The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Michail Bulgakov gave birth to a new biological species: the “dog-man” Sharikov^[2].  The Internet revolution of the 21^st century gave birth to the “Anonymous Man.”  The Anonymous Man is a crafty creature who is almost as clever as a dog.  The Anonymous Man has neither fortune, nor any features.  Yet for all that, when herding together, Anonymous Men become omnipotent and invincible.  In ancient times the Anonymous Men used to have another name: “the People.”

The Anonymous Men throng the Internet step by step.  Then they crawl to the Tahrir and Manezhnaya Squares like zombies from a horror movie.  Africa’s colonels are trembling in fear.  The Persian Gulf’s sheiks are hiding out in corners.  The faces of the former masters of Europe are painfully pummeled by statuettes.

In Russia, Alexey Navalny^[3] raises the Anonymous Men against the power of the “Thieves and Swindlers.”^[4]

On the other hand, the fate of the present idols, the “people’s protectors”, is not particularly better.  As soon as you raise your head a little above the crowd of Anonymous Men and become a bit wealthier, smarter or luckier, you are punished.  You, Navalny, and you, Shevchuk^[5]: once you’ve struck a pose—get a whack!  The anger of the Russian Anonymous Man finds its allegorical counterpart in left-wing and liberal cinema – the so-called Russian “New Wave”. Almost all important Russian movies of 2006-2010—Help Gone Mad, Wolfy, Wild Field, Yuri’s Day, School, Russia 88, The Revolution That Wasn’t and the quasi-national My Joy—look at reality from the little man’s position.  (Ilya Demichev’s Kakraki is a rare exception).  In Russia, a war between the power and the people, the aristocracy and the plebs, is looming.

And now, against the background of the egalitarian left-wing cinema, Andrei Zvyagintsev makes Elena, the most anti-populist film in 20 years.  In the context of current political life, this picture may become the Elite’s banner in its war against the underprivileged of all sorts.  We have seen nothing of the kind since Vladimir Bortko’s film adaptation of Heart of a Dog.

If we discard the metaphors, the plot of Elena can be vulgarly described as a battle between relatives for a posh apartment in the center of Moscow: a typical sort of topic for the popular TV show” Time of Court.”  The “new aristocrats,” youngish pensioner Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) and his heiress she-devil Katya (Yelena Lyadova), confront the “grassroots people.”  The lower classes are represented by Vladimir’s new wife, medical worker Elena (Nadezhda Markina), her unemployed son Seryozha (Alexey Rozin), her daughter-in-law Tanya (Yevgeniya Konushkina), and her grandchildren – a chav and deviationist Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov), and an Anonymous Baby.

The battle unfolds in a slow, even in a highbrow manner.  But at the peak of the conflict, Elena and her simple-minded son Seryozha begin to quote Shvonder and Sharikov, (characters from 1925′s “Heart of a Dog”) almost verbatim, as an irrefutable argument.

Sharikov: ‘I didn’t go to college I don’t own a flat with fifteen rooms and a bathroom. Only all that’s changed now—now everybody has the right to…’ Shvonder: ‘We, the house management, have come to see you as a result of a general meeting of the tenants of this block, who are charged with the problem of increasing the occupancy of this house…’

Elena: ‘What right do you have to think that you are special?  Why?  Why?  Only because you have more money and more things?’  Seryozha, replying to a refusal to provide him with another perpetual loan: ‘Well, what a sh_t!’ ‘What a f___ing tightwad!’ (read: ‘Where would I eat?’).

Elena cleans out Vladimir’s safe, just like Sharikov, who steals two 10-rouble notes lying under a paperweight in Philip Philipovich’s study.

After World War I, Europe was horrified at the scope of the slaughter. It seemed that nobody would ever think of repeating this mistake.  In the 1920s some journalists interviewed the renowned philosopher of history Oswald Spengler.  They asked the question, “Will World War II occur?” Spengler answered: “It certainly will.”  The journalists were taken aback and asked another question, “when and why?” Spengler smiled and answered, “In 20 years. Because a new generation, which knows nothing about World War I, will grow up by that time.”  After social experiments of the 20^th century it also seemed that the World could never be plunged again into a search for the “Great Sacred Truth.”  So it seemed in 1989-1993.

…20 years passed.

A generational change has occurred in Russia.  Now socialism and its “charms” are a pure abstraction for people under 35, a mental construction.  The departure of the famous Russian actors Gurchenko, Kozakov, Lazarev (this list can be continued infinitely) has had far more terrible effects that we can imagine.  Over 70 years the late-Soviet intelligentsia, though alien consumer society, has managed to develop immunity to Communist idealism, and to idealism in general.  It is mainly people over 35 who reign over the society’s minds and rule the country.  The liberal ideology of the 1990s in Russia was based on the old intellectuals.  Editors-in-chief and directors, actors and ministers of the 90s, who had lived through the Brezhnev years in the USSR, knew all the advantages and downsides of the old order.  They maintained healthy skepticism.  They kept a certain distance from the idea of social equality.  And then, they began to disappear, one after another. There are now only 18 persons still alive from amongst those who signed the Letter of Forty-Two^[6].  And leftist, Communist ideas, now increasingly popular in Russia, invade society precisely as a result of the generational change.

The new generation is seizing ideological power and is eager to steer the country: not only Russia, but all over the world. Countless new leftists such as Prilepin^[7], Udaltsov^[8], and Mantsov^[9] remember only the grudges of the 1990s.  For them, the USSR is their early idyllic childhood.  The new representatives of this new culture idealize the socialist past—not only the Soviet, but any past.  All the ills of life in modern Putin’s Russia are clearly seen.  Yet the past, the days of yore always look beautiful and magnificent.

There would be nothing to worry about, but behind the new left-wing writers and film makers are millions of anonymous jerks, who cannot analyze socialist ideas critically.  But they are always ready to jump on the band-wagon.  The base of Internet forums is made up of persons 17 to 33 years of age.  They were 13, at the most in 1991.  For them, bellowing “Long live Stalin!,” “Heil Hitler!,” or “Hare Krishna!” is a pleasant banality between masturbations.  Owing to the Internet, the Anonymous Sharikovs gained superiority in the cultural and ideological squares.  In the 19^th or 20^th centuries their scribbles would have not been accepted even by a provincial district evening paper. The technical revolution gave the floor to billions of fools, beautiful in their silence until now.  It is the collapse of Mind and the triumph of the Beast.

In comparison with Zvyagintsev’s previous film The Banishment, which alienated many viewers due to the metaphorical language, the plot of Elena turned out to be plain and clear. One of the reasons for this change is prosaic, namely the 2009 economic crisis.  The director had planned to work on more expensive projects.  But his ambitious plans had to be rejected in favor of the budget-priced Elena.  It is possible that the film was enriched by this forced economy; the film is more understandable and closer to what the national and Cannes critics desire to see.

Elena is filled with whole pieces of the immediate reality, in which many may recognize themselves and the circumstances of their own lives.  Biryulyovo^[10], a 2×3 meter kitchen, beer in the evening; this is the world of Elena’s descendants.  The “Enjoy” fitness club, fashionable apartments on Butikovsky Pereulok costing 3 or 4 million euros; this is the world of Vladimir and Katya.  The background television broadcasts, which intoxicate the minds of the characters and lures them into their iniquities, acts as the national idea linking Butikovsky Pereulok and Biryulyovo together.  When watching Elena, note the popular TV shows “Malakhov +,” “Control Purchase,” “Living is Great,” “Wait for me,” and “Let Them Speak” murmuring in the background of the movie, as well as the remarks about women’s magazines, crosswords and erotic magazines.  The innocent calls to “change the vector of your taste preferences” and “to make healthy food tasty” turn into sinister philosophical concepts: “This is just a typically Soviet system, they just absolutely have to load up a person hoping that afterwards they… Maybe, he will manage to steer out by the end of the season.”  Or, “the country will be appalled by the fact that everything’s going to repeat itself with you, I swear, you’re going to cry for all you’ve done, and you’ll also pay for everything.”  A transient remark can reveal a lot in the destiny of director himself and, consequently, solve some unsolved puzzles from The Return, The Banishment, and even the novella from New York, I Love You.

In criticizing the underprivileged, the author of this text has to admit with bitterness that he himself is like the son Seryozha to a considerable degree.  A small apartment, four children, infantilism, dependency, lying on the sofa, sitting by the computer, drinking Baltika No. 9^[11] in the evenings, mornings and afternoons, borrowing money from parents; all this is about me. I hate the Sharikov in me.  Yet it seems to me that I am a different, an entirely different person.  It seems to me so.  I believe it very much indeed.

In spite of its artistic and social novelty, Elena a signature Zvyagintsev film all the same.  The auteur’s style is easily recognizable.  You can make sure of that by watching his early short films—”Busido,” “Obscure,” “Choice,” and his latest, the segment from the almanac Experiment 5ive+, released after Elena.  But, after all, Kira Muratova and Andrei Tarkovsky made “the same film” for their whole lives, despite many different titles.  The individual signature is a sign of mastery.

In Elena, we again observe a conflict within a family and stern conversations with the Father.  And again, we hear laconic, significant dialogue.  This is the signature of Oleg Negin, Zvyagintsev’s regular screenwriter.  Negin always weaves the plot unhurriedly, but cunningly catches the viewer in it.  Mikhail Krichman is the cinematographer, depicting Moscow in enamel shades and slightly desolate even during a fair.  Long takes prevail, 30 to 50 seconds each.  It seems that scenery, which in real life may lie about in corners of the frame, is deliberately removed from the shot.  A clever effect is achieved in this way.  Despite the fact that Moscow is still recognizable, it nevertheless seems slightly symbolic.  Amongst Elena’s distant relatives, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, with its desert theology set in Warsaw apartment blocks, is perhaps the closest.

But despite the political content, Elena is not a political movie is the modern sense of the word.  In his numerous interviews Zvyagintsev harshly criticized modern Russian society, complaining “Everything was sold to America long ago!”  And in Elena the new elite also recognizes itself as a cursed seed that has no future.  Zvyagintsev is equally distant from both the Reds and the Whites.  Nevertheless, in the turmoil of 2011, the film is oozing with political connotations, and plays on the side of counter-revolutionaries.  Its anti-popular pathos strikes the eye, while the anti-elitist message is barely visible.  The fact that his movie began to be perceived as a political manifesto from the very first reviews will probably prove unpleasant to the director.  For him, Elena is first of all a conversation about the “mystery of the collapse of the society’s spiritual state,” about the end of the world, not about the degeneration of political parties.

Elena is an ideology, but not a provincial, red-white ideology; it is an iconoclastic, millenarian ideology.  It’s a total protest against Renaissance humanism,whose native children are both Marxism and liberalism.  This very protest looms behind the façade of obvious interpretations.  Elena is a protest against modernism and its offspring—hedonism.  A protest against anthropocentrism, in which the highest value is the Human Being.  The crucial moments of The Banishment, the Return, and Elena are the sacrifice of man in the name of something other than himself. Of what?  As Aristotle said, to offer only something human to people means to deceive them and to wish ill on them, because people are called by their main part, the soul, for something greater than just an ordinary human life.  And Heidegger echoes him: “The meaning of existence is to allow Being to be found as the ‘glade’ of all existing things.”

The trick is that within the depths of Elena there is hidden fundamental ontology, which extends from the Greek philosophers to Martin Heidegger. And upon this foundation of ontology, the building of heroism, valor and honor, in essence, a noble, aristocratic ethics is constructed.  According to Zvyagintsev, happiness, love, and even prosperity, should cost very much.  Where is the bourgeoisie, where the “bubble gum” here?  Where is the socialist concern about people’s everyday life?

Just the other way around! According to Zvyagintsev, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions: abortions, doctors-killers, beer and lobsters.

Paradoxically, the new Zvyagintsev’s movie plays in the fields of asceticism and elitism, where Nikita Mikhalkov is the leader.  However, the fundamental difference between Europe’s favorite and Mikhalkov is that Zvyagintsev pours out the limitless ocean of doubt.   Where Mikhalkov has ready answers: “Motherland”, “Homestead”, “Honor”, Zvyagintsev has only questions.  Zvyagintsev hints, never dictates.  For this he is loved by “progressive” people.  His oeuvre resists interpretation.  The resistance, in its turn, stimulates new interpretations.

Elena has a deep bottom. And the author of a single review cannot possibly reach it.

1. The title of a 1925 novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, a biting satire of the New Soviet man.
2. The hero of “Heart of a Dog,” made by crossing a dog with a proletarian man
3. A Russian political and social activist who in recent years gained great prominence amongst Russian bloggers and mass media due to his social campaigning activity
4. A humorous nickname for the ruling party in Russia led by Prime-Minister Putin.
5. Yuri Shevchuk is a Russian singer/songwriter who leads the rock band DDT.  Shevchuk is highly critical of the undemocratic society that has developed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
6. The Letter of Forty-Two was an open letter signed by forty-two well-known Russian literati, aimed at Russian society, the president and government, in reaction to the events of September – October 1993. It was published in the newspaper Izvestiya on 5 October 1993 under the title “Writers demand decisive actions of the government.”
7. Zahar Prilepin is a Russian writer, political dissident, and a member of Russia’s unregistered National Bolshevik Party since 1996
8. Sergey Udaltsov is a leader of the Red Youth Movement.
9. Igor Mantsov is a left-wing film reviewer.
10. A “working class” Moscow neighborhood.
11. Cheap and strong beer popular among Russian chavs.

Yekaterina Barabash argued that Zvyagintsev had invented “spiritual glamor”: merciless in its form and meaningless in its content.  Yelena Ardabatskaya noted that it had been a difficult viewing experience since The Banishment has nothing at all in it: no people, no scents, only Emptiness.  Roman Volobuyev, who at first confined himself mostly to sneering, finally succumbed and began to speak his mind. According to him, even Mikhalkov, now an object of scorn, “is a complex personality, while Zvyagintsev is a single-layered structure; he is a good professional director, at the level of an average American TV series maker, who makes films about things he does not give a damn about – and out of mercenary motives at that, and because he works not in the world of  ‘My Perfect Nanny’ but in Russian, kind of, spirituality, his indifference and the fact that he knows nothing about those abstruse things that he depicts in his movies is the most terrible thing.”  Even peacefully disposed Sam Klebanov complained, “It seems as if it is repeatedly suggested that we should think about the meaning of all those religious parallels.  Perhaps, we did not think well enough, but somehow we have not thought up anything.”

I am not going to list all the complaints and accusations of displeased cinema experts and female viewers; I am just going to say that the criticism against The Banishment boils down to three things:

1) The indeterminate time and place of the film;

2) Its artificial plot, and

3) an alleged absence of meaningful content.

Let us figure them out one by one.

Time and Place

Perhaps, in some other film the soft slopes, jade crockery and flecks of dust in sunbeams would be hurrahed, but the sophisticated aesthetics of The Banishment repelled the audience.  The mannerism of the mise-en-scènes, the scenic splendors in conjunction with the director’s maniacal determination to drive all markers of time out of the shot built a wall of incomprehension between the audience and the movie. It appeared to many that it was nameless ghosts, not living people, that were wandering in empty rooms and lonely copses, that the director tried to disguise the poverty of the content behind the beauty of the shot. Is that the case? Let us look at the situation from another angle.

Have you ever tried to recount a dream?  If you have, you certainly experienced a sort of frustration because it is impossible to communicate these feelings that only you can comprehend.  Well, why should we limit ourselves to speaking about dreams?  Even in our day life there are such breakdowns, such overflows of feelings, such “psychological spaces” that cannot be told about because words fail us. Sometimes poetry can help, sometimes music, and sometimes cinema. There is an expression “dream cinema.”  At times this kind of cinema opens such layers of memory, gives such feelings that can be both more vivid and more exuberant than, for instance, your reminiscences about your first love or your visit to China.  Alexei German’s film Khrustalyov, mashinu! [Khrustaliov, My Car!] is regarded as a classic example of dream cinema. I cannot speak for others, but The Banishment reminded me of my experience of my first day in Madrid, which was a prominent, say, rough experience at first, but completely forgotten afterwards.  For some reason, it is the first days in a new place that always stand apart.  Of course, everyone has one’s own psychological reality.  It stands to reason that there will always be someone left indifferent by the aesthetics of the film, and this is right.  Look at cinema from that angle, and maybe some other film will awake something in you which cannot be expressed in words.  The opinion that cinema is the closest to the world of dreams is common among film experts, and I can only agree with that opinion.

The Banishment was filmed in southern Moldova, 5 kilometers away from the city of Vulcanesti.  I do not know where precisely in Moldova Hare over the Abyss was shot, but as soon as I saw the landscapes of The Banishment I immediately remembered Keosayan’s picture.  Such is Moldova, beautiful and sentimental!  So, any “namelessness” is quite a relative thing.  The important thing is the breadth of vision.

Artificiality of the Plot?

Can we say that the plot of The Banishment is artificial?  It depends on how you look at it.  Indeed, at first sight, the harmonious story about adultery, pregnancy, about relationships between a man and a woman collapses like a house of cards at the end of the film.  And the blame is to be attributed to the “sacrifice” of the heroine.  Female viewers were especially outraged by the fact that the character of Vera is phony throughout, that instead of a woman Zvyagintsev presented a phantom, a masculine perception of a woman.  It is funny that a considerable difference is observed between the male and female assessments of The Banishment at IMDB.  Whereas women assessed the film at 6.4 on the average, men voted it an 8.0.  This does not happen often.  But the thing is, I am convinced that the family drama, the outline of events, is only the threshold of the deeper layers of the film.  In this context, the absurdity of Vera’s actions, her adultery, her allusions and sacrificial abortion acquires an entirely different approach.  It is interesting to note that with the widespread introduction of the DNA test, the problem of adultery became of unprecedented importance in society.  In cinema came Cannes laureate Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and then Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment, both of which sparked fierce clashes in online forums with regard to adulteries and related abortions.  But in The Banishment the abortion is not the subject, but only the cause, of the dispute.  The film is not about the abortion; then what is it about?

On November 21, 2006 Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an interview with Andrei Zvyagintsev. Answering correspondent Valeriy Kichin’s question concerning The Banishment the director says:

Zvyagintsev: …In general, it should be said that the character is not at all important to me as a personage or social type, but as a carrier of certain ideas. Not as an individual, but as a function embodied in that actor or actress.

Valeriy Kichin: In other words, you understand a film as a working model of life?

Zvyagintsev: Yes, as life arrangement.  Not at the popular level, but at the metaphysical, perhaps, even at the mystical level.  The same thing happened in The Return: there, the father was not simply, and not only a concrete person, but also a certain function, the personification of some concept.  And the children too. That’s just the way I am: I begin to get interested if I don’t so much discover the hero as a character as find a clue to his idea.  The beauty of the world is not at all embodied through disgraceful fights in the world of people who live by their emotions, greed and passions.  It is expressed through the battle in the world of ideas.  There, this battle is never-ending and beautiful.

These words immediately turn everything upside down.  A conscientious viewing of the film will allow you to see a story with carefully arranged prompts behind the heap of words and events from the very first shot.  Zvyagintsev did not want to perplex the viewer at all.  On the contrary, he shows his cards by both the film itself and direct allusions in his interview.  It turns out that an enormous world opens up behind the outline of events, where all puzzles turn into solutions.  So, what is this film about?

Content and Meaning

The reviews of The Banishment repeatedly mentioned its numerous allusions, quotations, metaphors; but in those reviews all allusions, hints, quotations spilled like beads on the floor.  It seemed as if the plot lived its separate life, whereas the quotations lay about separately.  Meanwhile, a careful and slow viewing of the film will change the viewer’s attitude to it.

0 minutes 0 seconds – 4 minutes 18 seconds

First scene: A spreading tree grows by a country road between a tilled soil and a field until a car appears on the horizon.  The car rushes along the country road,  enveloping this tree in clouds of dust.

It then rushes along a highway between a forest and a field passing out of sight three times.

The car enters an industrial suburb of a city.  Clouds of smoke pour from chimney stacks. It is sprinkling and getting dark. Note that at the beginning the car moves in open space; now it moves either between factory walls or between a canal and a string of buildings, strictly confined.

The car can turn neither to the right nor the left. In spite of anxious blinking of the traffic lights, the car moves ahead determinedly.

At this moment a train blocks the way.  That’s it.  The car stops.  A shower begins.  The driver uses the pause to bandage his blooded hand, but as soon as the crossing gate rises, he drives ahead.  At last the car drives up to a house in the dead of night, that is, it enters the city in the daytime and drives up to the house at night!  At night!  What the hell is this megalopolis that you have to drive through from morning till night?!  This is not Tokyo or Moscow, after all!  There are no traffic jams.

How should we understand this? From the first seconds of the film the director begins playing a frightful, inconceivable game with the viewer, but almost nobody notices it! The ordinary, worldly worldview is left behind, and we are falling, falling, falling into a dream, a myth, some metaphysical universe.  And here, in the world behind the looking glass, the country behind the eyelashes, everything becomes suddenly clear.  So, a car, a field, a forest, and a city.  There it is!  This is a direct paraphrase of the history of the Civilization, or, to be more precise, a historical narrative with its traditional division of the time into three periods: the Ancient World (field), the Middle Ages (forest) and Modernity (city).  From this angle, The Road becomes the Metahistory in itself, and the Tree becomes a symbol of Eden or the prehistoric Paradise.

That’s that! “That’s all, babies, that’s all, chickens, get off, here we are.”  The Banishment begins with the imposition of a sentence, with a peculiar version of The Decline of the West from Zvyagintsev. A thousand-year history is compressed to four minutes and a half.  Having started its movement in the blooming Paradise, civilization ended it in impenetrable gloom: there is no further way.  No further way?  And in general?  Is there any way out?  Is there any alternative to the onward movement in the “Car”?

4 minutes 18 second – 9 minutes 31 seconds

As it turns out, the driver’s name is Mark, and he has come to his younger brother Alex seeking refuge.  The name Mark is derived from the Latin Marcus, which means “hammer, sledge-hammer.”  Bloodstained Mark needs rest and a night’s lodging.  And not only this; he needs help, which is provided by Alex, as Mark declines the offer to call a doctor. Alex extracts a bullet from Mark’s shoulder and then washes off the blood.  As it will turn out later, the refusal to bring in a doctor proves to be a prudent step.

Throughout the film Mark is an example of unparalleled courage and self-renunciation.  The most courageous and heroic character, a perpetual wanderer used to relying only on himself, Mark proves the most vulnerable as well.  While Vera goes to death of her own volition, Mark fades away before our eyes.  Wounded, exhausted and sick, Mark dies of a heart attack.

The younger brother is not such a straightforward character. On the one hand, sullen and taciturn Alex resembles his brother in his “self-standing”, striving to decide everything on his own. But on the other hand, Alex constantly hesitates.  He is not a “hammer.”  The name Alexander is derived from the Greek words Alex (“protector”) and Andros (“man”).  Alex is in no hurry to make decisions.  His ability to hesitate, to pass his decisions through his doubts—that is to say, his tendency to contemplate—turns out to be a colossal advantage for him. Alex will stay alive.

So, Mark finds an abode at his brother’s place.  At this time Alex tells him that a certain Robert promised him a two-month job, after which he is going to visit his parents home.  In other words, while Mark’s way takes him to the city, Alex’s journey is from the city to the place where Mark has just come from.  The brothers differ from each other even by this insignificant detail, but the principal difference between Alex and Mark is that the former has Vera.

9 minutes 31 seconds – 11 minutes 49 seconds

Alex’s wife, Vera, is an absolutely enigmatic human being.  Vera is almost always subordinate and lacks initiative.  Her fate seems to be suffering and tears.  It is Vera, however, who is at the center of the story; she is the catalyst of the drama.  Her contradictory actions break the plot of the movie,and  her monologue about children and parents totally perplexes the viewer.  The Russian word vera (“faith”) is not just a woman’s name.  What if Vera is not only Alex’s wife, not only the mother of his children, but also vera (“faith”), that is, “conviction”, “belief in something”, a religious category?  How will she fit in the plot structure in that case?  Let us think.

Some time later Vera and Alex travel by train.  They go not by themselves, but with their children, a boy and a girl.  The son’s name is Kir, the daughter’s Eva.  In spite of the fact that Alex has vera (“faith”), it exists separately, so to speak, as if in a parallel world.  Despite their wedding rings, an abyss of estrangement has opened between them.

They are separate both in their marriage bed and in the train compartment.  What is more, it is not only they who sit separately.  Alex sits with the son, and Vera sit with the daughter.  In the course of the film Zvyagintsev repeatedly separates and estranges male and female protagonists.

It is evident even by the structure of the mise-en-scène in the train compartment: Vera’s relationship with the male half of the family is tragically broken, but her relationship with her daughter Eva is happily established.

As soon as the train approaches the destination, the sunshine lightens Vera as a sign, as a divine testimony. Vera’s face is illuminated with a smile.

With maniacal persistence the director likens the city to the Kingdom of Darkness, and the surroundings of the House of the Father to a Light Paradise. The train arrives at the destination and the family disembarks onto the platform.  Even the shape of the station hints at different directionality of their worlds: one arrow points to the left, and the other to the right.  The following episode, though barely noticeable, is important: Vera lingers with her things, and Alex and Kir go ahead.  Eva stays with Vera, but then dashes after her father and brother.  And for a reason, as it will turn out.

11 minutes 53 seconds – 19 minutes 37 seconds

After leaving the city, the family returns to the house of Alex’s father.  Why there?  What is special about it?  If you look carefully, you will notice that the house is separated from the outside world by a deep ravine.  The ravine is covered with a wooden bridge.  Before the bridge, there is a telegraph pole.

All of a sudden, this telegraph pole, or more exactly, its cross-shaped top starts hitting the eye literally from any camera angle.  Watch the film carefully. The cross, inconspicuous at first, obtrusively finds its way to the center of the frame.  It is viewed by Georgy and Victor, Alex and Kir.  It can be seen from any window, from any room. There is a wide cross on the house façade.  In addition, the camera lingers on cross-shaped rafters, window sashes and door beams that form crosses.

The testimony is obvious and unequivocal: the paternal home, the family cradle is nothing else than the House of God, the Church or Christianity as a whole.  There, beyond the ravine, there are cars, flocks of sheep pasturing; but here is the House of God as the place of last hope.  The House of God is consigned to oblivion by people in exactly the same way as Christianity is almost everywhere in modern-day Europe. Only the extinguished hearth and gray ash are left.

Nevertheless, Alex, Vera, Kir and Eva begin to adapt to it, to settle in its rooms.  The shutters are opened, fire burns in the hearth again, and light illuminates dark corners.  Is seems that the forgotten temple will be reanimated.  Will it?  Something uneasy floats in the air from the first minutes.  Leafing through a book, Kir opens to an enigmatic reproduction showing three occult, folkloric figures.  Then Kir asks Alex about the strange odor that is present in the house, but receives no answer.

Crucial significance is attached to the symbolism of water.  Water as a symbol of life is used often in esoteric literature, painting and cinema.  In The Banishment, water, or rather its absence, the thirst for water, conveys a sinister meaning.  On the way home Eva says that she is thirsty.  Then a certain spring located in the walnut garden becomes the focal point of the conversation between Kir and Alex.  Alex answers that they can go to the garden, that is, to the spring, only after bathing.  Bathing or ablution acts here as an allusion to the Baptism of Christ; that is to say, one can get to the garden or Eden only after being baptized.

The omnipresent cross, ablution, ravine, the House of the Father are only the beginning in the endless sting of biblical, historical and Christian allusions, which not only stick out everywhere, but also fit in a clear sequence, forming several storylines.  Each storyline—biblical, metahistorical, familial—affects and depends on the other lines, and each episode is reflected in mirrors of different conceptual levels.  And the most important thing is that it is not the parable that explains reality, but reality that explains the parable.  In an interview with Kseniya Golubovich, Zvyagintsev said, “Few people think about the fact that a ‘myth,’ a ‘pattern,’ some turn which has been known to humankind for millions of years, underlies every event of their own lives.  We do not live any new fates, we do not perform any new deeds.  All deeds have already been written in heaven and rest in our ancient brain.”  In other words, Zvyagintsev’s cinema is neither more nor less than a repercussion of such already almost forgotten philosophical school as structuralism.

Alex, Vera, Kir and Eva climb a hill and find themselves in a wonderful grove which looks like Eden.  There used to be a spring there.  Water from the spring used to flow down a stream, pass under the house and rotate its millstone . It can be assumed that the spring, watercourse, and millstone used to animate the House of God.  The spring dried up, however.  Alex had seen water in this spring before, but Kir had not.  Alex answers Kir’s question why the spring dried up, “God knows.”  Thus, while Heavenly Eden used to give reviving water to the Church in the past, it does not give it any more, by the will of God.  The parallelism between “dryness” in the Christian life and the life of modern family is obvious.  Which is cause and which effect is not important.

19 minutes 37 seconds – 21 minutes 42 seconds

The plot becomes more tense.  This episode begins with a dialogue between Vera and Eva.  Vera makes an apple and calls her daughter “bunny” or “sunshine.”  Eva suddenly bristles: she does not want to be “sunshine” any more. She wants to be just “Eva.”

In other words, the New Woman Eva, also wants to find herself in her own independent feminine essence, just as the New Man, Mark, wants to find masculine independence.  For Vera, Eva’s repudiation is a disaster.  If this episode is viewed as a family story, Vera’s reaction looks unnatural and paradoxical.  There is awe in her eyes.  A mother cannot react to her daughter’s innocent caprice like that.  Yet, The Banishment is not a game of daughter and mothers.  The only possible explanation to her odd reaction is as follows: Eva repudiates Vera, repudiates her “solar” essence.  In other words, Eva denudes Vera of her last hope, the hope to give herself to humankind.  Because Kir and Alex are already estranged from Vera, and all her aspirations were only for Eva, the female half of humankind.  Now all connections are broken.  Now Vera needs some way out, some other opportunity; and she finds such an opportunity.

Vera tells Alex that she is pregnant but the child is not his.  Thus, the baby, whose very being is questionable, becomes an opportunity for Vera to find salvation.  This possible child is the ultimate manifestation of the conflict between Vera and Alex.  Alex is shocked and crushed by his wife’s announcement.  She makes futile attempts to have it out with him, and later offers a “metaphysical explanation” for the pregnancy, but this “explanation” requires a tremendous effort from the listener, and Alex is able neither understand nor even lend his ear to Vera.

The logic of Vera’s actions baffles not only Alex, but also the viewer.  Her position seems unthinkable, inexplicable.  As it will turn out, her position is almost absurd, but only at first.  The famous maxim Credo quia absurdum est, or “I believe it because it is absurd” is a paraphrase of a fragment from the early Christian apologist Tertullian’s work De Carne Christi, where in polemic against the Gnostic Marcion he writes, “The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful.  And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is ridiculous.  And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible.”   Faith is absurd, but the ultimate foundations of Being and the laws of the universe are no less absurd, from our viewpoint.  Yet, in spite of the fact that these laws seems unfathomable and absurd, they are still laws. They do not condescend to our  everyday, ordinary consciousness.  On the contrary, Man must rise to their heights.

In the very same way the demand of Vera (faith) that Alex (Man) should accept her and (and his) child is irrational and inconceivable.  To accept Vera, it is necessary to make an intellectual effort, make a leap over the abyss of misunderstanding.  All the same, her demand is absolutely necessary, since Vera (faith) is an invaluable gift, a precondition of human existence.  Alex cannot rise to the challenge of this demand.  He leaves Vera.  Black night falls.

On the country road Alex meets a car.  A certain Max (“greatest” in Latin), the son of Georgy (“farmer” in Greek) is at the steering wheel.  Max offers to give Alex a lift. Alex agrees.  Max knows Alex well since he works as a postman (herald?) in the city, but Alex does not remember him.  With Max, he reaches the same station at which they arrived not long ago. From there, he phones Mark and tells him that they should meet.  Mark agrees.  However, something hinders Alex.  In spite of the fact that mysterious Max lends him his car, Alex does not reach the city.  At the crossroads of times, at the border between the City of God and the City of Man, restless Alex chooses Vera.  He stops the car at the boundary between a cultivated forest and a treeless area.  Once again, night is succeeded by morning, and gloom by light.

30 minutes 57 seconds – 39 minutes 14 seconds

Upon arriving home Alex behaves as if he wants to find reconciliation with Vera. Whenever Vera tries to start a conversation, however, Alex imposes silence upon her again. He is unable to listen to her.  Her words are just unbearable for him.

At this point a number of new characters become entangled in the plot.  They communicate with Alex like relatives who have not seen him for ages, as though, not finding faith in Vera, Alex searches for it in his old family.  First, he invites Victor’s family to his place for the evening, and then goes to visit Georgy.  Georgy, a hoary old man, arrives in Alex’s place in a car and takes him with the children to his farm. When meeting crestfallen Alex, Georgy lights up with pleasure.  It is apparent that Alex’s arrival is a great holiday for the old man.  In the course of their conversation it is divulged that Alex has not been home for 12 years.  His father longed for him “painfully” and died without having seen his grandchildren.  For Gerogy, the departure of Mark and Alex is also a puzzle: “People lived. Everything’s fine, it seemed, and, out of the blue… You never know what is waiting for you.” Nevertheless, Georgy is filled with joy.  There is a lot of wheat growing in the farm yard.  Georgy introduces his visitor to a donkey and leads him to the mill as if opening up his world to Alex, trying to interest and entice him. The mill is located high, it seems as if it hovers in the skies.

In Luke, Chapter 15, Jesus tells the famous parable of the prodigal son to his apostles.  In the story there is a father and his two sons. The younger son took half of the family fortune and left his father but spent all his money and, after many years of drudgery and suffering, returned home.  He did not expect his father’s mercy, and returned simply because he did not want to die from hunger as his father had always had a lot of bread.  Contrary to his expectations, his father displayed great joy instead of anger and presented him with sandals, a ring and a well-fed calf.

It is apparent that the episode with Georgy is a rendering of the parable where the figures of the father and the son are transposed to several characters: Alex’s father and Georgy, on the one hand, and Alex, Mark and Kir, on the other hand.  In the context of the movie the visit to Georgy’s farm can be construed as a heaven-sent opportunity for Alex: God opens his munificence to Man.  God requires nothing of Man except for love, but Man remains deaf and proves himself incapable of accepting His gifts.  Alex withdraws into himself and pays no attention to Georgy.  He seeks salvation on his own, and sinks in the bog of the Fall still deeper.  Therefore, not finding a Son in Alex, Georgy now turns this attention to Kir. (Note that for some reason Georgy ignores Eva).

John, Chapter 12 says, “Jesus, finding a young donkey, sat on it…”, and further on, “Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your King is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.”  In other words, in this episode Georgy acts as the Father in relation to both Alex and Kir; that is, encountering Alex’s incomprehension Georgy looks for a new Messiah in Kir.  The mise-en-scène here, Georgy and Kir’s crossed hands, resembles the fragment of Michelangelo’s fresco Creation of Adam.  God breathes life into the man by putting out his hand to man’s hand: dead clay comes to life owing to the divine touch.  Adam is born at the moment when God’s hand (in the hypostasis of the Father) and Adam’s hand touch each other. ^[1] According to Christian apologetics, Adam is the prototype of Christ.  While Adam was the first man of the Old Testament, Christ was the god-man of the New Testament.

39 minutes 14 seconds – 50 minutes 16 seconds

The episode with the arrival of Victor’s family develops the theme of “salvation.”  Alex makes another attempt to approach his wife, but Vera’s timid words infuriate him again and he strikes her a blow.  I do not know what Zvyagintsev meant by this episode, but I would like to note that after Victor’s family arrives, misunderstanding separates not only Vera and Alex, but spreads between all male and female characters of the film.  Just as Alex cannot understand Vera, Kir also cannot understand his sister Eva and Victor’s three daughters Flora, Faina and Frida.  Victor is also unable to understand his own daughters.

The children start playing hide-and-seek, and at this moment it becomes apparent that, notwithstanding the supposedly general rules of the game, Victor’s daughters and Eva use other rules which are totally incomprehensible to Kir.  Kir and Faina compete for who will be the first to run up to a tree.  Kir is in fact first, but that means noting to his sister: “no, she is the first,” Eva states.  Flora goes beyond the conventional limits of the game, finding herself in the garden, where Kir finds her.

The children walk through the forest and have a relaxed conversation.  In another episodes, Alex and Vera walk in the same forest, but in the opposite direction.  What does this mean?  Genesis 3:24 says, “So He drove out the man and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”  Italian painter Masaccio’s painting The Expulsion represents Adam and Eve being expelled, moving from right to left. In Zvyagintsev’s film, Alex and Vera also walk “to the left,” which means to the east.

But Flora and Kir, perhaps out of spite, walk from left to right or from the east to the west.  Ignoring unnecessary right/left political insinuations, I will suppose that the walk of Kir and Flora is an antithesis to the “Expulsion” of Adam and Eve, a “Discovery of Paradise” of sorts.

Not only Vera, but all women in The Banishment behave very strangely. The climax of incomprehensibility is a strange conversation between Victor, Alex and Max.  Victor remarks that something strange is happening, and he can only vaguely surmise what.  Faina, Victor’s daughter, comes up to him.  She does not want to play any more and says that she is bored.  Suddenly she stands on her head.  For her, this inverted state is almost natural; she can stand upside down for a whole hour.  Victor remarks, “acquire three daughters and you may be sure that you’ve acquired three more wives.”  When Victor tires to stand on his head, he falls over right away.

At this point I would like to leave plot collisions for a minute and mention the unusual artistry of Leningrad actor Igor Sergeyev, who plays Victor.  Typically, when speaking about The Banishment, reviewers note the powerful acting of Konstantin Lavronenko (Alex), Aleksand Baluyev (Mark), and Maria Bonnevie (Vera).  Lavronenko received the Best Actor Award at Cannes, but the supporting cast is also very good.  I have always been impressed by films in which the supporting characters look like live people and not just a kind of biomass.  In this respect, The Banishment is faultless. The girls from Victor’s family, Faina, Flora and Frida (Sveta Kashelkina, Elizabeth Danzinger and Yaroslava Nikolayeva, respectively) are real kiddies with infinite charm, and the acting of their father in the drinking scene deserves a special award.

The role of “messenger” at this moment is taken by a rather inconspicuous character.  While Alex, Victor and Max drink wine and talk about the incomprehensibility of women, in the kitchen the women talk about their children.  Knowing nothing about the pregnancy, Victor’s wife Liza hints to Vera that a third child is desirable: “God loves Trinity.”  The motif of Trinity is repeated in The Banishment many times: Victor has three daughters; Max, Alex and Victor have a three-way conversation; and it can be seen in old photographs in the house that Mark had three children. The film has three male protagonists: Alex, Mark, and Robert.  And who is Liza (or Elizabeth), after all?

Luke, Chapter 1 tells that the angel Gabriel appeared before the Virgin Mary with the message about the forthcoming birth of the Savior.  Doubtful, the Virgin asked the angel, “How can this be, as I have not known a man?” And the angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you,” and then in confirmation that “with God nothing will be impossible” mentioned Elizabeth as an example.  Righteous Elizabeth is the mother of John the Baptist, the wife of priest Zacharias.  According to the Apostle Luke, she is Mary’s cousin. Mary visits her pregnant cousin, and Elizabeth is the first to tell her about her upcoming fate.

The Holy Virgin gives birth to the Savior and Elizabeth becomes the mother to John the Baptist.  Both Mary and Elizabeth accept the will of God.  The Mother of God’s words, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord!  Let it be to me according to your word” became the moment of the Virgin Birth, and the Gabriel’s message became the Annunciation.  The Annunciation has been regarded as the first act of redemption, in which the Virgin’s obedience counterbalances Eve’s disobedience.  Mary becomes the “new Eve.”  It is said God sent the Archangel with the Good News on the 25^th of March, which is traditionally also the day of the Creation.

Thus, humankind was given the second chance.  Similarly, a second chance is given to Alex’s family, but if the first divine message was sent to Alex through Georgy, now it is sent to Vera through Elizabeth.  According to the logic of allegory, which goes in parallel to the outline of event, Liza is God’s messenger.

50 minutes 16 seconds – 01 hour 01 minute 22 seconds

Not everything is so simple in the sublunar sphere. The telephone rings, and Alex learns that Mark is waiting for him at the railroad station.  Alex has to leave the guests.  He takes Kir with him. Eva also wants to go, but despite her pleas Alex leaves the daughter at home.  On the way Kir tells Alex that in his absence Robert visited Vera… Robert visited Vera, that is that…

At the station Alex tells Mark about the cares of the last day. He waits for advice. Mark listens to his brother with an acid look on his face. Like the Wandering Jew who has seen everything in the world, Mark gives quite an extraordinary piece of advice: “Whatever you do, everything will be right.  If you want to kill, then kill.  The gun is in commode at the top.  And this will be right.  If you want to forgive, then forgive.  And this will be right too…”  It is obvious that such an answer bewilders Alex.

However, is Mark’s answer so paradoxical? Actually, Mark’s thoughts are nothing else but a paraphrase of the well-known thesis of the Greek sophist Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.”  This slogan was brought back to life by the humanists of the Renaissance and taken up by Modernity.  The concept of Man as the center of the Universe and the ideology of anthropocentric humanism built upon that concept have become the main trend for the modern society.  Some people believe that Nietzsche’s philosophy became the acme of Protagoras’ maxim.  In the 20^th century this idea was attacked from very different positions, from religious fundamentalism to leftist politics. (In my opinion, the most subtle and ingenious criticism of anthropocentrism is found in Heidegger).

There is no doubt at all that Mark is a parody of the anthropocentrism of the modern society.  Mark behaves in Nietzsche’s Superman as the hero of the new time.  He always finds the justification for his actions in himself.  Sometimes his adamant stoicism becomes self-renunciation.  Mark has forgotten his mother, father, wife and children.  He has neither past nor future, but, notwithstanding the obvious pain of such renunciation, he finds a certain mysterious meaning in it.  But this is not everything yet. Do you remember Kir’s words “about a strange odor in the house?”  After the conversation with his brother Alex drives home, and on the way Kir explains the source of this odor: “Mark smells like inside the house.”  Georgy previously said, by the way, that Mark had often visited the parental house.

In Judaism, there is a mention of a certain Beelzebub, or Baal-Zebub, a demon borrowed by the Jews from the Babylonians.  The name Beelzebub is translated as “the Lord of the Flies.”  From Judaism Beelzebub passed to the New Testament and was mentioned  in Matthew, Chapter 12.  In the Babylonian tradition, animals associated with eating carrion, corpses, with uncleanness and dirt, including flies, belonged to Ahriman’s kingdom.  Beelzebub was represented as a disgustful blowfly that flew over the corpse after a person’s death to take possession of his soul and befoul his body.  The Jews also considered flies to be an unclean insect, one that must not appear in Solomon’s Temple.  The character of Beelzebub often intersected another denizen of the lower world, Lucifer, the Fallen Angel of the Prince of Darkness.  Among other signs of deviltry, it is traditionally mentioned that Satan can be identified by his sulfurous odor.  According to Kir’s remarks, Mark has a strange, long-lasting odor.  The Devil tried to tempt Christ with worldly goods, and Mark keeps offering various worldly goods to Alex: a car, money, and the weapon of power, a gun.  So, what do we have as a result of this symbolism?  Zvyagintsev goes so far in his rejection of anthropocentrism as to liken Mark not only to the Nietzschean Superman, but also to the Prince of Darkness himself.

01 hour 01 minute 22 seconds – 01 hour 08 minutes 37 seconds

The subsequent developments can be interpreted as a “tug of war” for Alex between “the heavenly host and the earthly host.”  The situation is very tricky.  Alex constantly hesitates between Vera and his brother.  Alex comes home from the station, and guests Georgy and Elizabeth call to him as if “by accident”: “Well, where else can you see such a sky!”

Alex makes another attempt to talk to Vera.  He does not want to lose her.  He wants to help her.  In the last night her imploring touches and glances are directed to Alex.  Early in the morning, when at the brother’s instigation Alex takes the gun from the commode upstairs, he sees a broken photo of Mark’s family—with his wife and THREE children.

The telephone rings.  Alex picks up the receiver but instead of words he hears music.  Flora played a record with a strange melody and put the receiver against the record player without saying anything.  What does this mean?  The piece is Bach’s Magnificat, a Catholic canticle to the text of the song praising of the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation.  Alex looks at the children and says to his wife, “Well, Vera, please make breakfast for us.  Let us eat together.  Be their mother, and I’ll be their Father.”  A smile lightens her face for the first time in a long time.

Nobody has noticed the strange fact: in these seconds Vera changes dresses at an awful speed. She gets up from the bed in a white dress, stands with Alex by the window in a blue dress, and comes out of the house in a red one!  She heads for the exit in a blue dress, and outside she already wears a red one!

In Christianity white is a funeral symbol.  In the Orthodox Church the burial service is performed by priests in white robes.  Blue is the color of the sky, the color of heavenly Love.  Red is a symbol of God’s ineffable love for the human race, the color of joy and the color of sacrifice. ^[2]

Just when it seems that the heavenly host has won, a sudden turns happens. Alex comes out of the house with his family. They walk quite a long way from the house when the telephone rings. Alex comes back.

01 hour 08 minutes 37 seconds – 01 hour 19 minutes 28 seconds

Alex picks up the receiver. The telephone is silent, but Alex finds out from the operator that the caller was Robert.  Alex’s hesitations end at once: he makes a decision.  From that moment on the events unfold at a dashing speed, and characters start falling into the abyss head over heels.  For me, the feeling of black gloom, hopeless terror when one misfortune rolls over another, proved to be the most valuable thing in the movie.  (By the way, this condensation of darkness has been dramatized quite faithfully. More than once I witnessed how in some families one death was followed by several others, how misfortunes turned into black holes that drew everything alive inside).

The family ascends to the old cemetery to the nameless grave of the Father.  Alex answers Kir’s question, “Granddad was as old as Georgy?” with “no, he was younger.”  In the old family photographs we can see the “young” father who had been waiting for his sons for years!  A contradiction is apparent.  However, this contradiction is resolved if we recall that according to the canons of the Church, the Son and the Father have existed “since the world began.”  The Trinity exists out of time.  Eva’s question, “and why did he die?” is answered by Alex with “all people die”.

So, “God is dead”?

Alex's "youngish father"

Vera understands that she is doomed. On the way to the churchyard the family, led by Alex, meets a flock of sheep.  The flock is headed by a donkey . The family goes down to the Church but its doors are closed.  It is impossible to enter.  Upon coming back home Alex arranges with Victor to send the children to his place for some time . Everything is ready for the punishment of Vera.

The reflection of Vera in a black frame looks like a mourning photo

Vera manages to phone Robert at the moment when Alex takes the children to Victor’s car. Robert is alarmed by Vera’s call, but she cannot tell him about her trouble.  This is a very significant moment in the plot.  In her last call, Vera apparently waits from Robert for something more than just a Question.  She waits, but receives nothing.  What does Vera wait for?  We find out at the end of the film.  When they are left alone, Alex and Vera walk to the forest where Vera tells about her readiness to implement Alex’s will.

01 hour 19 minutes 28 seconds – 01 hour 32 minutes 01 second

Alex phones Mark and tells him about his decision.  Mark arrives with two doctors at dusk. As the children of Alex and Victor are solving a jigsaw puzzle (da Vinci’s The Annunciation) and Frida is reading an excerpt about love from Corinthians, Vera is dying in Alex’s house.  The abortion looks like a ritual killing.  The doctors wear black clothes like angels of death.

The house stands in pitch-black darkness. Vera makes no sound, though she cannot stand the pain. Nevertheless, the doctors say that it is normal, that Vera is “going to sleep.”  Mark echoes, “and this is right.”  These words play on the state of faith in the modern civilization, where the silence of religion is the condition of its existence.

Vera remains silent, and Alex becomes anxious.  He comes in her room every minute, anticipating something bad.  Realizing his fault Alex begins to repent.  He whispers, “help me Vera”, but Vera will no longer make any sound.  Finally, Mark too realizes that something wrong has happened.  Instead of the ambulance service he phones his friend German, a local doctor.  Mark assures his brother that German “will be here soon.”  Soon or not, judge for yourself. 

01 hour 32 minutes 01 second – 01 hour 59 minutes 29 seconds

German arrives and pronounces Vera  dead.  He tells Mark delicately, but Alex understands everything at once.  Alex is shaken.  His grief turns into exasperation.  He dashes onto Mark, but Mark copes with him easily.  Expectedly, German is also dressed in black.  It seems as if Zvyagintsev is scoffing at doctors. Every medical intervention in the film ends up in death, and every ambulance becomes a hearse.  Medicine here acts as an allegory for a purely scientific understanding of man, with all the ensuing consequences.

Alex calms down. In spite of his shock, Mark, with maniacal persistence, aims to bury Vera, no matter what.  I am not sure whether this mise-en-scène with Mark and Alex, where a cross can be seen again in the window and a poker bends under it like the Serpent, can be construed as another metaphor.  Maybe it is a coincidence.

The ambulance brings Vera’s body to the city morgue, where Mark and Alex soon find themselves.  Only Alex expresses a desire to see Vera for the last time.  Mark, despite the distress of his soul, does not want to see her, but appeals to Alex again to bury Vera.  A man of action, Mark does not rake over the dust and ashes of the past, looking for the cause.  One should live on, one should think not of what has been done, but of what must be done.  The traditional priority of Western culture, of Business over Idea, is played on here.

Alex and Mark go back to the house, where Mark has a heart attack.  German arrives again.  In the course of the conversation between German and Mark it turns out that the real cause of the death was a soporific Vera took: in other words, soporific, sleep, silence of faith is her death.  This news discourages Mark.  We have noted that the infernal image of Mark is a parody of the concept of the modern man, the Superman, but it should be said that Mark is not only the executioner, but also the victim: the victim of himself.  He also has faith, but his faith in science, action and self-sufficiency suffers a crushing defeat in the film.  Mark is tormented, but all his actions only aggravate his adversity.  It is he who becomes the catalyst of the disaster, it he who invites the “abortion mongers,” criminally mitigates his brother’s apprehensions, and it is he who delays the arrival of the doctor.  Even after the abortion Vera could have survived, but Mark did everything so that it did not happen.

German tells Alex that Mark is seriously ill.  Vera’s funeral should take place the next morning.  German wants to stop Mark again, but Mark is irrepressible.  He asks German to give him a potent stimulant, for at least three hours.  Before long the brothers, with grave diggers, and a priest bury Vera at the same graveyard where she stood only the day before yesterday.  After the funeral the priest walks down to the temple, walks for a very long time, walks down a straight track.  There is another track that twists to this temple… you do not need to be seminarian to recognize this textbook parable about the roads to God.  Two different roads lead to God: a straight one and a curved one.  The church goes to God along the straight road, but the way along the curved road is also possible.  But it more difficult, and longer.

Alex comes back home by himself with dead Mark on the back seat of the car.  As soon as Vera was buried, the “Superman” also passed away.  This is the message of the film: Man cannot exist without Faith.  Having kicked Faith out, having thrown it out of one’s life, having destroyed the memory of it, having remained alone face-to-face with oneself and having buried Faith, Man is doomed to die.

Alex assigns responsibility for Mark’s funeral to German and goes upstairs.  He takes the gun and money out of the commode.  There is not a trace of his former hesitancy. After losing Vera Alex has acquired determination.  Now he knows for sure what he wants.  He drives to the city and waits for Robert.  While waiting he falls asleep, and images of tree tops suddenly appear on the car’s surface. The reflection of trees in the city where there isn’t a single tree!

Reviewers interpret this episode differently.  Some write that all subsequent developments are Alex’s dream.  Others believe that Alex’s dream ends when Robert arrives. Whether in a dream or not, German, the man in black, closes the shutters of the house.  His silhouette completely obstructs the window opening, and along with it the cross, which used to be seen from everywhere.  Raindrops fall onto dry ground.  The reviving water fills the stream and flows to the millstone of Alex’s family home.  Robert comes, awakens Alex, and invites him into his place.  Alex comes in, sits down and puts the gun on the table.  It seems that the punishment is inevitable, that the retaliation will be performed.  But at this moment the telephone rings.  How many times now?  Robert picks up the receiver: it is Vera calling.  The plot folds back upon itself and draws the viewer with it.  Alex and Robert walk along the corridors of memory, back to the time when Vera was alive and the sky was so blue…

01 hour 59 minutes 29 seconds – The end

The last part of the film is the story of Robert saving Vera.  Robert does everything in a different way, not in the way that Alex, Mark, or even he himself acted in the story of Vera’s death.  He does everything the other way around.  We remember that Vera’s last telephone call before her death was to Robert.  Then, he left Vera alone with herself, but now he comes dashing to dying Vera’s call and does everything he can.  If Mark and the doctors wanted to send her to sleep, Robert repeats the words “just don’t sleep, Vera!” like a prayer.  He gives Vera water, causes her to vomit the poison, he talks to her, he listens to her.  If in the story of death it always rains in the city, in the story of salvation, after the rain the sun shines for the first time.  When Max, God’s messenger, rides his bicycle, there is sky blue reflected in the puddles on asphalt.  Max rides up to the door of Vera and Alex’s city house.  He delivers the letter with the pregnancy test.

In the mise-en-scène of the letter delivery, the mysterious postman Max does what Stirlitz would call an “exposure.”  Before handing the message to Vera, Max carelessly lets it fall and then drops on his knee in the very same manner as the kneeling Archangel Gabriel does in numerous representations of the Annunciation scene. If we look at Sandro Botticelli’s painting of the same name, everything clicks into place.  Now we can understand Max’s story about working as a postman, about the Father who had sent him to the city “to stretch his wings,” and about the addressee.

The next day Robert calls Vera again, and once more prevents her from sleeping.  When Vera hesitates, Robert goes to her himself.  Robert and Vera go for a walk around the morning city along the channel, on the other side of which the colossus of a black factory can be seen.  In the previous story, flocks of sheep grazed near the house, but in the alternative history there is gigantic graffiti on the factory depicting the struggle of the working class.  There by the channel Robert tells Vera the story about the keys from the house, which he lost and then found at the bottom of a glass, when he had a drink and remembered where they were.  Where Alex spends several days in tormenting reflections, Robert just came in and had a drink.

Vera says that she has never lost keys, and Robert notes that everything is still to come for her.  These words injure Vera, and she goes back to her place.  Vera asks Robert to stay, in spite of the dubiousness of his position, and he stays with her to the very end.  At this moment Vera begins to show old photos.  The reminiscences about the happy past injure her still more, as in the present everything is different.  The film draws to an end.  Finally, Vera tells Robert about her pregnancy: she carries Alex’s child.  What is the reason for her torment?

We remember that during the conversation between German and Mark a suspicion appeared that Vera was not pregnant. After the conversation with Robert, however, Vera states openly that she carries a child.  Alex’s child!  Why on earth should she kill herself?

Vera’s answer has frightened away, repelled the audience from Andrei Zvyagintsev’s second feature.  The view can be understood, as the viewer has just watched a movie about family drama, and Vera’s answer destructed the plot structure at a stroke.  In The Return Zvyagintsev enfolded a philosophical parable in a worldly story. In The Banishment, he sacrificed a worldly story for the sake of philosophical profoundness of the statement.  Actually, the essence is common to both The Return and The Banishment.  The audience did not understand and did not forgive the director.  It is a thousand pities, because Vera’s answer deserves consideration.

So, Vera openly states that she carries a child.  Alex’s child.  Where is the truth?  Both.  Vera died and stayed alive at the same time.  This is as simple and true as the fact that our children are not only our children, and we are not only the children of our parents.  This is as true as the fact that the boy or girl whom we see on old photographs and say “this is me” in reality is not actually me any more.  This is as true as the fact that we can live without ever dying, although we die.  But we can live forever only together, and only when we have Faith.  Alex returns; he returns to the place from whence his elder brother arrived at the beginning of the film.  He drives along the same road, past the same tree.  Now he is calm and he knows what to do.  Alex returns to his children.

Epilogue

Films similar to The Banishment are vanishingly few. Every year several thousands “simple” movies are released which require no effort form the viewer, which you can watch and enjoy; but there are very few directors who climb to such heights and require the same from the viewer.  That is why accusations against Zvyagintsev of  “mannerism” and of a broken plot are absurd.  Actually, there is no broken plot, and the mannerism—or rather otherworldliness—is quite precise and the right entourage for such content.

Some may ask, why should we climb to such heights?  Why do people fly to the Moon, play football or climb Everest?  They just want to, and they climb; many people have an ineradicable need to deal with problems of a universal scale, and nothing can be done about it.  It can only be prohibited.

In 1901 H.G. Wells wrote a story entitled “The New Accelerator.”  Its protagonist, Professor Gibbern, invented a preparation which increased the perception of the speed of reality a thousand times.  After the Professor and the narrator had tested the preparation on themselves, reality appeared before them in another light.  A bee turned into a snail, a coquettish wink into an ugly grimace, and a wonderful tune into a death rattle.  The problem of Zvyagintsev’s cinema, or rather the problem of its perception, is not a problem of erudition, taste or level of education.  The problem is the speed of perception.  The modern human being is like the person in Wells’ story.  To him, the plot line seem a motionless still life, a dumb show. The main thing here is not to hurry, not to hasten. Not to hurry to a trolleybus, fitness center, to a flight to Athens, and not to hurry to write a weekly review for the Art column.

1. Interestingly, 2007 saw the release of critically acclaimed Simple Things by Boris Popogrebsky, a film I love which also quotes the Creation of Adam.
2. Strangely, in Ivan Vyrypayev’s Euphoria (2006) the main heroine is also named Vera, also lives on the margin of civilization in a lonely house, also has a dress that changes color from red to white, and is also sacrificed by a jealous husband.  Other common elements are the style and color of dresses, and country bungalows, and 3 to 4 main characters. etc.

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn

PLOT:  In the indefinite future, mankind has set up a space station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious planet covered by an ocean that exhibits signs of consciousness.  Several of the crew members studying the planet demonstrate eccentric behavior and possible signs of mental illness, and psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the station to evaluate them and decide whether the program studying Solaris must be scrapped.  On board the satellite Kelvin discovers an incarnation of his wife, who has been dead for seven years, and falls in love with the hallucination.

BACKGROUND:

• For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
• Solaris was based on a 1961 novel by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.  Tarkovsky’s version was actually the second adaptation; the story had been filmed previously by Boris Nirenburg for Soviet television.  Steven Soderberg created an American version in 2002 starring George Clooney; it was a modest success with critics, but a commercial flop.
• Solaris won the Special Jury Prize (the second most prestigious award) at Cannes; the Palme d’or was shared by two realistic, political Italian films (The Working Class Goes to Heaven and The Mattei Affair) that are now almost forgotten.
• Although commentators frequently claim that Solaris was created as a reaction to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cinematographer Vadim Yusov says that the director had not seen the 1968 space epic until filming had already begun.  We can safely assume, however, that Soviet authorities were aware of the film, likely viewed it as propaganda for the American space program, and were more than happy to finance a 2001 response with cosmonauts as the cosmic heroes.
• Tarkovsky liked Natalya Bondarchuk’s initial audition for the role of Hari, but thought she was too young for the role (she was only 17 at the time).  He recommended her to another director for a different part and continued casting.  A year later Bondarchuk had completed her movie, Tarkovsky still had not cast Hari, and she still wanted the role.  The director was impressed enough with her work and persistence to relent, ignore the age difference between  her and leading man Donatas Banionis, and make her his Hari.  Later Tarkovsky would comment in his diary that Bondarchuk’s performance “outshone them all.”
• The weird seascapes of Solaris’ surface were created in the studio using an acetone solution, aluminum powder, and dye.
• American reviewers gave Solaris largely negative reviews on its Stateside release in 1976; in their defense, however, the version then screened here was badly dubbed and had a half-hour cut from the running time.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: During thirty seconds of scheduled weightlessness, Kris and Hari slowly rise in the air.  A chandelier tinkles, a slow Bach organ chorale plays, and a lit candelabrum and open books float past them as they embrace.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though Solaris is far from Tarkovsky’s weirdest movie—in fact, it

Original Russian trailer for Solaris (1972)

may be his most accessible—any movie in which a cosmonaut falls in love with an avatar of his dead wife that’s been created from his memories by an intelligent planet starts off on an oddish note.  When Tarkovsky points his dreamy camera at this scenario and applies his typically hypnotic and obliquely philosophical style, the weird notes push to the forefront.  The currents rippling in psychologist Kris Kelvin’s troubled subconscious turn out to be as mesmerizing as the ultramarine undulations of the surface of Solaris itself.

COMMENTS: Thirty minutes into Solaris Burton, a minor character, takes an almost five minute, silent, monochrome drive through the “city of the future” (actually contemporary Tokyo, which looked alien and advanced to Soviet audiences in 1972).  He’s just returned from trying, and failing, to convince Kris Kelvin—the psychologist who will be traveling to the space station orbiting Solaris to assess whether the “Solaristics” project should be shut down—that the planet is self-aware and that we as a species must continue to try to contact it.  The camera focuses on his worried face, shot in blue-tinted monochrome, as he speeds through the “futuristic” city with its tunnels, elevated highways and cloverleafs.  In the background is nothing but ambient highway noise, but as the trip continues, weird electronic acoustics creep into the sound mix.  As his car accelerates the pitch is manipulated, and sounds of unidentified whirring machinery blend with the increasing traffic noise.  Slowly, the alien sounds invade the mix as the audio environment grows more random, anxious and abrasive, until the scene snaps to a close and the action cuts to a silent pond.

I begin a review of Solaris with a description of this scene because it’s indicative of what the average person hates about a Tarkovsky film: the slow, slow pace, the director’s insistence on including long, challenging scenes where it appears that nothing whatsoever is happening (compare the scene where the tree principals sit quietly before the pool in Stalker, or the scholar’s nine-minute attempt to carry a lit candle across a drained pool in Nostalghia).  The point of Solaris‘ long driving scene mystifies even the film’s defenders.  There are theories that the director insisted on footage as necessary in a post-production attempt to justify the budgetary expense of sending a film crew to Japan.  The less charitable propose that the scene is Tarkovsky’s deliberate, anti-entertainment attempt to alienate the audience, to separate the wheat from the chaff and drive impatient patrons out of the theater.

Personally, I doubt both interpretations of the driving scene.  I suspect that, to Tarkovsky, it simply wasn’t that strange of an idea to focus on a single pensive face for four minutes in order to impress a mood of dreamy disquiet.  Did he even comprehend what an audience might have to complain of, when they had ample stimulation in the form of Eduard Artemyev’s sublime ambient electronic experiments humming quietly in the background?  This director thought on a different, more contemplative plane than other filmmakers.  To watch a Tarkovsky movie is to be slowly absorbed into the director’s ponderous dreams, until his subconscious almost imperceptibly becomes your waking reality.

This is not to say that Tarkovsky’s indifference to normal human pacing is unequivocally a good thing.  Solaris suffers from its slow prologue set on Earth.  Little crucial information is divulged during this long introduction, and what clues we do receive are told us in lectures rather than shown to us.  In archival film footage, a younger Burton describes his encounter with the hallucinatory consciousness of Solaris; he flies his craft through a thick colloidal fog cloaking the planet’s surface, and sees a giant naked baby rising from the ocean surface.  Tarkovsky’s budget obviously wouldn’t have allowed him to paint this mysterious vision in any convincing way; still, with the action being conveyed via dialogue we (as non-Russian speakers) are reading on the screen, Solaris seems much like a filmed novel, rather than a movie.  We get more background information on Solaris via a documentary glimpsed on TV, and the long Earthbound sequence, which gives us information that probably could have been conveyed in twenty minutes rather than forty, finally ends with that maddening driving sequence.  But fortunately better, and stranger, times are coming for the viewer, as the action and sense of mystery picks up significantly once Kris lands on the Solaris space station.

When Kris arrives, the sense that he has left Earth’s reality far behind is immediate.  He’s not greeted on arrival, but must wander through the ship’s curved halls alone looking for the crew.  When he discovers the scientist Snaut, the doctor is nervous and elliptical, explaining to Kris that only he and a Dr. Sartorius are left alive but, oddly, warning him not to react too rashly if he sees other figures roaming the station’s corridors.  Sartorius is even less helpful, only willing to speak to Kris through a cracked door—through which a dwarf escapes, only to be swiftly scooped up by the scientist and stuffed back into the room.  Kris then sees a woman in a blue nightgown walking through the ship, though he cannot catch sight of her face; she leads him to the corpse of one of the crewmembers.

Things definitely get weird from this point on, although there is always a “logical” sci-fi explanation for the strangeness—the hallucinatory interludes result from the interfacing of human minds with the consciousness of the planet Solaris, which overlaps the ship like a cloud.  After his disturbing welcome to the space station, Kris retreats to his room and barricades the door with footlockers.  He watches a black and white videotape left by one of the scientists, but Kris’ own reality is now monochrome, just like the video he is watching.  Black and white film stock is often used in color films to denote either memories, flashbacks or dreams, and Tarkovsky follows this convention in his other films.  Here, the sudden introduction of black and white in “reality” suggests that the line between the dream world and the waking world is breaking down.  Indeed, our expectations are subverted when Kris falls asleep and awakens in color: our expectations have been frustrated.  Are we now back in reality, or in a dream?  Complicating matters is the fact that there is now a beautiful young woman in the room, who walks over to Kris’ bed and kisses him; sleepily, he treats this event as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, but then he rises from his bed with a worried look on his face.  He reaches for a gun that’s lying near the apparition’s foot, but she kicks it away as he brushes her heel, saying “that tickles!”  Wandering the room, she discovers a picture of herself among his belongings and asks, “who’s this?”  She appears jealous.  Warily, he tells her he’s going out, but she protests that she can’t bear to be separated from him even for an instant.  He tells her that she can accompany him but she must put on a spacesuit and he tells her to undress.  She asks him to help her and he approaches to undo her dress, only to discover the frock has laces and threads, but no seam.  As he’s cutting her out of the clothes with scissors, he sees the sleeve of her dress is torn and there’s a puncture mark on her arm.

The relationship between Kris and this young woman—soon revealed to be a convincing replica of his dead wife, Hari, created by the planet below, for reasons unknown—becomes the core of the movie.  Hari is an illusion, a hallucination, but a convincing one, and an illusion who is completely devoted to, and dependent on, Kris.  Real or not, she arouses memories and longings in Kris both beautiful and painful.  Their burgeoning romance is even more complicated than a real life affair, for Hari carries metaphysical as well as emotional baggage.  She acts human, but we know she has been created by Solaris.  How human is she?  Is Kris falling in love with a memory, an illusion, a wisp?  Or, since she reacts like a real woman, since she appears to be a self-aware being craving love and acceptance, is it cruel to treat her as something less than human?  Things become even more complicated when the simulated Hari, herself, begins to understand what she is.  She paradoxically becomes more human to us when she begins to grasp and question her own existence.  Yet, there is a tragic fairy tale quality about her doomed love for Kris which echoes myths and folktales of spirits, ghosts and mermaids falling in love with human men.

Kris’ adventures on the satellite grow increasingly feverish as the film goes on; he begins to hallucinate about his mother, whose identity is confused with the similarly dressed Hari.  However strange things get for Kris, however, the central enigma of the movie remains Solaris itself.  What is this planet that seems to be alive, and how and why does it read the minds of those who study it and recreate figures from their past?  Who are the dwarfs that peripherally plague Sartorius? Is Solaris, that blue boiling ocean under a yellow sky, tormenting the cosmonauts, attempting to please them, or just experimenting on them in an attempt to understand them?  Its powers to create realistic, but flawed, homonculi are nearly omnipotent, almost godlike; and the film’s ambiguous ending implies it has even greater abilities, and perhaps even bears some love for humanity.  Is the planet Solaris, for Tarkovsky, an image of the God he was strictly forbidden to mention in film due to the Soviet state’s official materialism?  By making a science fiction picture, is he attempting an end-around on the ban on spirituality, by cloaking it as speculation on the nature of nearly omniscient alien lifeforms?  Tarkovsky’s films exhibit an odd, obscure and indirect mysticism, one that is more concerned with mystery, ambiguity and wonder than with clear answers or dogma.  He would push the obsessions begun in Solaris even further in Stalker, Solaris‘ weirder cousin, a fable about a journey to a strange room that can grant a man’s deepest wish.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow but absorbing parable on life and love in the guise of a sci-fi theme…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“Promising as all this may sound, it becomes apparent after the first few moments that the movie is going to remain stubbornly earthbound. The effects are scanty, the drama gloomy, the philosophy of the film thick as a cloud of ozone.”–Jack Cocks, Time (contemporaneous)

“…Tarkovsky’s eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker’s boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Solaris (1972) – The Criterion Collection – Features two clips from Solaris, as well as Phillip Lopate’s liner notes for the Criterion release and news snippets about the movie

IMDB LINK: Solaris (1972)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Andrei Tarkovsky on Solaris, Lem, Fellini, and Polanski – 1973 interview with Tarkovsky about the movie.  Many other Solaris tidbits can be found on nostalghia.com, an academic Tarkovsky fan site, though the wealth of articles on the director are not yet organized by movie

The Great Movies: Solaris – Roger Ebert’s essay on Solaris for his “Great Movies” series

Solaris – Information on the original novel from Stanislaw Lem’s official site

DVD INFO: The Criterion Collection DVD (buy) and Blu-ray (buy) releases contain exactly the same features. Criterion originally released a Solaris DVD in 2002.  In 2011 they released a Blu-ray that corrected an error in their original transfer: certain scenes that Tarkovsky had originally intended to be shown tinted blue had been presented in black and white instead. They simultaneously reissued a corrected version of the DVD, with the proper tinting restored.  Other than that change, the updated version is identical to the 2002 release, including the commentary track provided by Tarkovsky scholars Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie (coauthors of “The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue”).  Their reflections are enormously informative, but stiff—the pair sound like they’re reading passages from their book rather than spontaneously commenting on the action unfolding on screen.

On DVD extra features are hosted on a separate disc.  They include nine deleted or alternate scenes; a touching interview with star Natalya Bondarchuk; insightful conversations with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, art director Mikhail Romadin, and composer Eduard Artemyev; and an excerpt from a documentary about novelist Stanislaw Lem wherein the writer discusses his creative differences with the director.  Altogether, the supplementary materials run almost two hours.  The accompanying booklet contains an essay by Phillip Lopate and a Tarkovsky appreciation by no less an authority than Akira Kurosawa, who was touring the Mosfilm studios when Solaris was being made.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “236 Design.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Thanks to Russian translator and “friend-of-366″ Irene Goncharova, who previously gave us the lowdown on Russian cult director Rustam Khamdamov, we’re able to provide you at least with some titles, guidelines and recommendations on exploring the musty archives of Soviet films—there are some real treasures hidden there.  Irene painstakingly figured out which movies were subtitled in English and provided us with the translated titles and matching links, with some commentary of her own (her comments are marked “IG”).  We’ve included IMDB links for more information on the films along with a direct link to the full free movie on YouTube.

UPDATE 6/27: I discovered that more films are subtitled than we originally thought (Irene estimates more than 280!) Although some of the Mosfilm movies have “hard” subtitles (on the image itself), there are additional movies that offer translations via “closed captioning.” Look for a little “CC” button in the bottom right area of the YouTube player; if you see this button and push it (it’s not available on all videos), you get a “pop-up” English translation. The button will turn red when the service is active. You learn something new every day!

If you have any additions or information, leave them in the comments and we’ll incorporate them into the guide.

Let’s begin with the giant of Russian weird films, the only name here known known to Westerners: Andrei Tarkovsky (whose films Nostalghia and Stalker already grace the List of 366).  Several of the Tarkovsky pictures Mosfilm put up on YouTube (Andrei Rublev and Solaris) have already been taken down (we suspect at the request of the Criterion Collection).  The Mirror (1975), which tells a man’s life in a series of disconnected flashbacks, dreams and historical re-enactments, remains available.

FILMS OF WEIRD INTEREST

Assassin of the Tsar (1991, d. Karen Shakhnazarov) – Assassin was a co-production between Mosfilm and a British studio.  It stars Malcolm McDowell as a patient in an insane asylum who believes that he assassinated the Tsar in 1918.  McDowell spoke Russian for the production and later dubbed himself into English, which can be disconcerting. [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Viy (1967, d. Georgi Kropachyov & Konstantin Yershov) – Read our review.  Virtually the only Soviet horror movie, from a Nicolai Gogol story, with a witch flying on a coffin and a horde of demons at the end.  An excellent film.

Zero Town (1990, d. Karen Shakhnazarov) – An engineer is sent to a small provincial town where everyone seems to be crazy, even the nude secretary.   This looks pretty weird.  “Staring Leonid Filatov, a very good actor.”-IG.  [Watch on YouTube]

OTHER MOVIES

Alexander Nevsky (1938, d. Sergei Eisenstein) – Prince Nevsky turns back the invading Teutonic knights in this epic war classic.  Closed captioned (push the “CC” button for English translation).  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Ballad of a Soldier (1959, d. Grigori Chukhrai) – Romance set during WWII.  Ballad is highly regarded, but little known in the West.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

The Battleship Potemkin (1925, d. Sergei Eisenstein) – A classic of world cinema; other movies quote from Odessa steps massacre scene all the time.  Closed captioned (push the “CC” button for English translation).  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Full Moon (1998, d. Karen Shakhnazarov) – Movie about the “new Russians,” circa 1998. [Watch on YouTube]

Gentlemen of Fortune (1971, d. Aleksandr Seryj) – Mistaken identity comedy involving a stolen helmet belonging to Alexander the Great.   [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Occupations [AKA Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future] (1973, Leonid Gaidai) – Popular Soviet time travel comedy that involves an apartment manager swicthing places with Ivan the Terrible. Closed captioned (push the “CC” button for English translation).  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Jazzman (1984, d. Karen Shakhnazarov) – “A wonderful musical comedy on the origins of Soviet jazz.  Good actors and music.”–IG. [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Jewish Luck (1925, d. Alexis Granowsky) -  Silent comedy.  No music track included.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Jolly Fellows (1934, d. Grigori Alexandrov) – One of the first “talkie” musical comedies.  A shepherd is mistaken for a famous conductor.  [Watch on YouTube]

Mimino (1977, d. Georgi Daneliya) – Comic adventures of a rural helicopter pilot in Moscow.  “A wonderful comedy with a perfect cast.”–IG [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Poisons, or the World History of Poisoning (2001, d. Karen Shakhnazarov) – Comedy (?) about the title subject, with re-enactments of historical poisonings by the Borgias and others.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

A Railway Station for Two (1982, d. Eldar Riazanov) -  Comedy/drama/romance set in Siberia.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

A Rider Named Death (2004, d. Karen Shakhnazarov) – Historical drama about terrorists in pre-Soviet Russia.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Ruslan and Ludmilla (1976, d. Aleksandr Ptushko) – “A Fairy Tale after a poem by Alexander Pushkin.”–IG.  Special effects are dated by the sets and costumes are colorful.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch Part 1 on YouTube] [Watch Part 2 on YouTube]

Sadko (1953, d. Aleksandr Ptushko) – A Russian “Sinbad” seeks the Bluebird of Happiness.  You may have seen the dubbed version of this film (The Magic Voyage of Sinbad) spoofed on Mystery Science Theater 3000; here’s a chance to see at as originally intended, with the Rimsky-Korsakov classical score intact.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1968, d. Aleksandr Ptushko) – Another Pushkin fairy tale adaptation.  No information on the plot. [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Two Comrades Were Serving (1968, d. Yevgueny Karelov) – “A movie made to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Soviets rise to power.  Yet, the film is VERY GOOD! Romantic and tragic at a time with a very good cast. “-IG. [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

Volga-Volga (1938, d. Grigori Alexandrov) – Comedy.  [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

The White Sun of the Desert (1970, d. Vladimir Motyl) – Set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War, the story involves a soldier pressed into guarding a harem.  “A kind of the Soviet Western. Very good cast and music. We all love it!”–IG [IMDB Entry] [Watch on YouTube]

DIRECTED BY: Ilya Khrjanovsky

FEATURING: Marina Vovchenko, Yuri Laguta, Sergey Shnurov

PLOT: Three Moscow strangers meet at a bar and tell tall-tales, and then we follow what

happens to each of them after they leave.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s weird, indubitably. The problem with this cold, wandering drama is that very few viewers will have patience with its molasses pace and murky symbolism; it’s slow without being hypnotic, and mystifying without being mysterious.  It’s difficult to reject out-of-hand a film with high critical marks, excellent technique, and definite weirdness, but 4 seems too dry and directionless to resonate with many non-Russians.

COMMENTS: The shadow of Tarkovsky must still cast over the shoulder of every weird Russian filmmaker, just as the legacy of Lynch haunts their American counterparts.  The master’s influence can be seen throughout 4 in the lovely, leisurely treks through misty tundra; heard in the sound collages mixing mutated railroad clicks and hisses with synths and the baying of far off hounds; and felt in the appropriation of one of Tarkovsky’s favorite symbols, the dog.  The dogs who prowl the rubble of 4‘s Moscow streets and chew up villager’s livelihoods are not the loyal, mystical, otherworldly observers of Stalker and Nostalghia, however; they are remnants of social upheaval and agents of chaos.  With it’s Kafkaesque moments, portentous dialogues, mutant piglets and nightmare crones, incidents of Khrjanovsky’s feature debut conjure up a gloomy mystery that would have fit comfortably into a Tarkovsky film; but unlike its inspirations, it lacks much of a story, is missing an undercurrent of hope that cuts the despair, and has no emotional core.  The film likely reflects the mood of early capitalist Russia, circa 2005: ashamed of the past, already weary of the present, and fearful of the future.  Maybe the fact that the movie captures the latest iteration of Russian melancholy so perfectly is what makes it difficult to watch, and harder to love.  As the story begins we follow three contemporary Muscovites: a meat packer, a prostitute, and a musician.  They meet in a bar late at night and tell each other a series of escalating tall tales, ending with a claim by the meat packer that he has helped oversee Soviet cloning experiments, and that the clones walk among us.  After their  extremely long, attention-taxing dialogue which plays out over several cocktails, the threesome parts; we follow each of their separate stories—in theory.  In practice, the story of prostitute Marina Vovchenko returning to her boozy country village for a funeral takes up far more time than the others.  Vovchenko’s frequently nude body is stunning—a true miracle of nature—but the countryside is nightmarish.  The economy of the isolated village was built around the production of folksy dolls.  The townsfolk have a crude secret for giving their dolls a singularly realistic texture and appearance: the skin is made partly from half-masticated bread.  The dead woman was the only one in the hamlet who could fashion lifelike faces, and the entire fate of the village now seems to be in the hands of Marat, her bereaved spouse, who must figure out a way to revitalize the doll-based economy.  Other than the prostitute and three other beautiful busty females returning home for the funeral, he is the only young person in the village, and the only male.  The rest of the hamlet is made up of old crones whose only talent is chewing bread, and whose main interest is in drinking liters of vodka every night and acting like Hags Gone Wild, St. Petersburg edition.  They slobber, compare sagging breasts, engage in food fights, and make obscene pantomimes with the dolls, night after night.  Vovchenko seems trapped there, unable to leave, and there’s a nightmarish aspect to the nightly bacchanalia: it’s Gummo in the dacha.   In Russian iconography, old women are typically revered as the custodians of the culture, so to see them depicted this way suggests the filmmakers see Russia’s past as no more attractive than the cold, soulless present where stray dogs wander streets that are randomly pounded to rubble by giant pistons.  The funeral excursion is by far the most interesting of the segments (the other two involve an absurd interrogation and a melancholy home life).  But the extraordinary focus on the prostitute’s third of the tale makes the story feel strangely unbalanced—even sloppily planned—and as effectively bizarre as the drunken escapades are, they quickly become repetitive.  4 is worth a look for the patient and those who thrill to the pageantry of perverse geriatric peasantry, but it will probably resonate more to Russophiles (and Russophobes) than to the average viewer.

Look for items grouped in quartets—people, cars, round mutant piglets—which are scattered throughout the movies like clues (but clues to what?  One of the characters tells us that four is one of the few numbers with no numerological significance to any culture—though he’s wrong about that).  The script is by Russian cult novelist Vladimir Sorokin.  Ilya Khrjanovsky is the son of famous Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…seriously weird pic has a few flat stretches, but its bawdy comedy, bravura sound design and uncanny atmosphere will turn on auds with a taste for deeply oddball fare and baffle others.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (Venice Film Festival)

Below is a list of dozens of highly-rated movies that have been tagged with “surrealism” or similar keywords, broken down by country.  To my knowledge, none of these movies is currently available on DVD, and I suspect that several of them may never have been translated into English.  Any information on these titles by people who are familiar with them would be of enormous value to us in deciding whether or not we should invest time in trying to track them down.  So, my non-American friends, please have at it!  If you leave a comment with some information on any of these titles, I’ll update the body of the text to reflect it.  (Information supplied by readers is added in bold).

Argentinian

• Razón de mi vida, La (20??) [The Reason for My Life].  This showed up on the IMDB as a highly rated 2008 release a while back.  Now, the link goes to a movie of the same name, but it has no rating and is listed as a 2010 release.  OFFICIAL UPDATE: Per Kino Red: “completed in this month. Release soon (Buenos Aires, Paris and Tokyo). Trailer and teaser (in Spanish) in youtube: NOTE: The film is not based on the Eva Perón autobiography. The title of the film is ironic or parodic about the Eva Perón’s book.” I will add that the trailer looks very promising!
• Rosaura a las 10 (1958) [Rosaura at 10 o'clock].  Alon thinks it’s only borderline weird at best.

Brazilian

• Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) [God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun]  Per Alon: “interesting, beautifully filmed and edited, movie about the drama of the Brazilian dispossessed… but I wouldn’t consider it weird by any measure.”
• O Anjo Nasceu (1969) [The Angel Was Born]

Per Alon: “…seems to be famous for its unconventional camerawork and editing. The film tells the story of two murderers, one of whom has mystic visions, and was regarded as quite gory for its time.”

• Terra em Transe.  No English translation of the title.  Per Alon, Entranced Land or Land in Anguish. Has read it’s more “daring” than Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol by the same director.

Czech/Czechoslovakian

• Adéla jeste nevecerela (1978).  Per LRobHubbard: translates to Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet. From the director of Lemonade Joe (which we do plan to review).  “Spoofs the ‘Nick Carter’ detective stories, featuring Carter investigating strange disappearances, which involve a carnivorous plant, the ‘Adele’ of the title.”  No Region 1 release.  Worth seeing, but not necessarily weird.
• Akumulátor 1 (1994).
• Jak utopit doktora Mrácka aneb Konec vodniku v Cechách (1974) [How to Drown Dr. Mracek, the Lawyer]
• Kytice (2000) [Wild Flowers]
• Lepsie byt bohaty a zdravy ako chudobny a chory (1993) [It's Better to Be Wealthy and Healthy Than Poor and Ill]
• Nejasná zpráva o konci sveta (1997) [An Ambiguous Report About the End of the World]
• Nevesta (1970).
• Pane, vy jste vdova! (1970) [You Are a Widow, Sir]
• Postav dom, zasad strom (1980) [Build a House, Plant a Tree]
• Sedím na konári a je mi dobre (1989). No English translation of the title. Probably never translated into English.
• Tajemství hradu v Karpatech (1981) [The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians].  Per LRobHubbard: from the director of and similar to Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet (above) but a pastiche/parody. The idea may be from a story by Jules Verne.
• Tisícrocná vcela (1983) [The Millennial Bee]
• Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem (1977).  No English translation of the title.

French

• La Cicatrice intérieure (1972).  Written by and featuring glacial chanteuse Nico (best known here for her work with The Velvet Underground).
• La Dernière femme (1976) [The Last Woman].  Despite the presence of a young Gerard Depardieu, I am not sure this was ever translated into English for home video.  Controversial on release due to its sexual content.  Per Irene, not a weird film.

Greek

• Souvliste tous! Etsi tha paroume to kouradokastro (1981) [Barbecue them!].  A Greek correspondent tells me this is basically unknown even in Greece and no DVDs are available.  It is on Google video, with no English subtitles.

Italian

• Capricci (1969).  By Carmelo Bene.
• Don Giovanni (1970).  Also by Carmelo Bene.
• Fantozzi (1975) and Il Secondo tragico Fantozzi (1976).  These popular Italian comedies seem to have never been released in America.  I gather Fantozzi is something like the Italian Monsieur Hulot?
• La Rabbia (2008).  With Faye Dunaway and Franco Nero in the cast, I would assume this might see the light of day soon.

Indian

• Poi (2006).

Japanese

• Den-en ni shisu (1974) [Pastoral Hide and Seek]
• Tokyo senso sengo hiwa (1970) [He Died After the War]

Mexican

• Pafnucio Santo (1977).  Per Alon: “…seems promising… directed by Jodorowsky’s cinematographer… the trailer on YouTube is rather terse.”

Polish

• Ewa chce spac (1958).  No English translation of the title.  Per Irene Goncharova, “a mere comedy… I didn’t find it weird.”
• Jak daleko stad, jak blisko (1972) [How Far, How Near]
• Walkower (1965) [Walkover]. Per Irene Goncharova, “A Polish movie, just drama, nothing weird.”

Russian/Soviet

• Den vyborov (2007) [Election Day].  Per Irene Goranchova: “…absolute trash, a really BAD Russian movie. I sometimes laugh watching it. Bad, bad, bad! Nothing weird…”
• Posetitel muzeya (1989). [Visitor of a Museum]?
• Sobachye serdtse (1988). Literally, Heart of a Dog. Based on a Mikhail Bulgakov novel that was also adapted by the Italians into a film called Cuore di cane.  Produced for television?  Per Irene Goncharova: It was a television production, although there may also be another filmed version.  “…a good movie, quite weird.”
• Zhena kerosinshchika (1988) [Kerosene Salesman's Wife]?  Per Irene Goncharova: hasn’t seen it, but looks weird from the description.

Spanish

• Amanece, que no es poco (1989). No English translation of the title.  Per Alon, English translation may be Isn’t dawn enough? “…a masterpiece of surreal humour. You have a serious candidate for The List.”
• Don Juan Tenorio (1952).  Alon thinks it’s unlikely to be weird, mentions that its notoriety may come from the fact that Salvador Dalí served as the costume designer.

In the interest of thoroughness, we’re potentially saving a spot on the List for all these movies, so any help as to whether they are must-sees or duds will be greatly appreciated!

DIRECTED BY: Peter Bogdanovich (using the pseudonym Derek Thomas)

FEATURING: Mamie van Doren

PLOT: Three cosmo—I mean, astro-nauts—are sent to Venus to rescue two missing

comrades,while Venusian blondes in seashell bras pester them from afar by sending volcanoes, thunderstorms and dinosaurs to hinder them.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Prehistoric Women is a classic Frankenstein-film stitched together from various pieces of footage lying around the studio.  The movie made from dubbed footage from the Soviet space opera Planeta Bur, some effects from a second Soviet science fiction film, new voiceover narration which changes the focus of the original plot, and added scenes shot years later featuring English-speaking actors.  Not only is the discrepancy between film stocks, soundtracks and atmospheres disorienting, but the new footage of (top-billed) Mamie van Doren and other scantily clad, pterodactyl worshiping Venusian dames is itself bizarre.  This makes Prehistoric Women a worthy curiosity, if one for specialized tastes. Unfortunately, the movie is neither entertaining nor demented enough to merit inclusion among the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time.

COMMENTS: Though it was seriously intended, the original 1962 Soviet space opera that forms the bedrock stratum of Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women was not a great movie.  Looking at it from a post-Cold War perspective, the most valuable thing about it is the revelation that, despite petty ideologically differences, the US and the USSR were not so different as we supposed at the time: both societies assumed that nearby planets in our shared solar system would probably be inhabited by dinosaurs.  Technically speaking, the special effects are highly variable: the hovercar looks great, the giant tenatcled cosmonaut-eating Venus flytrap is not bad, the tin-can robot is standard Forbidden Planet surplus issue, and the men in dinosaur suits are as cheesy as anything you might see in a low-budget 1950s American sci-fi epic.  The color, which was tinted from the original black and white, is extremely washed out in surviving prints, a look that Corman and Bogdanovich managed to keep consistent for the new sequences; or, maybe, the passage of time did their work for them.  The muted colors add another layer of unreality to the film. Looking at the original Soviet film, you have to believe that Corman was onto something: what this movie really needed was a bunch of sunbathing, telepathic, pterodactyl-worshiping sirens in skintight pants and clamshell bras to liven things up.  The gratuitous mermaid babe sequences are the most memorable parts: every time the explorers face an environmental Venusian threat like a volcano or thunderstorm, it turns out the ladies’ pagan ceremonies were the cause.  Their siren scenes, which all take place on a single rocky beach, are accompanied by an eerie, wordless keening, and the fact that the prehistoric witches never speak except in voiceover does add a legitimately dreamlike feel to these sequences.  Prehistoric Women is slow (and incoherent) by contemporary standards, but the patient viewer seeking a cinematic experience that’s the equivalent of a fractured dream half-remembered after falling asleep on the couch at 2 A.M. while watching a sci-fi marathon on a UHF station will find this to be mildly rewarding.

This was the ever-frugal Corman’s second attempt to recycle footage from Planeta Bur.  In 1965 he released the same Russian footage, with different inserts, as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.  The earlier film featured a few scenes of top-billed star Basil Rathbone as a mission control type back on earth, barking extraneous orders to the stranded cosmonauts that were relayed to them through yet another unnecessary character.  Mamie and her buxom coven were a big upgrade over Basil, and not just in pulchritude; without the ridiculous Venusian siren subplot, Prehistoric Planet was a much duller experience, while remaining just as confusing.

Because Corman was too cheap to renew the copyrights on his 50s and 60s movies, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women fell into the public domain.  It can be found on many bargain-priced compilations or can be legally viewed or downloaded by anyone through the Internet Archive or other sites.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…[the] very peculiar ending… has a weird B movie pulp poetry to it.”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (DVD)

By Irina Goncharova, edited and additional material by Greg Smalley.  Original research and Russian translations by Irina Goncharova.

- What is your father’s occupation?

- My father writes poetry. That’s all he does. He is one of the greatest unknown poets of the world.

- And when does he get money?

– Never. It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it.

The quote above is an exchange from Rustam Khamdamov’s V gorakh moyo serdtse [My Heart’s in the Highlands] (1967).  When he was a third year student of the All-Union Institute for Cinematography (VGIK in Moscow, USSR) Khamdamov shot this movie that was called “the work of a master” and was included into the list of the best Soviet movies.  The movie swept the VGIK internal festivals. Although Khamdamov is mentioned in the credits only once, along with other students, everybody knew he was the one and only author of the movie—not just its director, but the one who wrote the original screenplay (after William Saroyan’s play), who wrote the absurd dialogue, who made all streamers and costumes with his own hands, who selected the best actors when doing the casting.  The response to the film was polarized and conflicting. The VGIK Communist Party Committee—just imagine, at that time the Communists decided destiny of everything and everyone in the country—introduced ideological censorship on the works of the VGIK students straight away.

Really, it’s not so easy to write for an American audience about a director such as Rustam Khamdamov.  I believe there are very few people in the USA who have ever heard his name, although it may be found by googling or searching the Internet Movie Database.  Still, this search would hardly clarify the situation.  The list of his movies is incredibly short, and practically each one has a very sad production history, but those critics who mention his name do so with much respect and even a kind of devotion, often calling him “legendary.”

What makes this director so legendary?

Rustam Khamdamov is of Uzbek descent and took his film production course from the renown Russian film director Grigori Chukhrai.^[1]  As mentioned above, his first movie was the student work (some critics say it was his graduate project) My Heart’s in the Highlands (1967), a short, approximately 30 minute black and white film. This was the first film where viewers saw the beautiful Elena Solovey, a future Soviet movie star.

Elena Solovey in Raba Lyubvi, 1975.

My Heart’s In The Highlands (1939), initially a play by William Saroyan, was a comedy about a young boy and his Armenian family.  Khamdamov used the play’s plot, but recycled it and made a poetic film, or better a non-narrative one, and did it so masterfully that Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Sergeo Paradjanov^[2], and Kira Muratova all praised him for it.  In Polina Barskova’s words, Khamdamov shows “qualities that may easily be called decadent: the obsessive aestheticization of all aspects of life, including the goriest; the eroticisation of the Other—the other space, the other epoch, the other sex; the eschatological quest for the ultimate, the final, the last in the series.” The Italian directors were so impressed by Khamdamov’s student work that they mentioned his name as if he was already one of their equals on the cinematic Olympus.  So did Andrei/Andron Konchalovsky^[3], in his book The Enlivening Deception (M., 1999).

Elena Solovey and Natalia Leble in a surviving still from Khamdamov’s Nechayannye radosti (1972).

What was so special about the film that brought its director from nowhere to the spotlight?

I think that for the American audience, Khamdamov’s films are one more example of the strangeness of the Russian cinema, and of European cinema in general (see 366weirdmovies’ review of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia), because they almost lack the action which is so attractive for American moviegoers.  Khamdamov’s movies are different.  One can hardly write a paragraph on the plot.  As a postmodernist—but a distinctly Russian, non-narrative postmodernist—Khamdamov freely adapts the plot of the Saroyan play. For Rustam Khamdamov what matters is not so much WHAT HAPPENS, but IN WHAT ENVIRONMENT and HOW he shows it.

The images that later became Khamdamov’s trademarks first appear in My Heart’s in the Highlands^[4]: the room cluttered with every sort of art object in every space, ladies stockings hanging over a balcony rail, the peculiar, elegant ladies hat with the white band and feathers, and always visions of women and the Feminine.  The short film begins with a man playing a piano in a silent movie style.  The piano and its player rolls down the street.  The camera follows several characters—a smiling prostitute, two young wealthy girls, some boys on a bicycle, a black woman carrying a basket of flowers—through both the rich and the poor streets of a town before finally finding its main characters, a boy and his father and grandmother.  The grandmother is a retired opera diva (or so she claims), and the father is a poet who has been writing a single poem for his entire life.  The family wishes to entertain a visitor, the actor/musician MacGregor, who they meet in the street, but they have no money for breakfast.

They send the boy to get food from a local grocer.  The shopkeeper has loaned them food on credit before and is reluctant to do so again.  The boy must scheme to melt his cold heart to get food for the party.

The owner asks the boy when his father will have money to pay for the food. It is at this moment the phrase “It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it” is spoken. The boy is not just shrewd, he is a philosopher.  He understands that his father will never get any money for his “great poem.”

It seems to me that the entire film was made just to pronounce these words: “It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it.”

The boy eventually gets some breakfast and returns to his family and their visitor.  The group feasts and gets a little bit drunk.  They tell stories, MacGregor plays a song on his trumpet, the old woman dances the can-can.  The camera pans around the home and shows art objects stuffed into every corner.  The scene dissolves, and suddenly we see another woman in a garden sitting in a rocking chair.  Then she disappears, leaving nature alone.  Then the movie returns to the prostitute, Rosa, learning to ride a bike in a vacant lot with the help of some boys.  The piano from the beginning of the film rolls by, this time with a young girl sitting at it, playing a duet with the original pianist.

It ends here, a poetic, nostalgic movie without any special plot or idea. And we ask ourselves: “Why, why it is so appealing, charming, even compelling?”  A. Konchalovsky asks similar questions in one of his interviews: “I will say more: the picture My Heart’s in the Highlands influenced me greatly―while making Dvoryanskoe gnezdo [A Nest of Gentry]^[5] I found myself under its spell. I watched the picture several times and each time I could not understand, why it impressed me so much, why it disturbs me, and I do not fear to ask, what is so special in it?” Later he goes back to this question, and comes to the conclusion: “It was very beautiful, though there was some mannerism in it… Alas, but My Heart’s in the Highlands happened to be [Khamdamov’s] only listed work.  Later, there was a sad story with the unfinished film Nechayannye radosti [Unintentional pleasures] (1972), which was recycled and reappeared as Raba Liubvi (1976) [A Slave of Love] by Nikita Mikhalkov.  And then goes one more sad story―with Anna Karamazoff, which nobody has ever seen but at Cannes. Where it is now?  It is amusing, that A Nest of Gentry was made influenced by Fellini and Khamdamov. A great classicist and a student of the VGIK!”^[6]

Rustam Khamdamov is first of all an artist. An artist who is fallen in love with life, once and for ever. For him life is the eternal Feminine, in the vast diversity of the female imagery, from a simple young prostitute Rosa who dreams to meet a man that will take her abroad, the young girls with the nurse, the black woman with the flower baskets, and the lady in the rocking chair in My Heart’s in the Highlands (1967) to the neglected opera divas of Vokaldy paralelder [Vocal Parallels] (2005).

As mentioned before, after the success of My Heart’s in the Highlands, Khamdamov made a movie based on the poetics of Russian silent film, Nechayannye radosti [Unintentional Pleasures] (1972).  It was unfinished due to some conflict between the director and the production managers.  Furthermore, the part of the film that was completed was banned. The managers of Mosfilm, the major movie production studio in the USSR, ordered the camera negatives destroyed in 1974. Twelve years later three and a half boxes of the work material were found. They were rescued by Ilya Minkavetsky, the project’s cameraman. What survives today is about 30 minutes of a rough cut and a dozen production stills. Meanwhile the screenplay was rewritten. Nikita Mikhalkov recycled the story, the costumes, and the main actress Elena Solovey, for his popular film A Slave of Love [Raba liubvi] (1975).  This was a new blow for Khamdamov.  He left Moscow.  For many years nobody in Moscow knew where he was or what was he doing.

It took Khamdamov about 16 years to recover from this blow, and in 1991 he completed his new film Anna Karamazoff, described by Mike Haberfelner as “less a narrative piece of film but a metaphoric and bizarre, even surreal journey through 1940′s Russia and beyond that makes its point through impressive images rather than a coherent story…”  Khamdamov cast the iconic actress Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim, 1962), as the female lead and inserted the remains of Unintentional Pleasures into this new film.  This caused another scandal and led to one more disaster for the director and his films.

At times, the saga of the production of Anna Karamazoff reads like a detective story.  Moreau and the producers had a falling out at Cannes, and Anna Karamazoff was never released to the general public; but even before that, a lot of strange and inexplicable things happened in the production.  The production quickly ran over budget, and foreign investment was sought to complete it.  The French producer Serge Siberman and the French firms Pairmedia and Victoria-Film-Production were brought in to help complete the film.  (As you might know, Serge Silberman was at that time one of the greatest international film producers. He worked with Becker and Kurosawa, and made five or six pictures with Buñuel.)  With Moreau on board, Silberman had high hopes for the film and wanted to exhibit it at the Cannes festival in 1991.

At this point things turned even stormier for the already troubled production.  Silberman requested cuts, particularly asking for the deletion of a dream sequence that Khamdamov thought essential.  He also requested adding a prologue explaining that Moreau was a prisoner returning from the Gulag.  Khamadamov made some cuts and resubmitted the film, only now with new added scenes.  Silberman was exasperated.  He  had promised to deliver the film to Cannes and it seemed like it would never be completed.  Eventually he gave Khamdamov a twelve day ultimatum to complete the editing, and flew the director to Paris.

In the meantime there were problems between the French and Russian producers.  Mosfilm had a right to keep the original negative, but Silberman convinced them to release it to him so he could have the print struck in Paris, arguing that the Russians would do a sloppy job.  Silberman arranged to have a new agreement signed on short notice at the airport as he was leaving for Paris.  Rumors circulated that he had secretly changed the terms of the contract at the last moment, to Mosfilm’s financial disadvantage.  Also, according to representatives of Mosfilm’s Krug studio, the folder with the production papers had mysteriously disappeared from the studio archives.  In the end it appears the film was exported from Russia without any legal authorization except the oral agreement of Mosfilm’s administrator, who seemed was happy to get rid of the crew, the film and the producer. The USSR was still in shock from what it saw as a tragic “divorce with its partners”, i.e. the former Soviet Republics.  Movie producers, along with many other industries, found themselves heading towards an abyss.  The negative was never returned to the Russians.

Meanwhile Khamdamov and his editor slaved day and night to edit the film in twelve days so it could premier at Cannes.  Khamdamov says that the polite requests Silberman made to make cuts in the film turned into rude demands once they arrived in Paris.  In the end, the two agreed to assemble two cuts of the film: Khamdamov’s long version, and the shorter edit Silberman preferred, which was to be shown at Cannes.

The film was highly anticipated, but Cannes turned into a disaster.  A few days before the festival was to begin, Khamdamov contacted the organizers and said that he would remove the film from competition unless his cut was screened instead of Silberman’s preferred version.  The French producer had no choice but to cave in to this ultimatum.

During the first screening, Khamadamov’s assistant went into the projection booth and placed his finger in front of the lens so that the explanatory captions Silberman had ordered added to the prologue could not be read.  This was scandalous, but it was nothing compared to what happened at the crucial press screening the next day.  The audience began walking out after ten minutes.  The main reason may have been the behavior of star Jeanne Moreau, who began to shout “merde! Merde! Merde!” as the screening went on.  She had not seen the director’s cut before, and was shocked to find that her starring role had been de-emphasized.  Khamadamov had made the unused black-and-white footage from his unfinished Unintentional Pleasures the centerpiece of the film.

After the fiasco at Cannes, Anna Karamazoff was never released to theaters, and to date has not been issued on home video. This make it essentially a lost and legendary film.

Why am I providing such a detailed account of the situation around this movie? Because in my view it explains much of Rustam Khamdamov’s behavior.  He appears to make something extraordinary, extraordinary films that for some reason (each time different) disappear and for practical purposes do not reach their audience. Any other person would be completely destroyed as a creative personality. But not Rustam Khamdamov.

After each new blow he disappears for several years, only to appear again like the legendary Phoenix.

On writing this last sentence, I am reminded of his latest movie, Vokaldy paralelder [Vocal Parallels] , which happily has reached its audience, but only after nine years of production due to numerous obstacles and stoppages. What is THIS film about?  Again, no definite plot, but a kind of a concert-film.  You most probably exclaim in astonishment, absolutely disappointed: What?! A concert?  Yes, it’s a surreal, impressionistic concert of classical opera pieces performed by several retired Soviet opera divas: Roza Dzhamanova, Araksiia Davtian, Bibigul’ Tulegenova, and the late Erik Salim-Meriuert (Kurmangaliev), a fantastic countertenor.

Erik Kurmangaliev in Vocal Parallels costume and makeup.

Those of you fascinated by or at least curious about this undoubtedly weird movie may read the short but very accurate review by Polina Barskova (University of California, Berkeley): “…shot in Kazakhstan, the land to which the film pays homage, with its snow-covered mountains; the language of the narrative; and the strange sensation of freedom, desolation, and spaciousness produced by the vacillating image of this ancient country… But it would be very wrong to say that Khamdamov’s film takes place in Kazakhstan or is about it! The space of Vocal Parallels is an imaginary locale of lost memories and ambitions….”

Kamdamov is no doubt one of most interesting and enticing personalities in Russian cinema, and was until recently absolutely underrated both at home and abroad. His style may be compared to Sergey Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates).

His movies are spectacular, striking, eye-catching, astonishing, and gorgeous, such that they may be described by one word: STUNNING.

Although neglected as a film director, there is no doubt Rustam Khamdamov is respected as an artist and painter.

Rustam Khamdamov’s watercolor “Nina”

In 1992 Rustam Khamdamov was granted the Jacques Chirac Grant by Paris City Hall as an outstanding contributor to world culture.  Until 1995 he lived in Paris, where he worked anonymously making designs for the haute couture houses of Milan, Paris and New York, worked as an artist, and designed jewelry for the American company Russian World Gallery. In 1997 he was awarded the prestigious Russian “Triumph” prize for his work as an artist, playwright, and film director. In 2003 Khamdamov was honored with the Russian Grand Prix as a national cultural hero (Academician Piotrovskiy, Director of the Hermitage Museum, was commission chairman).

In 2003 he became the first living Russian artist in history whose work was officially included in the Hermitage Contemporary Collection.  Artists, art theorists, art historians and international critics such as Francesco Pellizi, David Ross, Valeriy Turchin highly estimate Khamdamov’s aesthetics and his artistic style. His works are also included in the collections of the State Teriyakov Gallery (Russia), the Zimmerli Museum of Rutgers University (USA), the National Gallery of Ravenna (Italy), and numerous private collections all over the world.

In an essay on Rustam Khamdamov^[7], theater critic Inna Solovieva asks with bewilderment: “May a person gifted by the Creator be present in the world without turning anything in it into cash, without profiting by his gift (let the profit be the artistic one: a film or a book)?” Her question refers to Khamdamov’s absolutely non-commercial attitude to directing films.

“It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it,” Rustam Khamdamov replied, as early as his student years.

APPENDIX 1: COMPLETE PLOT SUMMARY OF THE SHORT FILM V GORAKH MOYO SERDSTE (1967) [MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS]

My Heart’s in the Highlands starts with piano music, played in a silent movie style.

Still from V gorakh moyo serdtse

We hear a female voice reading the credit: “Improvisation on William Saroyan’s short story ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands.’” We see a very old street car leaving the depot. The piano is just inside the yard of the depot, and the performer continues to play his simple melody. The street car driver drives his trolley past the performer.  And the movie starts.  We read the caption: “It is early morning in the town” and see how the city awakens: a lady leaves a beautiful building with a Russian wolfhound and meets another young lady with a similar dog. Then we see a pair who are most likely marine college students, a young man and a young girl dressed in special marine uniforms, he in the typical black jacket and white short pants, while she in a white blouse and black skirt. They wear white marine caps. The pair walks by the sea quay. They stop, and begin competing at throwing small stones. A homeless, elderly musician with a trumpet goes by, sits on the steps of the quay, and starts playing just few notes on his instrument, as if a herald announcing his arrival in the town.

Then we are on a new street and again see the same performer and his piano, but now there is a new character: a young girl, most likely a prostitute, in a 1920s style hat with a black and white feather boa. It looks like she is returning home in the morning in a very good mood. She appears from out of the morning mist and goes down an empty street of a rich residential area. She approaches the piano and sits at it, taking place of the performer, and starts playing.  She plays the same melody but in quite a different style and rhythm―in the can-can rhythm.  Two young girls, most likely sea port workers, also in marine uniform blouses with kerchiefs tied around their heads, ride their bicycles down the same street. A black woman in a black dress with a white collar and hat carries flower baskets down a clean street, most probably in a wealthy area.  She walks to the rhythm of the music, smiling wide and showing her beautiful white teeth.  The elderly musician in his long black overcoat and old hat walks down another street, carrying his trumpet under his armpit.  He looks very weary. We see an old woman beating the dust off of pillows and placing them on a rail of the balcony of a dilapidated building to dry.

Again Rosa, the prostitute, appears, still in good mood.  It looks like she is always in good mood, smiling, revealing her big teeth and horsy upper jaw.  She walks, also in the rhythm of the music, down a slope paved with old stones, and a person (it is hard to tell the sex, most likely a female) carrying a big box looks at her and curses.  A young boy dressed as a choirboy is hurrying to the church sermon.  The black woman with the flower baskets walks in a ragtime rhythm.  Two little girls walk out of a wealthy home with their nurse, wearing very big hats decorated with white bands and feathers. (Hats of this style appear in each and every one of Khamdamov’s movies; it’s a trademark of his). Later, in the finale, we will see the elder of the girls playing a piano duet with the main performer.

But soon Rosa, the musician and the two young women riding the bicycles arrive at the crossroads where three streets meet, Rosa coming from one direction, the musician coming from another, and the young bicyclists from the third.  One of the bicycle riders makes circles around Rosa, almost riding over her shoes. Then they all continue to go their own ways.

Soon we see Rosa, the musician, and a new character, a boy, on a narrow street with dilapidated residential houses. We see white bed linens and curtains hanging across the street to dry, and it is clear we are in the district where poor people live.  With all the white linen hanging across it, the street is reminiscent of an Italian city.

A bridge crosses the street from one decaying house to another, and on the bridge we see a strange couple.  She looks like an elderly female clown with weird makeup, dressed in a vintage dress. Later we learn that she was an opera singer who toured all over the world―according to her; it’s possible she only imagines herself to be a retired diva.  Her son is an elderly man who informs us he is presently writing a poem; it later appears that he writes this one poem for his entire life.  His mother presents him as “one of the greatest unknown poets of the world”.

The musician presents himself to the couple telling them that he is a great actor McGregor whose “heart is in the highlands;” at the moment he is thirsty and asks for a glass of water.  Rosa teases the boy, asking about his grandmother, but the couple on the bridge invite MacGregor to their home to share a meal with them.  But it comes out they have nothing for breakfast, nor any money to buy it. Thus, they send the boy to Mr. Kozak, the owner of a small grocery/pub who used to give them food on credit.  They tell the boy it is his job to get the food, and we understand he does everything so that his parent and grandparent will not starve.

The boy goes to the grocery and approaches Mr.Kozak, but is smart enough not to ask him straight away for some food, again on credit.  He begins “Hello Mr. Kozak. What would happen if you found yourself in China alone and without a penny in your pocket?”

But Kozak wants to get his money and replies quite curtly, “What do you need?  Have you brought money?”

But the boy knows what he needs. His goal is to get some food for the family and the guest.  So his reply is: “Money? We are talking about a man in China. How would you feel in China in such a situation?”

“But you’re not in China and neither is your dad. I will not give you anything on credit anymore.”

A question comes to one’s mind: how do these people survive?

At that moment a young and very beautiful girl, Mr. Kozak’s daughter (Elena Solovey) appears, cordially greeting the boy.  The proprietor’s attitude changes to the opposite, especially after the boy asks the owner how his “beautiful daughter” is doing after she disappears into an office behind some curtains. The father’s heart melts and he starts to pack food for the boy―a pound of cheese, two loaves of white bread, and a bottle of wine.

“What’s your father’s occupation?” asks a visitor to the pub who was sitting at the table and listening to the discussion.

“My father writes poetry.  That’s all he does. He is one of the greatest unknown poets of the world.”

The latest words make Mr.Kozak even more generous.  He opens the cupboard behind his back and adds two additional cans of food for “the greatest unknown poets of the world”.

“It’s impossible to be great and be paid for it,” is the answer the boy gives when the owner asks when the father is going to pay for the foodstuff. 

The boy returns home and the feast starts.  They are getting full and a little bit drunk, or better to say, more relaxed feeling free to say what they think. And each person says what he or she has dreamt to say aloud for a long time. They are in the company of equals―a hypothetical former opera diva, an actor-musician, and a poet.  But the paradox is that they are talking to themselves. The lady tells about her success in Morocco, Egypt, China, etc. while she was a young opera singer. She recollects her contracts and lovers, but his husband and the son tease her. At that moment her son (grandson?) climbs up on the chair tells MacGregor several times that she lies; he is tremendously happy to be, as he thinks, the focal point of the adults’ attention.  The poet says: “Oh, she is a great woman!” And we understand that she was his Muse.  But from his tone we feel that “only a great woman could be next to the great poet.”

The lady decides to go to her bedroom and to put on her old gown.  But she is too fat now to fit into it.  She even asks the boy to pull her corset tighter.  But alas!  She grew irreversibly fat.  She is upset and cries, lying down on her bed. But all of a sudden she gets up from her bed and starts dancing a can-can dance with the boy (being already appropriately dressed in the underwear of that epoch). Then she comes out to the dining room in her regular dress, keeping her wonderful old white gown in her hands as if evidence of her youth and beauty, and she starts dancing with the gown.

MacGregor, who has just stolen a piece of bread with meat and cheese to eat when he leaves the house, takes his trumpet and starts playing “a song of happiness”. The song is heard on the street, and the people walk out from their houses. Mr. Kozak and his daughter leave the pub to listen to the  melody that is performed by MacGregor, a melody “that makes hearts to tremble with sorrow and happiness,” as he says. He plays the same tune that has been heard during the entire film.

The camera pans around the room showing different objects: paintings of famous artists, some simpler paintings, sculptures, crystal wineglasses, books, shovels hanging from the ceiling, porcelain jars (some of them broken), a pair of lady’s stockings being dried on the balcony, a live white chicken on the balcony rails, etc., etc. (Actually, ladies stockings hanging and the balcony rails appear in practically all of Khamdamov’s films as a symbol of frailty, the feebleness of feminine beauty, and life in general—because beyond the rails lies the abyss.) The room is jam-packed with paintings and pictures hanging or simply leaning on the walls, antique furniture pieces, books, vases. In that artistic mess we perceive that the director is fascinated by the beauty of the world in all its forms, especially in the ‘fin de siecles’ aesthetic.

The decorations of the room are excessively aesthetic. There isn’t any empty wall or space. Such is the artistic language of the director, starting from his very first picture. We will observe the same in his other movies, such as Unintentional pleasures (1972).

All of a sudden we are taken to a garden where we see a lady sitting and rocking in a rocking chair. Water falls from an unknown source. The lady wears a beautiful hat, similar to the hats two little girls wore at the beginning of the movie, and similar to the one the old singer keeps in her bedroom. The rain stops, but the lady has disappeared from the garden. And we see the everlasting nature, the thick green garden (forest?) without any human presence, which again reminds us of the fragility of the human life irrespective of how beautiful it may be, and the undying nature of the world.

We now see Rosa, the prostitute, who is learning to ride the bicycle aided by a gang of little boys on the vacant land. Her first attempts look very comical.  Music is being played on a piano by the performer from the opening in a duet with a little girl in the typical Kamdamov-style hat, one of the girls from the rich house.  The piano goes down the city street while Rosa rides her bicycle accompanied by the boys… and the film ends.

Mr. Kozak and his beautiful daughter at the door of the pub listening to the music performed by MacGregor.

APPENDIX 2: SELECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF INTERVIEWS REGARDING THE PRODUCTION OF ANNA KARAMAZOFF (ORIGNIALLY PUBLISHED IN “Сеанс” №9: SEE  http://seance.ru/n/9/rustam-hamdamov/rustam-hamdamov FOR COMPLETE RUSSIAN TEXT)

Sergey Solovyev (film director, and art director of the Krug studio): I found Rustam in 1986, when Krug was established…. I said to him: “Make what you want.”  Soon he proposed the scenario of the opera movie “The Snow Maiden.” I told him: “OK, write a screenplay.” His response was: “What screenplay? Everything is clear.”  Three months later he declared that it was not “The Snow Maiden” he wanted to make but an entirely different scenario, and “it cannot be put short.” I asked him how much money would it cost, but Khamdamov did not know. We allocated about three million rubles. Then money was not any problem for the studio.

Lilia Ogienko, actress: It was so unexpected, like in some fairy tale…. Solovyev invites him to the Krug Association. He writes a screenplay, friends translate it into French.Somehow the screenplay gets into Jeanne Moreau’s hands. It’s not Khamdamov who selected her, but she who selected him. She reads the screenplay, sees his drawings, arrives in Russia, and they begin work.

…For Rustam everything is hard after sixteen years of complete neglect…everything is extremely hard and sometimes even unbearable―the need to have real, actual relations with the people… his inability to tolerate, his incapacity to bridge the gap between the desired and the real, the concept and its physical realization; and an absolute lack of understanding the money problems… And yes, a great actress, but a foreigner in the lead role, and there is no harmony between her and the mise en scene… he undoubtedly understands all this, he is man of a rare intelligence, but he is nervous. And all this continues ad infinitum, it lasts for long, too long…

Despite all the difficulties, he continues to work under conditions Western directors cannot imagine. However, no one can stop the collapse.  The situation continues to aggravate. Every day the production costs increase, and Mosfilm cannot afford it anymore. All of a sudden some western firms appear that are ready to help finance the completion of the project. They become the saviors of “Anna Karamazoff.”

Lyubov Arkus, journalist: On March 18, 1991 the Krug Association of Mosfilm studios signed an agreement of partnership in the Anna Karamazoff production. The agreement was signed by the representatives of Mosfilm and the Director of Parimedia, Mr. Mark Ruscar.,, The Agreement began March 28, 1991, after the initial sum was agreed.  According to this Agreement, Mosmedia, a French-Soviet joint venture, represented the interests of the Soviet Union and took upon itself rights and responsibilities of Mosfilm, which had been outline in a previous contract with the firm Victoria-Film-Production. In my view, from this point on the situation becomes confusing and ambiguous…

Sergey Solovyev: After the initial budget was exceeded, the financial situation of the production was extremely complicated and the production approached catastrophe. At that moment appeared a gentleman with a cigar from the Mir Theatre (Mark Ruscar) and the famous French producer Serge Silberman.

Mark Ruscar: Silberman arrived at Jeanne Moreau’s request.  He was her friend. He watched the unfinished film, and liked it. It ran about two hours and thirty minutes. Silberman talked to the director and the crew, and they agreed to cut it shorter.  Silberman had already decided to show the picture in Cannes. He flew off to Paris, returned in a week and watched it for the second time.  Silberman did not understand and was irritated: the director made some cuts, but at the same time added more material which was not in the previous version.

Inna Brozhovskaya (editor):  He [Khamdamov] called me and said that it is necessary to finish the picture in 12 days… We worked until two-three A.M. without days-off. We had an electric teapot… Once I saw Rustam sitting in front of the teapot, which had fogged up his glasses.  He said: “Inna, I think I’m blind from the fatigue.”

Sergey Solovyev: The French predicted success at the Festival and called for us to complete the picture as soon as possible, as soon as possible. I hoped these people would make Rustam finish it. I understood that there is no limit to his shamanic tricks with the film, but he did not know how to stop himself. I hoped that the people, as tough strangers, would be able to persuade him.

Lyubov Arkus:  Earlier negotiations had been held in Moscow on April 28, 1991 between Mr. Dostal’, the managing director of Russia’s Mosfilm, with Silberman and Ruscar representing the French. They merely discussed technical issues about the handing over of the original negative by the Mosfilm laboratory to the French part without the preliminary production of the intermediate positive and second negative. The management of Mosfilm yielded to Silberman’s request and agreed to hand over the negative. This violated a contract term regarding the unconditional retention of the original by Mosfilm, the production studio.

Mark Ruscar: Silberman turned directly to Dostal’, the Mosfilm administrator, and told him that it was necessary to take special measures for the picture be completed in time.
- Did Khamdamov share the desire of the producers to exhibit the film at the Cannes Festival?  – asks the interviewer

It was impossible to understand what Khamdamov wanted. He gave impression that he was indifferent to the future of the picture, provided they did not interfere with him and he could proceed editing the film…. Mr. Silberman makes the following proposal to Dostal’. He invests additional 1 million francs and takes all the materials to Paris.  They take Khamdamov, his assistant and the editor as well.  A standard print is printed in Paris.

Sergey Solovyev:  Silberman insisted the copy be printed in Paris, arguing Moscow would make it carelessly. He requested the negative, promising to return it to the studio as soon as the copies are made… Dostal’, who never trusted anyone under any circumstances, bit and signed the release, accepting Silberman’s word of honor.  It was late April, and the Festival was to begin May 9.

Lyubov Arkus: On April 29, 1991 in the Sheremet’yevo Airport, Mosfilm offered Silberman the previously approved contract to sign. There is a theory that Silberman had changed the text, already signed by Mr. Dostal’, changing the terms of the contract and affecting the future income of Mosfilm… According to the same account, Moscow customs had a copy of Silberman’s written obligation to return the exported items back to Russia within three months.

Rustam Khamdamov: While in Moscow, Mr. Silberman asked me to cut an entire dream sequence from my film Anna Karamazoff, a piece that had been included in my 1974 material and saved by my cameraman, Ilya Minkavetsky.  Mr. Silberman was aware of the fact that I believed the omission of this most important scene would make the film less understandable. I respect him, but it seemed to me that such anti-artistic proposal on his part could not be intentional. Most likely, he took this decision impulsively. Leaving for Paris, I was convinced that we would be able to find common language. Moreover, when we were in Moscow, it was just a proposal, but not an order. In Paris the situation became tougher. Mr. Silberman demanded I cutting out dream sequence, no matter what. I refused to comply with his requirements. He forbade me to approach Éclair factory and standardized the copy himself.

Mark Ruscar: In Paris, Silberman and Khamdamov could never come to an understanding regarding the editing. As a compromise, they decided to make two versions of the film: one long and another short.  Silberman was sure that the short version would be shown at the Festival… Then, a standoff happened, like in a Western. On the eve of the screening we learned that Khamdamov had talked to Jil Jacob, the director of the Festival, and declared his intention to remove the picture from competition if the short version was shown. Negotiations began an hour before the film was to be screened. Silberman didn’t have any way out and agreed…

There are usually three screenings for a picture in competition: the first on the eve of the main day, then a second in the morning – for the press, and in the evening – the main showing. There is a ridiculous anecdote from the first screening. At the last moment Silberman had ordered that at the beginning of film there should be a caption explaining to the viewers that Jeanne Moreau’s character is a woman who had just returned from a Gulag camp to her native city. We considered that without this caption it would be impossible for the audience to guess what was the movie about. When Russians learned about this caption Khamdamov’s assistant went to the projection booth and shut the projector with his finger so that the caption could not be read. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Cannes Festival. The next day the picture suffered a disastrous fiasco.

Rustam Khamdamov: During the screening a whistle was heard in the hall, and after 10 minutes spectators started leaving. Those who stayed to the end applauded fervently. But even the applause was a symptom of the total crash, for it was the applause of solidarity of those who go against the established view… The public opinion … had been already formed. However, I hardly remember this screening because of Jeanne Moreau’s behavior.  As soon as the black and white film started, she, who had been my devoted friend immediately turned into my merciless enemy. She yelled and demanded to stop the showing. I was scared something bad might happen to her.

Inna Brozhovskaya: Ms. Moreau shouted: “Merde, merde, merde!” and stomped her feet. I understand why she was so infuriated.  It was to be her film, but all of a sudden the black-and-white footage from Unintentional Pleasures turned out to be the centerpiece. Really this piece and its expansion were always more important for Rustam.  Jean Moreau had not seen the director’s final cut…

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

ENDNOTES

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Chukhrai, best known in the West for such his movies as Sorok pervyy (1956) [The Forty-first] and Ballada o soldate (1959) [Ballad of a Soldier].
2. Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964) [Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors], Sayat Nova (1968) [Color of Pomegranates], Arabeskebi Pirosmanis temaze (1985) [Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme, Ashug-Karibi (1988), etc.
3. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0464846. Konchalovsky (as Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky) later wrote the script for Khamdamov’s never-completed Nechayannye radosti (1972).  He wrote the same scenario again for Nikita Mikhalkov’s Raba lyubvi (1976) [A Slave of Love], a kind of remake of the earlier unfinished film.
4. A complete shot-by-shot plot synopsis of this movie appears as Appendix A to this article.
5. Konchalovsky invited Khamdamov to be a designer for A Nest of Gentry.
6. Andron Konchalovsky, “The Enlivening Deception” (1999).
7. Magazine “Сеанс” №9, http://seance.ru/n/9/rustam-hamdamov/rustam-hamdamov

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Alisa Freindlich

PLOT:  A mysterious phenomenon known as the Zone arises in a small, unnamed country.  The military sent soldiers in and the troops never returned; they cordon off the Zone with barbed wire and armed guards, but rumors persist within the populace that inside the Zone is a room that will grant the innermost wish of anyone who enters it.  A Stalker, a man capable of evading both the police and the traps formed by the Zone itself, leads a writer and a scientist into the Zone in search of the mystical room.

BACKGROUND:

• For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
• Stalker is very loosely based on a science fiction novel with a title translating to “Roadside Picnic” written by two brothers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
• After shooting the outdoor scenes for over a year on an experimental film stock, the entire footage was lost when the film laboratory improperly developed the negatives.  All the scenes had to be re-shot using a different Director of Photography.  Tarkovsky and Georgy Rerberg, the first cinematographer, had feuded on the set, and Rerberg deserted the project after the disaster with the negatives.
• Tarkovsky, his wife and assistant director Larisa, and another crew member all died of lung cancer.  Vladimir Sharun, who worked in the sound department, believed that the deaths were related to toxic waste the crew breathed in while filming downstream from a chemical plant.  He reported that the river was filled with a floating white foam that also floated through the air and gave several crew members allergic reactions.  A shot of the floating foam, which looks like snow falling in spring or summer, can be seen in the film.
• The Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened seven years after the film was released.  The quarantined area around the disaster site is sometimes referred to by locals as “The Zone,” and guides who illegally and unwisely take tourists there as “Stalkers.”
• A popular Russian video game named “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” involves the player penetrating a “Zone” and evokes a similar visual sense as the movie.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Like most of Tarkovsky’s works, Stalker is a movie full of awe-inspiring visual poetry and splendor, making it hard to pick a single sequence.  One key scene that stands out is Stalker’s dream.  The film stock changes from color to sepia—but a very warm brown, almost golden—as the camera pans over a crystal clear stream.  A female voice whispers an apocalyptic verse and the mystical electronic flute theme plays as the camera roams over various objects lying under the water: abstract rock formations, tiles, springs, gears, a mirror clearly reflecting upside down trees, a gun, an Orthodox icon, a fishbowl with goldfish swimming in it.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Stalker is an ambiguous, but despairing, existential parable

Scene from Stalker

containing narrative non-sequiturs wrapped inside of strange and gorgeous visuals.

COMMENTS: It’s not fair to the potential viewer unfamiliar with Tarkovsky to start a review of one of his films without the following caveat: this movie isn’t for everyone.  Most people find this director’s extreme, deliberate slowness hard to digest.  There a relatively static, dialogue-free shots in Stalker that run for four minutes or more—a lot of shots like that, in fact, in a movie that runs for almost three hours.  Add to this obstacle the additional hurdle that Tarkovsky movies are obscure and difficult to comprehend: there are lots of shots that are obvious symbols (dogs, flowing water) but which appear to add up to nothing, and snatches of poetry and philosophical ramblings that seem like they must be profound but are impossible to decipher within the context of the story.  If the foregoing isn’t enough to turn you off, Tarkovsky movies are also oppressively doom-laden, full of dour Russian men with craggy faces who are slowly devoured from inside their guts by malaise.  A smile in a Tarkovsky film is almost as rare as a four syllable word in a Michael Bay production.

If you haven’t been scared off yet—if the style sounds tolerable, or even intriguing—then step into Tarkovsky’s strange world and be prepared to glimpse miracles.  If you are at the proper wavelength, Tarkovsky will cast a hypnotic spell on you like no other director.  The Russian is every bit the equal of Stanley Kubrick as a visual stylist.  Stalker contains awe-inspiring images: the sepia-lensed scenes that begin the film, set in the drab urban world, are like vintage photographs that transform poverty and squalor into beauty.  The lighting in these sequences is set to blaring, increasing contrast and bringing out light tones so that the characters glow with an unearthly light.  Tarkovsky provides unexpected textures to fill in the backgrounds: the wooden walls of the houses and barrooms are abstract and unnatural, the gray rock walls of the Zone are geometric and fractured, and at one point a rolling prairie turns liquid and wavy like a gently undulating lake.  Stalker contains many of the director’s trademark pans, slow reveals, and tracking shots, including the one in Stalker’s dream where the camera travels over a path of submerged symbols.  In some scenes, the lighting will shift slowly and almost subliminally, from grey to lava orange and back, in ways that could never happen in nature.  The constant photographic invention and trickery makes Tarkovsky a filmmaker’s filmmaker, one whom those with great visual ambition study carefully.

In Stalker, Tarkovsky adds sonic artfulness to his visual mastery.  The recurring theme from Stalker is an ahead-of-its-time mix of what we would today call “world music” and electronically altered instruments.  Tarkovsky wanted a composition that sounded like a blend of Eastern and Western music, and the melody that flows from this desire is played on a Western flute accompanied by an Armenian string instrument called the tar, with the sound of both instruments modulated by a synthesizer.  The resulting piece is strange, complex, and mystical, and creates an otherworldly atmosphere.  Although the mix of wandering Oriental melodies and synthesizers is a relatively common way to achieve a “spiritual” ambiance today, it’s worth reflecting that, in 1979, there was nothing in the world that sounded quite like this.  The musical experimentation did not end with the theme.  As the three men ride into the Zone, the clickity-clack of the train wheels on the track is slowed down and electronically altered so that each revolution of the wheel sounds like an alien drumbeat, a truly weird effect that creates a sense of foreboding an proclaims that the  journey is not to an exotic land, but rather deep inside the soul.  Add to this a quiet sound design that makes careful use of ambient echoes and splashes of water in the abandoned, quarry-like rooms of the Zone, as well as long periods of carefully orchestrated silence, and you have a sonic environment that is the auditory equivalent of the unique visual world Tarkovsky creates.  Together, the curious aural and visual worlds of Stalker combine with its unexpected narrative to create a singular, and unnerving, movie universe.

As for the story, the journey into and through the Zone provides a structure for the film, but Tarkovsky’s method constantly frustrates our expectations.  In the end the film is much more about the characters than about the events that occur to them.  Although we are told by Stalker that the Zone protects itself by constantly shifting its layout and creating traps, in the end each of the three men spends more time struggling with his companions (and even more effort wrestling with himself) than they do fighting their way through the perils of the Zone.  At the outset of the journey, there is almost the sense that this will be Tarkovsky’s action movie, as the three men sneak past armed guards and even encounter gunfire.  But the action shifts to a lower gear quickly.  We are told that the Zone is dangerous and full of traps, and Stalker insists that the men never forge ahead unless he has first thrown a nut with a bandage tied to it onto the path to assure himself there are no traps, but we never see any real evidence of mortal danger from the sentient Zone.  Instead, all the conflict comes from the men themselves.  The man known only as Writer and the man known only as Scientist squabble incessantly, with Writer usually getting the upper hand.  The two men come to distrust Stalker, and disobey his orders, without consequences.  They sweat and tremble as they consider the possibility that a diabolical snare may lie behind the next door, but when the Zone finally springs its trap on them, it is purely psychological in nature: the existential trap causes Writer to deliver the sort of despairing monologue that he had been freely offering up throughout the journey anyway, without prodding from mystical forces.  When, after some logic-defying occurrences such as the appearance of a ringing telephone (a wrong number, as it turns out), the men finally reach the antechamber of the room of wishes, the goal they have risked their lives for eludes them.  For different reasons, each man is afraid or unwilling to enter the room.  So, they sit there, on the cusp of having their ultimate dreams fulfilled, then turn back.  The film ends with an entirely unexpected, ambiguous denouement, where an unexplained miracle of uncertain significance may, or may not, occur.

Writer obviously represents right-brain intuition, and Scientist left-brain logic.  Writer is consumed by self-doubt, half-convinced that his talent is an illusion, that he is not a great genius and that his words will not live on past him.  Scientist is more inscrutable, but it turns out in the end that his character has an important twist to provide the story.  It’s Stalker himself who most engages our interest.  Although he serves as the other men’s guide, as the journey progresses it is revealed that he is just as flawed, afraid and tormented as the others.  There are intriguing suggestions that he is a Christ-like figure, one that the other two men defy and refuse to put their faith in, and that he suffers psychically from his failure to lead his charges to happiness—or to whatever exactly it is that the room will bring them.

Stalker is a movie which is built out of loose ends.  Each of the three men sets out to complete a quest, but chicken out when the time comes for action, and end the story exactly where they began.  Conspicuously highlighted symbols cascade through the movie, but never reveal their significance: water, trains, the dog that follows Stalker throughout the Zone, not to mention the long, random parade of submerged images Stalker envisions while he dreams of Biblical apocalypse.  No rational explanation is ever offered for the origin of the Zone itself, and the existence of the possibly mythical room of wishes.  The men philosophize and poetize about the meaning of life throughout the film, but never come to any firm conclusions.  Their various speculations, considered together, demonstrate no consistency or intellectual rigor or add up to a thesis.  Some might consider this overweening pretentiousness—filling the frame with half-explored ideas in order to suggest a profound meaning that the director is incapable of delivering.  Others may find it humble, an accurate and honest realization by the artist that he is smart enough to recognize the big questions of life and the human soul, but not omnipotent so as to answer them.  Stalker remains a fascinating, and frustrating, mystery, if we are capable of seeing it; but it bores us if we are firmly lodged in an age where our homes no longer have house-spirits, or our churches Gods.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s certainly not necessary to construct an Oz or an E.T. in the service of every film fantasy. On the other hand, the fact that film is a visual medium cannot entirely be ignored.  ‘Stalker’ offers the eye so little that it might well have made a better novel, or short story, than a nearly three-hour-long film.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Weird, imagist allegory of the perils of intellectualism in Russia.”–The Guardian (DVD)

“… something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that’s simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Stalker (1979)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Stalker at nostalghia.com: The Stalker page at the ultimate Tarkovsky site (more of an academic resource than a fan site) features several interviews with the crew of Stalker and with Tarkovsky himself

Is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker about the gulags? Chernobyl? EU immigration?: Reflections on the possible meanings of the film by novelist Geoff Dyer

DVD INFO: The 2-disc release by Kino (buy) contains the movie, not remastered and presented in full screen. There is an option to hear the dialogue overdubbed by a single actor in either English or French; this is an odd choice, and one that I can’t imagine many people would be interested in taking advantage of. Disc 2 contains interviews with the composer, cameraman, and production designer about their roles in the film’s production and memories of Tarkovsky. It also contains excerpts from Tarkovsky’s film school graduation project and some footage of Tarkovsky’s ruined childhood home.

The Kino release, although almost identical in content, supersedes the the Ruscico DVD, which was poorly received by many Tarkovsky fans because of the decision to replace Tarkovsky’s mono soundtrack with newly created Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio. In creating the new soundtrack, some of the music was altered and some ambient sound effects were added where the director had chosen to place only silence.  The Kino release offers the option of listening to either soundtrack.