey Hannah as Lyudmila and 
Zack, who only goes by one name, as Dymshits. Photo courtesy MANDANA KHOSHNEVISAN

 I was not a theater man and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I do not mean the resources I had to marshal to have the play staged, including a big chunk of cash that Dean Keith Baker helped me raise for a revolving stage, “an absolute must” to do justice to the cinematic structure of Babel’s play in eight scenes. Carl did not want some modest affair. His idea was to mount a full-scale production, with an original set designed from scratch, real costumes, with music, visual projections, fancy curtain, in short, all the trimmings, as if we were on Broadway. But getting hold of the resources and taking care of the technicalities – these were a small part of my job compared to the kind of treatment that Carl, as director, subjected the play to, and me along with it.

Beginning early fall, we met two or three times a week for lunch or coffee to read the play together. Carl did not know Russian,  and as we read into the play, he queried literally every word (I realized then that the award-winning translation had a lot of howlers and had to redo whole sections of it). Carl intuition was fierce: I was often surprised to see myself circle back and discover a hidden pearl exactly where Carl suspected it to be but where I, the Babel scholar, had seen nothing. In effect, Carl forced me to take apart the whole play, disassemble it into its smallest particles, elaborate all the hidden subtexts, resonances, and implications, produce extensive cultural “dossiers” on all the characters, contextualize the action and background events, and finally, put it all back together as a play by author and man Isaac Babel. It was in the course of this dramatic directorial treatment that I came to see the play, not as an outlier, but as a brilliant work, central to the Babel’s oeuvre, and a work of great civic courage. The “ugly duckling” concealed an authorial cri de coeur, the play itself, a powerful autobiographical subtext. A precursor of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (the eponymous Maria Mukovnin never appears on stage), the play was a deeply personal testament meant for Babel's future audience. My collabortion with Carl was a lark but it enriched and deepened my understanding of Isaac Babel, and with it, the conundrum of Russian-Jewish authorship in the twentieth century.

The play was a success and ran to full house at the Pigott Theater for four performances. In attendance was Babel’s older daughter Nathalie Babel, his second wife Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova and her, and Babel’s, younger daughter Lydia. 

Antonina Pirozhkova (right) with daughter Lydia Malaeva (Babel)

After the final curtain, we asked Pirozhkova, who sat riveted throught the performance, if she liked the play. She replied, holding back tears: “I know this is how Babel would have liked to see it done.” Precious words from one who spent her lifetime safeguarding Babel’s legacy, for many years at the risk to her own life. Fortunately, I was able to video-record the dress rehearsal of the play. I later turned into a DVD, and can now be seen in full on YouTube (it plays well on my Mac using Google Chrome).

Afterwards Carl and I kept seeing each other, we fantasized about some other future production. But none of this came to pass. He and his wife came to have dinner at our house in Berkeley. Alas, soon after, his wife took ill and died. Widowed, Carl spent long periods of time in France where he had a house in the country. Our dates in Paris never worked. We still met for lunch or coffee occasionally when he was on campus but contact attenuated. My own circumstances made socializing at Stanford increasingly difficult, driving to Berkeley was a problem for him. Eventually, we lost touch.

Fortunately, Carl left a record of our Maria  adventure. He contributed an essay on staging Maria at Stanford for the a volume of essays on Babel that I edited, based on the Stanford conference and the Exhibition we mounted at the Hoover concurrently with the play (The Enigma of Isaac Babel, Stanford UP, 2009). It was called “Staging Babel’s Maria – for Young American Audiences, Seventy Years After.” Like his contribution, my own long essay, “Two Babel’s – Two Aphrodites: Autobiography in Maria and Babel’s Petersburg Myth,” is the fruit of this blessed collaboration. If it ever get republished, I will dedicate it to Carl. 

Berkeley, January 7, 2017

СТОИТ ЛИ БОЯТЬСЯ ДОНАЛЬДА ТРАМПА?

The New Times/Новое время | 05.12.2016 | Григорий Фрейдин | №40 (428) от 05.12.16

Целый ряд аналитиков по обеим сторонам океана предрекают «сумерки в Америке» после избрания в президенты человека, который раньше не занимал выборных должностей, не имеет опыта руководства в некоммерческом секторе и страдает серьезной формой популизма. Однако не стоит сбрасывать со счетов и иммунную систему американской демократии, институты которой отстраивались на протяжении двух веков

«Сумерки в Америке»* — так назвал свою заметку, посвященную избранию Трампа президентом Соединенных Штатов, известный поэт и литературный критик Алексей Цветков, уже давно живущий в США. Неужели это — закат? Нет, не тянет. Уж слишком это пораженческий сценарий для молодой и оптимистичной Америки. Как пойдет дело дальше, мы не знаем, но ретироваться в отчаянии резона все-таки нет, тем более закутавшись в дырявое одеяло столетнего немецкого мифа о Закате Запада (Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes).

ОПАСНЫЕ АНАЛОГИИ

Естественно, особенно среди американцев европейских корней, напрашиваются аналогии с Россией, Италией, Германией 1920-х и 1930-х годов*. Несмотря на их заманчивость, аналогии эти все же бьют мимо цели. Феномен Трампа из другой оперы или, лучше сказать, из другого романа. Я имею в виду неподражаемый «Заговор против Америки» Филипа Рота (Лимбус Пресс, 2008), где разыгрывается схожий сюжет на фоне Америки конца 1930-х: на выборах 1940 года побеждает не Франклин Делано Рузвельт, как и было на самом деле, а любимец толпы, летчик Чарльз Линдберг, известный своими нацистскими симпатиями. При нем Америка поворачивает вправо, начинаются погромы, политические убийства и т.д., но пронацистским правым все же не удается захватить власть — им противостоят конституционные институты и большие города, особенно Нью-Йорк. Не буду выдавать конца романа, но у Рота все вскоре встает на свои места.

НЕТ ТАКОЙ ПАРТИИ

В отличие от Ленина-Сталина, Муссолини и Гитлера у Трампа нет дисциплинированной массовой «партии нового типа», нет общенационального движения, несмотря на все его многочисленные митинги с разогревом толпы и все «зиг хайли» американских нео-

нацистов**. Такая массовая «партия нового типа» маловероятна в очень уж разношерстной Америке. Да и американские институты — политические, юридические и добровольные общественные объединения (партии, церкви, НКО) — проверенная временем сложная и мощная машина, которая работает по принципу взаимного дублирования и большой избыточности. Ничего подобного ей не было ни в царской России, ни в Веймарской республике, ни в королевской Италии. Американские институты — это даже не старомодный будильник с множеством шестеренок, это вечно подвижное нагромождение разных агрегатов, каждый из которых приводит в движение свой двигатель и питается своим собственным током, будь то федеральные, штатные, местные налоги или неиссякаемый поток частных благотворительных пожертвований.

В ОТЛИЧИЕ ОТ ЛЕНИНА-СТАЛИНА, МУССОЛИНИ И ГИТЛЕРА У ТРАМПА НЕТ ДИСЦИПЛИНИРОВАННОЙ МАССОВОЙ «ПАРТИИ НОВОГО ТИПА», НЕСМОТРЯ НА ВСЕ «ЗИГ ХАЙЛИ» АМЕРИКАНСКИХ НЕОНАЦИСТОВ

ХРАМ И ЛЕС ИНСТИТУТОВ

Как в знаменитых стихах Бодлера «Соответствия», общественный мир Америки — это «храм», заключающий в себе целый «лес» институтов власти всех уровней и всех ее «ветвей»: от федеральной власти с ее «перечисленными полномочиями», до штатов, городов и общин. Везде — свое регулярно избираемое начальство, чья функция — исполнять законы; свои законодатели, суды. Каждая из этих ветвей ревниво следит за своими прерогативами и огрызается на всякое посягательство, от кого бы оно ни исходило. Тем же занимаются политические партии, церкви, разные добровольные общественные ассоциации, НКО и, главное, поставленная во главу конституции как основа американской государственности Первая Поправка (вернее, «уточнение») — беспрекословный запрет на ограничение свободы слова, прессы, религии, собраний и т.д.

Освященная временем, эта гигантская конституционная машина вот уже более двухсот лет прядет саму паутину американской общественной и политической жизни, и она способна если не парализовать, то сильно притормозить любое нововведение. Тем более плохо она поддается посягательствам сторонников авторитаризма (фашизма или коммунизма) — даже при куда более сложных экономических и международных обстоятельствах, нежели теперь. В ней увязли и сошли на нет Маккарти и маккартизм в самый разгар Холодной войны, в ней запутался хитрейший, но превысивший свои полномочия Никсон, она заставила Буша-младшего отказаться от плана подчинить политическому диктату федеральную прокуратуру, она парализовала — увы, лишь отчасти — традиционную расовую сегрегацию и многие проявления расизма и шовинизма. В конце концов, благодаря ей пали коммунизм и колосс СССР, оказавшийся неспособным в период мирного сосуществования противостоять системе институтов, обеспечивших создание невиданного в истории благополучия, личной свободы, а с ними и процветания искусств, убийственной поп-культуры — от джаза до хип-хопа и Голливуда.

НЕКОТОРЫМ ВЕЗЕТ

Серьезные нововведения случаются лишь при редком стечении обстоятельств, как, например, при президенте Линдоне Джонсоне, когда ему удалось, вслед за убийством молодого Джона Кеннеди и охватившим страну горем, пробить через Конгресс ряд радикальных реформ по защите гражданских прав; или ближе к нашему времени, когда Америка избрала в президенты первого чернокожего политика, которому удалось, поставив на кон весь свой политический капитал, осуществить давнюю мечту американских президентов — поголовное медицинское страхование. Но это — исключения. Как правило, по контрасту со своим размером и сложностью эта машина позволяет продвигаться вперед лишь малыми шажками.

Сумеет ли эта машина опутать и парализовать Трампа? Полагаю, что да, если американцы не поленятся, а СМИ и общественные организации не дадут им заснуть. Хотя, конечно, зарекаться нельзя… Но, повторяю, ни в Веймарской республике, ни в королевской Италии, ни тем более в царской России — ни таких институтов, ни тем более такого их переплетения не было.

УЧИТЬСЯ У ПУТИНА

Но вот, казалось бы, опыт современной России дает основания для более подходящей аналогии, а взаимные симпатии Трампа и Путина — аргумент в ее пользу. Однако, в отличие от современной России, где Конституция оказалась, увы, слишком податливой (например, закон 2013 года «Об оскорблении религиозных чувств верующих», который напрямую противоречит ст. 28 Конституции РФ), где институты партий мало развиты, политическая конкуренция практически отсутствует, пресса, особенно ТВ, пиарит власть и рынками верховодит Кремль, — в отличие от России Америка имеет живую, мощную конституцию, которая выросла из необходимости религиозной толерантности, по-настоящему независимую судебную систему, устоявшиеся партии, незыблемое право собственности и, главное, непобедимые механизмы разделения властей, которые не терпят скопления силы в каком-либо одном центре, даже в Вашингтоне. Что и доказали выборы самого необычного и непопулярного кандидата, который, однако, искусно сыграл на желании избирателей перетрясти весь вашингтонский истеблишмент.

Ближайшие месяцы покажут, с каким скрипом тронется телега власти президента Трампа, и удастся ли ему, не завязнув, свернуть с пути, проторенного его предшественниками. Так что, не стоит проигравшим на выборах уж слишком отчаиваться, как, впрочем, и победителям зарываться и обольщаться победой. Для сумерек Америки — Обамы ли, Трампа ли — время не созрело.

МАЯТНИК КАЧАЕТСЯ, А ЧАСЫ — ИДУТ

Да, налицо кризис демократии и гуманизма, кризис их ценностей. Последний раз кризис такого масштаба охватил Европу после Первой мировой войны и был реакцией на нее, на миллионы смертей — бессмысленных, как это стало ясно победителям и побежденным. Сегодня на Западе нет за спиной такой катастрофы (даже распад СССР несоизмерим с катастрофой Первой мировой войны). Нынешние Трамп и brexit — это реакция на ускорение социального прогресса, а не, как когда-то, на крах его в окопах Великой войны; это реакция на ускорение социальных процессов, вызванных глобализацией. А глобализация, как всякий широкомасштабный, нарушающий статус-кво процесс (индустриализация, научно-техническая революция, электрификация, новые коммуникации и т.п.), неизменно создает как победителей, так и проигравших (найти способы компенсировать ущерб последних — естественная задача для политики). Но это также и реакция на распространение гуманизма и просвещения на народы, которые до недавнего времени жили как бы на обочине Истории. У них тоже есть свои победители и проигравшие, но ставки в более традиционных обществах намного выше, чем в развитом мире, а, соответственно, и реакция на модернизацию куда более болезненна. Иными словами, источники кризиса демократии сегодня — будь-то экономика и коммуникации, массовая миграция с «юга» на «север» или вызвавший ее глубокий кризис на Ближнем Востоке — в корне отличаются от тех, что сто лет назад заложили под мир бомбу замедленного действия, хотя прецеденты и аналогии не могут не настораживать.

ГЛОБАЛИЗАЦИЯ, КАК ВСЯКИЙ ШИРОКОМАСШТАБНЫЙ, НАРУШАЮЩИЙ СТАТУС-КВО ПРОЦЕСС, НЕИЗМЕННО СОЗДАЕТ КАК ПОБЕДИТЕЛЕЙ, ТАК И ПРОИГРАВШИХ. НАЙТИ СПОСОБЫ КОМПЕНСИРОВАТЬ УЩЕРБ ПОСЛЕДНИХ — ЕСТЕСТВЕННАЯ ЗАДАЧА ДЛЯ ПОЛИТИКИ

Конец Холодной войны, падение коммунизма, приход демократии в СССР и Восточную Европу успокоили Запад, особенно США, собравшие после краха Советского Союза значительные дивиденды, материальные и моральные. Показалось даже, что нового в истории больше не будет: мол, победила глобализация в ее западной либеральной ипостаси. А оказалось — наоборот: история вовсе и не кончалась, да и с объявлением смерти модернизма, то бишь необратимости модернизации, сильно поспешили.

Все смешалось в доме Облонских, и конфликт старого и нового, составляющий сущность этой знаменитой фразы, охватил весь мир, а не только, как в романе Толстого, старорежимную Россию, где высокие технологии и самые передовые идеи (железные дороги и коммунизм в «Анне Карениной») уживались с верой в кикимору, дурной глаз и полоумных провидцев.

Сто лет назад Александр Блок, как и многие его современники, поспешил с «крушением гуманизма». Ему казалось, что качнувшийся маятник остановил часы. К нашему времени больше подходит его строчка: «Покой нам только снится». Борьба идей, борьба за просвещение и гуманизм, как и история, продолжаются.

* См., например, статью Маши Гессен в NYRB, «Руководство к выживанию при авторитарном режиме», http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/

** http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/

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