Kinoblog

The latest edition of online journal Senses of Cinema has several lengthy articles devoted to aspects of central and eastern European cinema, including:

• Sweet Movie: The Gentle Side of “Destructive Art” by Dušan Makavejev
• The World Tasted: Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie by Lorraine Mortimer
• Slovak Cinema of the 1970s Revisited by Peter Hourigan
• Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film by Yana Hashamova - book review by Lars Kristensen
• plus three pieces on Andrzej Wajda’s films: Ashes and Diamonds by Rahul Hamid, A Generation and Kanal by Boris Trbic, and Polish Reveries & Reflections:
  Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble by Adam Bingham.

The Best Foreign Film Oscar shortlist has been whittled down to nine titles, with three of the nominations going to Eastern European films.

Predictably, Wajda’s Katyń is still on the list, though there’s a surprise in that Cristian Mungiu’s masterly 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile) has been dropped in favour of Sergei Bodrov’s admittedly hugely entertaining but decidedly silly Genghis Khan epic Mongol. The others are Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 and Srdan Golubović’s The Trap (Klopka).

According to the Hollywood Reporter, a record 63 films are on the initial longlist for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The full list is here, and these are the Central and Eastern European submissions:

• Azerbaijan: Caucasia (d. Farid Gumbatov)
• Bosnia and Herzegovina: It’s Hard to Be Nice/Teško je biti fin (d. Srđan Vuletić) - IMDB/Variety
• Bulgaria: Warden of the Dead/Пазачът на мъртвите (d. Ilian Simeonov) - IMDB/Variety
• Croatia: Armin (d. Ognjen Sviličić) - IMDB/Website/Variety
• Czech Republic: I Served the King of England/Obsluhoval jsem Anglického krále (d.Jiří Menzel) - IMDB/Website/Variety
• Estonia: The Class/Klass (d. Ilmar Raag) - IMDB/Website/Variety
• Georgia: The Russian Triangle/Русский треугольник (d. Aleko Tsabadze) - IMDB/Website
• Hungary: Taxidermia (d. György Pálfi) - IMDB/Website/Trailer/Variety
• Macedonia: Shadows/Senki (d. Milcho Manchevski) - IMDB/Trailer/Variety
• Poland: Katyń (d. Andrzej Wajda) - IMDB/Website/Trailer
• Romania: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days/4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile (d. Cristian Mungiu) - IMDB/Website/Clip/Variety
• Russia, 12 (d. Nikita Mikhalkov) - IMDB/Variety
• Serbia: The Trap/Klopka (d. Srdan Golubović) - IMDB/Website/Variety
• Slovakia: Return of the Storks/Návrat bocianov (d. Martin Repka) - IMDB/Trailer
• Slovenia: Short Circuits/Kratki stiki (d. Janez Lapajne) - IMDB /Website/Variety

Старик Хоттабыч
Lenfilm, USSR, 1956, colour, 86 mins

• Director: Gennady Kazansky
• Writers: Lazar Lagin (based on his novel)
• Camera: Muzakir Shurukov
• Design: Isaak Kaplan, Berta Manevich
• Music: Nadezhda Simonyan
• Cast: Nikolai Volkov (Hassan Abdurrahman ibn Khottab), Alexei Litvinov (Volka), Gennadi Khudyakov (Zhenya), Lev Kovalchuk (Gogha, aka ‘Pill’), Vera Romanova (Gogha’s Mother), Maya Blinova (Volka’s mother), Olga Cherkasova (Varvara Stepanovna), Yefim Kopelyan (Jafar Ali Mukhammedov), Alexander Larikov (doctor)

Though the poster implies a never-never-land extravaganza along the lines of the films of Alexanders Ptushko and Row, an impression reinforced by a cursory glance at the synopsis, with its references to genies, magic, flying carpets and exotic locations, the bulk of Old Khottabych is actually set in the time and place where it was made: Moscow circa 1956. As a result, it has an immediate historical fascination that its more fantastical cousins lack, not least thanks to a script that’s determined to ram blatant Soviet propaganda down its audience’s throat at every opportunity.

The film initially introduces us to young Volka (Alexei Litvinov), whose Young Pioneers garb (essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts) immediately labels him the embodiment of wide-eyed idealism, an impression that he does nothing to counter later on. While out swimming, he finds and retrieves an ancient bottle. Uncorking it at home, a startled Volka finds that it contains a nearly four thousand-year-old genie, ‘Old Khottabych’ (Nikolai Volkov), who in gratitude promises Volka a seemingly unlimited array of granted wishes.

So far so generic, but the film’s most inspired twist follows shortly afterwards - which is the revelation that Khottabych, far from being master of all he surveys, is in fact a doddering dullard whose views on science, technology and geography are hopelessly outdated, and his would-be generous attempt at offering Volka wealth beyond his wildest dreams is met with a curt “We’re not tsars, or capitalists, and I’d rather die than become a speculator”. In other words, he has as much to learn from Volka (and the various archetypal Soviet workers he encounters along the way) as the other way round - if not considerably more.

There is little place for magic in the thrusting technocracy of Khrushchev’s USSR, only a year away from kick-starting the space race via the launch of Sputnik. A threadbare magic carpet, initially seen flying over assorted monuments to Soviet architecture, industry and town planning, is no match for an Aeroflot plane (”How swift and convenient is this air chariot!”), and the 20th-century equivalent of the sultans of Khottabych’s youth (or first three thousand years, at any rate) turn out to be scientists, miners and engineers, whose innovations create ‘magic’ whose principles Khottabych can’t begin to grasp - an evocative shot sees him switching a small electric table lamp on and off, mystified as to how it works. Small wonder he eventually realises that his natural home is a circus.

There’s plenty of unintentional humour, not least thanks to much of Volka’s dialogue, which could have been lifted word for word from a Young Pioneers handbook. How many actual schoolboys, even from that particular society, would insist on the supremacy of the state educational and food distribution bodies over the prospect of individual gratification? Or speculate on the scientific importance of ancient gemstones over their monetary value? Or turn down the chance of surreptitiously passing an exam with a priggish “We Young Pioneers are against cheating: we fight in an organized manner”? That said, it would be churlish not to acknowledge that there’s also some genuine wit on display.

The oral geography exam where Volka is fed “facts” by Khottabych that turn out to be outdated flat-earth drivel is very funny on top of delivering its sledgehammer moral about cheating (the unsubtlety of the latter arguably adds to the entertainment value), and the football match where one team is granted an unusually co-operative goalmouth is a riot in every sense, recalling the similarly unhinged climax of the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932). The special effects, typically for a Soviet film of this vintage, are primitive, rarely rising above basic matte work and dissolves, but they serve their purpose - and of course add to the film’s already considerable kitsch quotient.

Old Khottabych has, of course, dated horribly, but that’s a major part of its charm, much like that of the explicitly socialist musicals Volga-Volga (1938), Tractor Drivers (1939) and Cossacks of the Kuban River (1946), with their scenes of synchronized wheat harvesting and songs about the joys of attaining farm production quotas. Few if any of these films were distributed on the other side of the Iron Curtain at the time of their original release and most film historians regard them with embarrassment bordering on derision - but, half a century on, films like Old Khottabych have become historical documents, not just in showing how children and families lived in the early Khrushchev era but also the kind of propaganda they were expected to swallow in the form of mass entertainment. Director Gennady Kazansky would go on to make the sci-fi romance Amphibian Man (1961), a rather more winning attempt at blending the fantastic and the didactic.

The DVD

Old Khottabych is available on DVD from the Russian Cinema Council in a package that includes a short documentary alongside the usual filmographies, stills and trailers. Spoken language options are Russian dialogue with optional English, French and Arabic voiceovers, and subtitles in thirteen languages including English. It’s available in either PAL or NTSC versions (the original encoding is PAL), and is not region-coded.
Links

• Internet Movie Database
• A complete English translation of Lazar Lagin’s original novel (courtesy of Fainna Solasko)

Холодное лето пятьдесят третьего
Mosfilm, USSR, 1988, colour, 100 mins

• Director: Alexander Proshkin
• Writer: Edgar Dubrovsky
• Camera: Boris Brozhovsky
• Editing: Yelena Mikhailova
• Design: Valery Filippov
• Music: Vladimir Martynov
• Cast: Valery Priyomykhov (Sergei Basargin, ‘Chaff’), Anatoly Papanov (Nikolai Starobogatov, ‘Spade’), Victor Stepanov (Mankov), Nina Usatova (Lydia), Zoya Buryak (Shura), Yuri Kuznetsov (Sotov), Vladimir Kashpur (Fadeyich), Boris Plotnikov (Starobogatov, Spade’s son), Vladimir Golovin (Baron)

A huge hit on its original release, voted best film of 1988 by the journal Sovetskii Ekran and second only to Vassily Pichul’s raunchy phenomenon Little Vera (Маленькая Вера) at the box office, The Cold Summer of 1953 simultaneously depicts two pivotal periods of Soviet history. Set in the months immediately following Stalin’s death and produced and released in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s late 1980s reforms, it implicitly criticises the Soviet system to a degree that must have been unimaginable even a few months before it went into production in June 1987.

Indeed, director Alexander Proshkin acknowledged that if the film had been shot not that much earlier, it would probably have ended up as the unexceptional thriller approved by state film body Goskino on the basis of a script called The Dance of the Ephemera. Those ignorant of or uninterested in the underlying politics should still find the film perfectly watchable as a smaller-scale Russian version of Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven, as assorted misfits band together to save their remote village from marauding bandits - it’s nowhere near the class of those two, but it delivers enough generic thrills to hold the attention.

But it’s the elements added during production that gave the film its considerable lasting value. The summer of the title saw Stalin’s rivals jockeying for power in the wake of his death the previous March. An amnesty engineered by his right-hand man Lavrenti Beria gave prison governors a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of their worst troublemakers, though the amnesty didn’t affect exiled “enemies of the people”. Proshkin and his scriptwriter Edgar Dubrovsky had a great many discussions with lawyers and criminologists while preparing the film, as they wanted to make sure its primary message came through loud and clear - which is that the term ‘criminal’ has multiple meanings depending on who’s applying it, and in a totalitarian situation it can often become so distorted as to be essentially meaningless - much like the phrase ‘enemy of the people’, which is uttered at least three times in different contexts.

Chaff (Valery Priyomykhov) and Spade (Anatoly Papanov) have spent years in Stalin’s gulags on trumped-up charges (Spade’s ‘crime’ was to have travelled abroad, Chaff’s was to have been captured by the Nazis during the war), the prime of their lives irretrievably lost: when the film opens they still live under huge restrictions, forced to live in a remote northern village as they’re banned from travelling. They’re still serving their sentence, while the violent marauders who invade the village have a clean record. And all these events are set in train by the actions of people at the highest levels who are later denounced as criminals - Beria is the one repeatedly named, but the clear implication is that he’s just one of many rotten apples.

This theme is explored further through the village’s three authority figures: the slavishly lickspittle Fadeyich (Vladimir Kashpur), unquestioningly accepting everything state-sanctioned and rejecting all ‘unofficial’ suggestions, the increasingly embittered Mankov (Victor Stepanov), too intelligent and observant not to realise what’s really going on, and the weaselly opportunistic Sotov (Yuri Kuznetsov), who’s even prepared to throw his lot in with the bandits, not least as he’s worried about an ongoing investigation digging up aspects of what seems to be a dubious past. With all due respect to the actors, this trio is not depicted with any especial subtlety, and it’s safe to assume that even the most slow-witted audience member would have drawn numerous parallels with events and people in their own lives.

Even less subtle is the depiction of Lydia (Nina Usatova) as a literally mute slave of whichever master happens to be a part of her life at the time (past lovers, present bandits): she’s as much a prisoner of events as any of the others, and the sequence where she wordlessly gestures with increasing desperation at a boat filled with dancing revellers clearly represents the plight of the ordinary Soviet citizen, powerless to attract any kind of attention other than one entailing brutal exploitation. In turn, she takes her frustration out on her daughter Shura (Zoya Buryak), cutting short a potentially romantic conversation between her and Chaff by pouring cold water over them. Shura has dreams of studying in Moscow: had she achieved them, what would have been the chances of her ever returning? And how many people watching her in the cinema had similar ambitions?

What runs throughout the film is a sense of futility, a lament for wasted years and lives and not so much anger as resigned fatalism towards a system that not only permits such things to occur but also actively encourages and exacerbates them. Chaff pointedly refuses to do any more than the bare minimum of work, arguing that he owes nothing to anybody any more, while Spade still holds out hope that he’ll rejoin his family after his exile is over (though they took his advice to forget him, not so much to preserve their safety as their sanity). And the final shot, where Chaff briefly makes eye contact with a white-bearded professorial type, hints that former exiles come from all walks of life, and are so numerous that it’s all too easy just to bump into one.

Though the film was primarily intended hold the past up as a mirror to the then present, it also turned out to offer a grimly accurate portent of the future. No less an authority than the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko made a point of screening it in courses that he taught at American universities in the 1990s, as for him the film symbolised the agonising decision that Russians faced throughout their history: either submit to brutal totalitarian rule or allow crime to flourish unfettered. And by positing the latter as the logical consequence of removing the former, The Cold Summer of 1953 turned out to prophesy the period following the collapse of the USSR just three years after its release. As a thriller, it’s watchable but pretty standard-issue, but as a historical document it’s fascinating.

The DVD

The Cold Summer of 1953 is available on region-free DVD from the Russian Cinema Council in either PAL or NTSC video formats (though the NTSC version is almost certainly a conversion from the PAL original). The package includes a twenty-minute interview with Alexander Proshkin, short documentaries about Beria’s trial, Stalin’s funeral and Anatoly Papanov’s career, filmographies, a stills gallery, soundtracks in Russian, English and French and subtitles in those languages.

Links

• Internet Movie Database

Василиса Прекрасная
Soyuzdetfilm, USSR, 1939, black and white, 72 mins

• Director: Alexander Row
• Writers: Galina Vladychina, O Nechayeva, Vladimir Shveitser
• Camera: Ivan Gorchilin
• Editing: Xenia Blinova
• Design: Vladimir Yegorov
• Music: Leonid Polovinkin
• Cast: Georgy Millyar (Father/Baba Yaga), Sergei Stolyarov (Ivan), Lev Potyomkin (Agafon), Nikita Kondratyev (Anton), Valentina Sorogozhskaya (Vassilisa), Irina Zarubina (Malanya), Lydia Sukharevskaya (Belyandrasa)

The second film by director Alexander Row (1906-1973), who throughout his four-decade career specialised almost exclusively in fairytale fantasies (long after they were dismissed as the second-class citizens of Soviet cinema), Vassilisa the Beautiful is based on a famous Russian folk tale about a young maiden cursed by an evil serpent after she spurns his advances, and who is finally freed from its clutches by the love of an honest man.

Viewed today, it comes across pretty standard children’s fare (though entertaining enough), but back in 1939 it must have seemed much newer, traditional Russian folk tales not having provided much source material for films in the past. The first seems to have been the Pushkin adaptation Ruslan and Ludmila (Руслан и Людмиа) from 1938, also starring Sergei Stolyarov). And since the film was shot when Stalin’s Terror was at its height and released the year of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, it’s tempting to read various coded messages into this, not least because the film’s relentlessly Manichean championing of good versus evil, light versus darkness and beauty versus ugliness seems to reflect a yearning for a better, simpler world than the one that produced it. There’s no explicit sign that it was influenced by the previous year’s Eisenstein epic, Alexander Nevsky (Александр Невский), but it’s certainly suffused with the same spirit.

Lead actor Sergei Stolyarov (1911-1969) had in fact spent the early part of his career playing explicitly ideologised blond proletarian “heroes of the people” in such films as Alexander Dovzhenko’s Aerograd (Аэроград, 1935) and Grigori Alexandrov’s The Circus (Цирк, 1936), a musical paean to racial tolerance released at a point when other kinds of tolerance were in all too scarce supply. But he was peripherally caught up in the Terror, when a friend and colleague (cameraman Vladimir Nilsen) was denounced and shot, and although Stolyarov survived, his attempt to defend Nilsen’s reputation caused him to be blacklisted as far as a continuation of his earlier work was concerned: he was no longer an “approved social hero”.

So he turned to fairy tales, drawing on his own rural roots to recast his previous characters as heroic fantasy figures clad in shining armour, sword in hand to do battle with all manner of exotic adversaries in such films as the this one, Khaschei the Immortal (Кащей Бессмертный, 1944), Sadko (Садко, 1952), Ilya Muromets (Илья Муромец, 1956) and many others, becoming one of the Soviet Union’s most popular actors all over again. There’s not much to say about his part here, given that the script provides no real depth or shading, though greater complexity would arguably have worked against the material.

Playing the title role, Valentina Sorogozhskaya (1912-1988) has little to do but live up to its accompanying adjective, which she does pleasantly enough: given that she wasn’t a professional actress and only made one other film, it seems churlish to quibble. Irina Zarubina and Lydia Sukharevskaya are much more entertaining as the ugly (would-be) sister-in-law duo, but their prospective husbands Lev Potyomkin and Nikita Kondratyev contribute little apart from pratfalls and gurning. The real acting honours go to Georgy Millyar (1903-1993), rarely offscreen thanks to the dual role of the brothers’ father and (uncredited) the legendary witch Baba Yaga, a part he incarnated so effectively that he would repeat it in many later films.

Vassilisa the Beautiful was shot near Moscow, in Sergiev Posad, a landscape chosen because it seemed to embody an essential ‘Russianness’, festooned as it was with birch trees, mountainous landscapes and villages that had an authentically pagan air about them. Aside from one impressive sequence involving the ground Ivanushka is standing on suddenly crumbling into a shockingly deep ravine, the production values are cheerfully primitive, more reminiscent of the mechanical effects of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen some fifteen years earlier than the achievements of King Kong or The Wizard of Oz in Hollywood - the spider and three-headed serpent Gorynych are particularly clunky (even on the DVD under review, the latter’s strings are all too visible), and the three bears are much more convincing when they’re on screen by themselves (when they’re clearly real) instead of sharing it with human characters (where they’re obviously men in bear suits).

But Row and his designers counterbalance these defects with some inventive touches, such as a wooden chicken carving reacting angrily to being hit by an arrow or Ivan literally shattering the darkness with his newly-acquired sword, and there’s plenty of incidental wit, such as Belyandrasa Petrovna’s threateningly pointy hat, or the torpid bellringer being energised by the prospect of bridal fisticuffs and responding accordingly.

Some of the set-pieces are genuinely exciting, even if there’s a distinct lack of sustained peril: Ivan’s triumphs often seem merely to be a matter of hitting a stationary target at the right angle, and he’s given plenty of second chances, notably in the scene where he has to guess the answer to the spider’s riddle (it seemingly doesn’t matter if he gets it wrong first time provided he gets it right at some point in the ascent to the arachnid mandibles - which means he can offer a cute answer to the question “what is the dearest thing in the world” in the form of his beloved’s name before having a stab at the correct one: life).

Sergey Stolyarov’s son Kirill claimed that Vassilisa the Beautiful was hugely successful internationally (he also claimed it directly influenced the following year’s British fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad), but this is not supported by my own research: I trawled in vain through a decade’s worth of back issues of the Monthly Film Bulletin and Variety to find any indication of it being released in Britain or America, and it’s not mentioned in any of my reference books - even those with a generous coverage of Russian and Soviet cinema. But it’s certainly one of the earliest examples of its genre that’s easily available to the likes of us, and makes fascinating comparison with both the other Soviet films of the late 1930s and Row and Stolyarov’s later work - as well as providing an insight into what the children of the Stalin era were expected to enjoy.

The DVD

Vassilisa the Beautiful is available on region-free DVD from the Russian Cinema Council in either PAL or NTSC video formats, though the NTSC is reputedly a poor-quality conversion of the PAL original. The package includes two interviews with Kirill Stolyarov on his father’s career and Russian fairytales, short biographies and filmographies of key cast and crew members, a stills gallery and trailers for other Russian fairytales. The only spoken language option is Russian, but there are subtitles in twelve other languages including English.

Links

• Internet Movie Database
• Russian Folk Art - an English version of the original folktale