Tag Archives: Soviet

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZEROGRAD (1989)

Gorod Zero, AKA Zero Town; City Zero

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DIRECTED BY: Karen Shakhnazarov

FEATURING: Leonid Filatov, Vladimir Menshov, Aleksey Zharkov

PLOT: An engineer travels from Moscow to a tiny industrial town where he finds all the residents utterly bizarre, but is ordered to remain when he witnesses a suicide.

Still from ZEROGRAD (1989)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: In this ambiguous satire from the final days of the Soviet Union, engineer Varakin finds himself trapped in the purgatorial Zerograd, a not-so-wonderful Wonderland of nude secretaries, suicidal chefs, and rock n’ roll dance enthusiasts. Zerograd can be enjoyed as a weird crawl through an enclave of eccentrics, but it’s also a major historical artifact documenting the dour mood as the Soviet system tottered on the brink of collapse. The Russian identity crisis explored here continues to trouble the world to this day.

COMMENTS: Varasky enters the nowheresville of Zerograd hoping to lodge a simple request to resize panels in air conditioners manufactured in this backwater town. This routine assignment turns out to be a never-ending low-key ordeal when he becomes witness to a suicide (or is it a murder?), which the officials view as a matter of great importance to the State. Varasky’s first hint that something’s not quite right in town comes when he finds the factory’s receptionist typing and watering plants in the nude, a fact her preoccupied boss doesn’t even notice. That’s odd, and having hopefully sorted out the air-conditioner issue in a day, Varasky’s eager to leave town. But, at dinner that night, the cook insists on serving him a desert that he has repeatedly refused to order. It’s a lovingly-crafted cake—perfectly made in the shape of Varasky’s own head. When Varasky refuses to try even a bite, the chef shoots himself. And then Varasky’s troubles begin…

Zerograd funnels Varasky through a series of absurd situations, all of which the engineer accepts with a formal protest followed by a deadpan look of resignation as he realizes it’s pointless to try to swim against the tide of the town’s insanity. Among the adventures the hapless visitor endures are a trip to the town’s subterranean history museum, where elaborate dioramas of uncannily lifelike wax figurines demonstrate moments from history that absolutely did not happen: artifacts from Trojans, Romans and Huns all improbably found in Zerograd. On the wall, a poster proclaims “The Source of Our Strength Lies in Historic Truths.” The malleability of truth to fit the State’s official position becomes one of Zerograd‘s big themes: Varasky’s personal history even seems to be rewritten to connect him to the town. He finds himself unable to leave: trains go into Zerograd, but they don’t go out. And besides, the town’s authorities have more questions for him to answer. He seems doomed to take up a permanent exile in Zerograd.

Zerograd emanates from the Soviet Union’s brief Glasnost period of 1986-1991, when filmmakers and other artists had an unprecedented (if not complete) freedom to follow their muses without fear of reprisal. That promise of freedom notwithstanding, Zerograd is still loathe to criticize the Soviet system directly: instead of savaging its conformity, bureaucracy  and rewriting of history, it attacks its targets obliquely, cloaking criticisms in obscure, absurdist jokes. Simultaneously, Zerograd expresses anxiety about encroaching Westernization, symbolized by the ridiculous rock ‘n roll dancing fever sweeping the town’s citizenry, which may be as crazy as the enforced propriety of the old order. A crucial speech by a Communist official at the film’s midpoint describes the difference between the Russian spirit and Western capitalism: the “irrational” willingness of Soviet citizens to subsume their personal interests for something greater than themselves, versus what he views as Europe’s “pragmatic” every-man-for-himself ethos. Despite Varasky’s travails at the hands of the bureaucracy, the official’s plea has some appeal, and the analysis of the Soviet dilemma emerges as ambiguous. Zerograd is a portrait of a society at a crossroads: ready to abandon the past, but unsure of what the future might bring. The film ends with Varakin in an oarless rowboat, floating away in no particular direction; his chance of escaping this limbo and returning to the humble-but-familiar comforts of the Moscow he left behind are laughably remote.

Zerograd had not previously been available on home video in the U.S. Deaf Crocodile comes to the rescue with a Blu-ray release from a restored print from Mosfilm, containing a new interview with director/co-writer Karen Shakhnazarov and a commentary track from film historian Samm Deighan. The disc is available directly from partner Vinegar Syndrome starting today (October 25); it lands with other retailers on November 29.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Nothing makes sense for Varakin here — or, unfortunately, for us. We’re baffled but not interested. Possibly, this is because the director’s sense of the surreal is so obvious and commonplace.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

CAPSULE: THE RED AND THE WHITE (1967)

Csillagosok, Katonák

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DIRECTED BY: Miklós Jancsó

FEATURING: Krystyna Mikolajewska, József Madaras

PLOT: During the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), the Reds and the Whites battle over a monastery on the banks of the Volga that keeps switching hands.

Still from The Red and the White (1967)

COMMENTS: The Red and the White begins with a regiment of horsemen, sabres and rifles raised, charging in slow-motion directly at the camera as a martial trumpet fanfare plays. This stirring sight creates an expectation of an epic about proud Hungarian volunteers coming to the aid of their Soviet brothers against the meddling, foreign-sponsored counter-revolutionary Whites. And that was, indeed, the propagandistic picture producers envisioned for this Soviet-Hungarian co-production, commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. But Miklós Jancsó instead delivered a virulent anti-war/anti-authority classic, with only the slightest ironic hints of patriotic sentiment. (Some accounts say the completed film was screened in Russia only in a severely edited form, while others report it was banned outright).

It’s hard to tell who is who in The Red and the White. The Whites’ officers have more elaborate uniforms festooned with medals and insignia, but that’s about it for distinguishing the two sides. Perhaps contemporary audiences were able to identify the rivals more easily, but there’s every reason to think that the lack of clarity is entirely intentional, and contemporary confusion only heightens the effect. The movie is told as a series of vignettes, which play out to an individual climax but then follow a new character into the next story (five years before The Phantom of Liberty). Sometimes, characters will return in later episodes, giving the movie a mild sense of narrative continuity, but the general effect is to immerse the viewer into the fog of war. Time often seems to expand within a single scene, and fortunes reverse in an instant: a Red officer goes to investigate why his sentry isn’t responding and is suddenly ambushed, and when the camera circles back the Whites now control the territory. The narrative style and lack of characterization is disorienting, but forces us to identify more with groups than individuals. Soldiers on both sides spend more time bullying civilians and prisoners of war than they do fighting each other. (At one point, POWs are set loose to play a round of “The Most Dangerous Game“). Jancsó particularly loves scenes where the ascendant side forces their captives to strip as a way of asserting dominance. (Although we see nothing, rape is suggested as an inevitable offscreen event.) Due to the lack of an identifiable protagonist, our sympathies are drawn to the innocent pawns in these power games as a group: local farmers, a band of nurses who tend the injured of either side, and the poor conscripts and Hungarian volunteers, who are constantly being captured and liberated in an endless reshuffling of pieces. The Reds play the same cards as the Whites, and Jancsó’s vision conveys an implicit message of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” that could not have been pleasing to Soviet authorities.

The scenarios are repetitive in their cruelty, but purposefully so.  Jancsó invests each anecdote with its own level of suspense (captives are arbitrarily toyed with and freed or toyed with and executed, so you can never be sure who will live and who will die). Occasionally the adventures travel into the absurd, as when one group of interrogees are led into a white birch forest to perform a waltz accompanied by a military band. The rest of the time, the audience enjoys the spectacular long tracking shots that brought Jancsó renown. The flowing camera reinforces the sense of constantly changing front lines on a battlefield where an individual soldier never knows what is happening meters away: one man is executed on the banks of the Volga, while we can see his comrade hiding nearby in the reeds. One battle sequence has the outnumbered Reds singing “The Internationale” before charging a superior White position, only to be mowed down. It’s a maneuver only slightly more effective than lining up against a wall to be shot, but it’s the type of scene that could be sold to the Soviet backers as a portrait of heroic sacrifice. In full context, however, it’s just another example of how the common man finds himself cast into a no-win situation in service to one camp or another of brutes more united by sadism than divided by ideology.

In 2022, Kino Classics re-released its Jancsó catalog on Blu-ray for the first time. The Miklós Jancsó Collection includes The Round-Up, The Red and the White, The Confrontation, Winter Wind, Red Psalm, and Electra My Love, along with a host of supplements and short films. About half of those had never been released on home video in North America, or were hard to find. If you just want the essential Jancsó, they released his two most popular films, The Round-Up and The Red and the White, in a separate 2-disc package, with the seven short films also included. Kino restored all six films in 4K for these releases.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

‘…both masterful and absurdist, using cutting-edge cinematic techniques to show the chaos and pointlessness of war.”–Christopher Lloyd, Film Yap (Blu-ray)

19*. MIRROR (1975)

Zerkalo

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“For Proust the concept of time is more important than time itself. For Russians that’s not an issue. We Russians have to plead our case against time. With authors who wrote prose based on childhood memories, like Tolstoy, Garshin, and many others, it’s always an attempt to atone for the past, always a form of repentance.” –Andrei Tarkovsky

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Filipp Yankovskiy, voices of Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy and Arseny Tarkovsky

PLOT: Alexei’s life story is told through jumbled flashbacks and dreams that mainly involve his mother. Abandoned by his father, he spent his youth in a remote cabin with his mother and siblings. He grows up to have a child of his own, but his relationship with the boy’s mother is only cordial, and he’s grown apart from his own mother.

Still from Mirror [Zerkalo] (1975)

BACKGROUND:

  • Originally conceiving the film as a memoir about his own childhood memories of WWII, but gradually adding in elements from his later life, Tarkovsky began work on this story as early as 1964.
  • The poetry heard in the film is written and read by Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei’s father. Andrei’s mother appears as herself in the film.
  • Tarkovsky reportedly made 32 edits of the film, complaining that none of them worked, before settling on this as the definitive version.
  • The Soviet authorities refused to allow Mirror to screen at Cannes.
  • Mirror ranked #19 in Sight & Sound‘s Critics’ Poll and #9 in the Director’s Poll in 2012.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Maria floating in a dream while a dove flutters above her.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Apparition history lesson; levitating mom

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Mirror is an intensely personal, extremely diffused meditation on the meaning of life from one of cinema’s greatest artists. Although insanely difficult, many cinephiles find it intensely moving as an accumulation of individual images that flow like finely crafted verses of surrealistic poetry.


Restoration trailer for Mirror [Zerkalo]

COMMENTS: If you enjoy being confused, jump into Mirror with no Continue reading 19*. MIRROR (1975)

360. COME AND SEE (1985)

Idi i smotri

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”–Revelation 6:7-8

Must See

DIRECTED BY: Elem Klimov

FEATURING: Aleksey Kravechenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius

PLOT: Florya, a boy of about 14, digs in a field with a playmate, hoping to find a buried rifle so he can join the Belorussian partisans fighting against occupying Nazis. He finds one, and is soon roughly whisked away by soldiers to the forest campground, leaving his sobbing mother behind. When the troops go on patrol he is left alone to guard the camp, but after the Luftwaffe bomb the area he and a female companion return to Florya’s village, where he finds the war has devastated everything his once knew.

Still from Come and See (1985)

BACKGROUND:

  • Based on a memoir of a teenage Belarussian partisan, Come and See was commissioned to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis.
  • Director Elem Klimov, still a relatively young man at 52 when he completed Come and See, chose to retire from filmmaking after its release, saying that he could not top this achievement.
  • Come and See is included in Steven Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” and tied for 30th (among directors) and 154th (among critics) in “Sight and Sound”‘s 2012 Greatest Movie poll, among other accolades and honors.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It could be the closeup of Aleksey Kravechenko’s prematurely aged face at the end. Or the S.S. skull-on-a-stick the refugees turn into an effigy of Hitler. For me, however, the most surprising and unforgettable image was the nightmare of Florya and Glasha sloshing through a muddy bog in desperation, fleeing from a horror they will never be able to outrun.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Forest Charleston; cow in a firefight; kill baby Hitler?

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Come and See’s flirtations with surrealism nudge it into the “weird” category, and then its sheer grueling intensity carries it to “must see” status. That recommendation should perhaps come with a warning that, despite containing nothing particularly graphic, this movie’s sheer aura of evil is likely to disturb you on a deep level. This is not a shock-for-shock’s-sake experience, however, but an honest, unflinching dip into the subconscious of an adolescent boy thrust into a horrific situation initially beyond his comprehension—one which he tragically comes to understand all too well.


DVD trailer for Come and See

COMMENTS: Come and See is war movie as horror movie. It is notable for its immersive intensity. It unrelentingly assaults your sensibilities, as sadistically eager to strip away your innocence as it is to Continue reading 360. COME AND SEE (1985)

350. SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1964)

Tini zabutykh predkiv, AKA Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors; Shadows of Our Ancestors; Wild Horses of Fire

“To say that Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors violates every narrative code and representational system known to the cinema is an understatement—at times, in fact, the film seems intent upon deconstructing the very process of representation itself. The relationship between narrative logic and cinematic space— between point of view inside and outside the frame—is so consistently undermined that most critics on first viewing literally cannot describe what they’ve seen. Adjectives frequently used to characterize Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors are ‘hallucinatory,’ ‘intoxicating,’ and ‘delirious’—terms that imply, however positively, confusion and incoherence.”–David Cook, filmreference.com

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ivan Mykolaichuk, Larisa Kadochnikova, Tatyana Bestayeva

PLOT: Ivan, a Hutsul villager in a remote town in the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains at an undetermined time in the past, falls in love with village girl Marichka. After Marichka tragically dies he’s inconsolable for a time until he finds and marries Palagna. He and Palagna cannot conceive a child, however, and when she seeks the help of a sorcerer to become fertile, she ends up seduced by the wicked magician.

Still from Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)

BACKGROUND:

  • The story is adapted from an (out-of-print in translation) short novel of the same title by writer Mikhail Kotsyubinsky (to whom the film is also dedicated, on the centennial of his birth).
  • Director Serjei Parajanov considered Ancestors the real start of his filmmaking career, calling the five features he directed before this one “garbage.”
  • Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors launched Parajanov’s rocky relationship with Soviet authorities, which would eventually lead to his blacklisting and even to jail time in 1974 after the release of The Color of Pomegranates. This movie contained three elements sure to raise the ire of the Communists: Christian imagery, the suggestion of a Ukrainian ethnic identity separate from the Soviet Union, and flights of fantasy that defied the official aesthetic of socialist realism.
  • The actors in Ancestors speak in an authentic Hutsul dialect of Ukrainian and Parajanov refused to allow it to be dubbed or translated into Russian, further angering Soviet authorities.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Seven minutes into Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a man is struck with an axe. Blood runs across the camera lens, and we cut to an insert of rusty red horses leaping through a white sky. At this point, you either turn the film off in frustration, or fall totally in love with it and ride it to the end.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: The red horses of death; blindfold yoke wedding; Christmas reaper

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Sergei Parajanov creates a specific yet idealized universe that feels like a fairy tale. Real Ukrainian folk rituals are painstakingly recreated, but with a postmodern spin that makes them seem new and strange. Red horses leap through the sky, a parade of Christmas characters includes the Grim Reaper, and it all plays out under a star of eternal love twinkling in an icy sky. Soviet authorities saw these nostalgic fantasies as dangerously counter-revolutionary, but they are as much a manifesto for a superior counter-reality.


Trailer for the narrated Russian-language version of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

COMMENTS: Sergei Parajanov saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors as the beginning of his career; it was also almost the end of it. Ancestors displeased his Soviet overseers so much that it is miraculous that he was allowed to make another movie before the dawn of Continue reading 350. SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1964)