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RECENT
SOVIET CINEMA AND PUBLIC RESPONSES: ABDRASHITOV AND GERMAN
Vladimir Padunov and Nancy P Condee OUR FOCUS IN THIS ARTICLE is the work of two film-makers as yet little known in the West, Vadim Abdrashitov and Alexei German. Their recent films have been the subject of many discussions in Moscow in the past six months, the plots argued about and analyzed equally by those who have managed to see them and by those who have not. We have chosen to discuss Abdrashitov's films, and the public reactions to them here, because he is a figure who has not yet received attention from Western specialists, despite the remarkable talent his work shows, and because we are convinced that in the next several years he will become of major importance as a director, on a par with his former teacher Nikita Mikhalkov (Slave of Love, Oblomov, Without Witnesses) and El'dar Riazanov (Garage, Train Station for Two, Cruel Romance). Gerrnan's major work, My Friend, Ivan Lapshin (Moi drug Ivan Lapshin) is chosen for discussion here because of its highly unusual thematic handling of social life in the mid-1930s, immediately prior to the great purges.
Each of the three most recent films is set in a different kind of artificial male society: Fox Hunting in a paramilitary sports club and, for a time, in a prison for juvenile delinquents; The Train Stopped in a provincial hotel room shared by a journalist and a railroad-accident inspector; Parade of Planets in an army reserve corps. Women appear in all three films, not as characters with independent life and depth, but as social-psychological landmarks that permit the men to orient and define themselves. Abdrashitov-Mindadze's heroes are not so much loners as they are almost always alone. Their attempts to break out of their isolation so as to reaffirm companionship with other men are doomed: moments of solidarity are fragile, of unity - fleeting; moments of intimacy can not only not be sustained, they inevitably are based on misunderstanding and self-generated illusion. At the end of Fox Hunting, the hero turns his back on those around him - his wife, child and friends - and runs off into the woods; at the end of The Train Stopped, the hero passes by the silent and distant stares of the village residents; Parade of Planets ends with the comrades-in-arms parting unemotionally, knowing they will probably never meet again. To be a hero, in Abdrashitov-Mindadze's films, is to be outside the collective. The Train Stopped focuses on the investigation of a railway accident in which the train-driver is killed. Investigator Ermakov is brought in to determine the cause of the accident, while the residents of the local town of Ensk, all of whom are in some way connected with the railway industry, prepare to honor the dead man who, in their eyes, sacrificed his life in an attempt to forestall the accident. As the investigator begins his work, the townspeople praise the heroism of the deceased; a memorial service is held, at which those who knew him give tearful eulogies - his former school-teacher, his co-workers, friends, people who knew him as a child, those who knew his father. A well-known newspaper reporter, Malinin, who had been on the train at the time of the accident, decides to stay and cover the story; he is housed in the same hotel room as the investigator. Television crews arrive to conduct film interviews. A sombre funeral service is held at the railway roundhouse. The victim's elderly mother is promised her own apartment. Money is collected to erect a monument at the site of the accident. Meanwhile, the investigator uncovers another side of the accident: alcoholism, sloppy safety procedures, falsified paper work, improperly installed brakes, speeding, acts that incriminate many of the townspeople, including the dead suicidal (according to the words of his wife) hero. As this evidence accumulates, the investigator's relationship to his journalist-room-mate changes. At first, they had been somewhat distant allies, both interested in the details of the accident. The journalist, who in addition to being a passenger on the wrecked train is also a former resident of the town, was a useful source of information, both eyewitness and spectator to the event, and therefore able to demystify the exaggerated early reports of the accident. Gradually, however, his role as a journalist turns precisely to that of mystifier. Like the other media reporters, he is indifferent to the causes of the accident: for him, the story most appropriate to the needs of journalism is the selfless heroism of a dedicated worker. Thus, as the investigator uncovers the story, the journalist covers it back up, reproducing in his own profession the indifference to careful work. As the film progresses we see the event not as one event but as two: the heroic deed (podvig) celebrated by the media as a demonstration of the valor of a simple railroad man; and as a tragic series of misjudgements, based on sloppy work and mismanagement. In the latter interpretation it is not monuments, but indictments that are called for to ensure such accidents are not repeated. For the townspeople, in the throes of mourning one of their own and protecting guilty relatives, the event is an act of cruel but unavoidable fate, a moment which calls for praising the victim and ignoring the causes of his death. What is unusual about this film has as much to do with its structure as its content. A more traditional - for Soviet cinema - and less problematic handling of the subject would move from the accident to the investigator's lonely work, unsupported by the townspeople, to his vindication and the punishment of those responsible for the accident. Instead, the film ends with the investigator's isolation: the townspeople are shown in final group portraits - railway workers, Komsomol boys and girls, militia men, families, elderly women, small children - all indifferent to the investigator's search. He is no longer threatened, harassed or misled, as at the outset of the film; he is merely ignored. The need for heroism outweighs the need for social change and is prepared to claim lives for the perpetuation of that order. The positive hero, mainstay of Soviet narrative art, is salvaged as an aesthetic category only insofar as the viewer perceives him to be positive. From the perspective of the other characters, the investigator is an anti-hero, or irrelevant altogether. Reactions to the film have been mixed. Many Soviet friends have felt that here at last was a director who had the honesty and courage to address the question of false heroism, empty rhetoric and the endemic laxity of work discipline. The film was able to show clearly and simply how disastrous mistakes can be laundered so thoroughly that they are not only not punished, but are in fact lauded. A great many others felt differently. As one friend, a chemist at Moscow State University explained, "The film shows what the individual zeal of that investigator can lead to: heartless-ness, lack of human compassion. He didn't live in that town. He had no idea how those people felt, having just experienced such a loss. The film demonstrated the wrongness of his approach; you could see that on the faces of the townspeople at the end of the film." Asked how such accidents could be avoided in the future, he replied, "Not by putting people in prison. We have tried that. The investigator was just one more little Stalin, trying to impose his individual will to wreck people's lives." But how could the system change? The system as a whole would have to change, he insisted. The man who installed one brake instead of the necessary two did so because of the shortage of brakes. If two were installed, half as many trains would be in service for an already overburdened transportation system. And so only one is installed and, usually, nothing happens. The film was about an exception to the rule, and how an individual's ideals can lead to extremism.
Published reactions, too, have treated the film as if two sides of equal weight and integrity were presented to its viewers. This "balanced" approach, distorting and disregarding the film's negative depiction of news media figures, effectively blunts the film's critique of false heroism. The film critic Vlasov, writing in Film Art (Iskussivo Kino), for example, taking as his starting point the fact that the original film title was to have been Dialogues, approaches the film as if Ermakov the investigator and Malinin the journalist were countervailing characters, each of whom is right and wrong in his own way, and suggests that the strength of the film is precisely this even-handedness".' (1) In fact, Abdrashitov-Mindadze individualize and cinemagraphically build sympathy for investigator Ermakov's ethical and moral position by having him displace the journalist as the focus of the film. Once Ermakov appears on the scene, Malinin disappears into the town; the journalist is an integrated member of the collective and a part of its faceless opposition to the investigator. By focusing so sharply on the investigation and his quest, Abdrashitov-Mindadze forcefully underline his isolation from all other characters in the film, news reporters and townspeople alike; the camera isolates him visually, the film narratively. Both the film-makers and their own characters are equally and conversely partisan: "even-handedness" is not a relevant concept. Fox Hunting is literally and metaphorically about listening with one's own ears, going one's own way. "Fox" hunters are runners, who must race across an unmarked course, wearing headphones and carrying a spiral antenna, with which they trace the radio beams of concealed transmitters. The point is to ignore everything outside the headphones, to align what is heard with what cannot be seen, in order to uncover the source of the disturbance. The hero, a champion "fox" hunter in his sports club, is a man who has internalized all of the social norms, but insists on following his sense of what is correct. These two sets of moral criteria come into profound conflict with each other because of a single event. He is mugged by two teenagers, one of whom is sent to a juvenile prison for two years, while the other, from a middle-class family able to hire an advocate, receives a suspended sentence. His own sense of justice having been violated by the court and social services, the hero decides to strike out on his own and reform the jailed teenager. His efforts to visit, bring books, arrange days off, file appeals, are finally successful in freeing his erstwhile attacker, but only at the expense of estranging him from his wife, his coach, his co-workers. The film contains a double paradox. On the one hand, the hero becomes alienated from the very social norms he is trying to instil in the youth; his repeated plea to "be like me" acquires a hollow ring by the end of the film. On the other, the fraternity and companionship he establishes with the teenager do not survive outside the prison walls: the newly freed youth abandons his rescuer at the prison gates and takes off with the very friend who had betrayed him in the courtroom. The final scene of the film, reuniting hero, wife, child and both teenagers, brings to the fore the hero's rejection of the values he had tried so hard to convey to the teenager. The pretext for this reunion is a sports rally that features a "fox" hunt. The hero begins the race under everyone's watchful eyes and smiling faces, but as soon as he is out of sight, he removes his headphones, drops out of the race and goes off alone. The hero has changed roles with his muggers - he cuts himself off from his own community, from traditional values and norms, while the muggers are surrounded and comforted by them. The social criticism implied in this film is more muted than that of The Train Stopped and the film has aroused correspondingly less interest. At issue here are the uneven justice of the court system and the conflict between individual and state criteria of right and wrong. Neither of these two issues represents a substantive challenge to the status quo, but then the notion is not the sole standard of artistic value. Seen in the context of dominant aesthetic theory, a realm of no interest to the average viewer, the film takes the unexpected step of separating its positive hero from the social order and sympathetically depicting his struggle for change, albeit in an isolated instance. Indeed, the caution exercised in the film is precisely and paradoxically its challenge: an isolated instance of individual reform, a one-man crusade and its inevitable failure. The Soviet viewer is at once won over by his attempt and vicariously experiences its futility. The story line of Abdrashitov-Mindadze's most recent film, Parade of Planets, is both very simple and its least interesting aspect: a group of reservists is called up to serve their final annual training exercises. They participate in war games, are released early, and trek home. This simplicity is deceptive: the film is a complex structure, which uses a "cosmic" frame of reference and impersonal point of view to provide the narrative momentum ("pedalization", as the Russians love to say). In effect, whereas the storyline is firmly grounded in the minutiae and trivia of material, everyday life, the plot of the film is organized by the abstractions of mystical philosophy - the river of life, the eternal return of the soul, and transcendental homelessness.(2) The film opens with a sequence of shots of'the galaxy, long pans of heavenly bodies. Gradually, the viewer realizes that there is nothing extra-terrestrial here at issue; the camera is merely recording the events in an astronomical laboratory, tracking the work-day chores of a group of scientists, who are preparing to observe a rare occurrence, the parade of the planets. One of the members of the laboratory, a reserve senior lieutenant, returns home to find that he has been called up for his final stint in the reserves. In the company of other members of his unit (an architect, a butcher, a trolleybus driver, a mechanic and a stevedore), he returns to a life that he has already lived several times, leaving behind his present-day one. Old friendships and ties are silently re-established. The artillery unit is assigned its part in the military manoeuvres: to prevent the enemy-team's tanks from fording a river. During the night the unit struggles to cross the engorged river - last time, or year, or life, it was just a creek - positions itself next morning on the banks, which have grown even wider while they slept, and heroically "destroys" several "enemy" tanks, only to learn that the unit itself has been "eliminated" by an "enemy" rocket barrage. The unit is now officially "dead" and disbanded. Together with the dead enemy tank officers, they go for a swim in the ever-expanding "river of life" (as the butcher, Sultan, remarks: "We're all dead now; we're all bodiless spirits!") From this point to the end of the film, the reservists are condemned to be inseparable, always to return to each other: four buddies sneak away from the other two reservists, take a bus to a distant city and find that the others are already waiting for them; six of them swim across the immense river ("I can't even swim," calls out one of them as he easily strokes his way across) and "logically" find their clothes on the other bank. In their wanderings, they pass through two other cities: a city of fertility, where there are only young, beautiful women, and where each of them pairs off with a perfect, potential mate. (3) They get to the second city, a city of the dead, by commandeering a motorboat (the river can no longer be swum across) and forcing the morose owner (Charon?) to ferry them to the other shore. In this city of the dead, each meets a silent, pensioned version of himself and is once more paired off. The unit is still metaphorically dead: the senior lieutenant is mistaken for the child of one of the pensioners, who died during the Leningrad blockade. This mistake, too, has happened before and will happen again. Their destination, of course, is the city of life, from which they were pulled at the beginning of the film; they cross a vast field ( a visual pun, perhaps, on the Russian proverb "To live life is not like crossing a field") and stumble into their home city. Once they arrive, the solidarity of the unit disintegrates into separate and isolated lives. They scatter to their various pasts, presents, or futures. Rumour has it that during a pre-release screening last August at the House of Film, a private club for those in the film industry, Abdrashitov attempted to forestall critical attacks on Parade of Planets by insisting to his audience that the film they were about to see actively fulfilled all of the demands placed on film-makers by Socialist Realism: the film was to be considered, according to his public version, as a social document about the contemporary state of ideological commitment and the execution of political tasks in film art. Given the frequency with which the word "documentary" is (mistakenly) used in describing his preceding and most debated film, The Train Stopped, Abdrashitov's choice of terms would seem to be a tactical, defensive move. The results, however, were most unfortunate. His detractors had no difficulty in demonstrating the director's duplicity: the film's story line is realistic; its plot is allegorical. Terms like "social document", "ideological commitment" and "political tasks" cannot mask the intensely mythological nature of what is represented. Meanwhile, his supporters found themselves arguing against the version publicly endorsed by the director himself. By insisting so forcefully on what the film was, Abdrashitov in effect underlined what it was not. He disarmed his partisans by trying to appease his opponents in advance. The film disappeared for several months from official theatres and was shown only occasionally in less accessible cinemas, for example, at Moscow State University in October. Finally, it was given a first-run in third-string cinemas in early December. There was no publicity, except for an article in the Literary Gazette, no public discussion and no attempt to upgrade the choice of theatres. In conversations with Soviet friends we have been told repeatedly that Parade of Planets is a "Western" film. In part they attribute this to the quality of its editing and other technical aspects; in part to its multiple narrative layers and the range of allusions it expects its viewers to understand. When those allusions escape the Soviet viewers, they assume the film is ipso facto accessible to Westerners, more familiar with modernist narrative technique, uses of myth and mystical philosophy. In fact, the handful of Westerners here with an excellent grasp of Russian, higher education in literature, and experience of living in this country, were as baffled by the film as anyone else. Those Westerners who correctly recognized the film's alternative reality as transcendental mysticism, understood the presumed audience to be not themselves, but that growing sector of the Soviet urban intelligentsia, reacting to the insularity and xenophobia of their environment, by a fascination with other world, other realities, and other states of consciousness; hence the growing interest here in transcendental meditation, yoga, extra-sensory perception and even unidentified flying objects (see the January 30th issue of the Soviet newspaper Labor [Trudl ). In this sense, Abdrashitov and Mindadze are very much part of the urban intellectual environment here, however "foreign" they are viewed by Soviet audiences. To Westerners, as well as Muscovites, the film was - excuse us - mystifying. One of the things that has become apparent during our months in this country is how differently we interpret what we see in comparison with our Soviet friends and acquaintances. We are frequently told, "As foreigners, you couldn't possibly understand what this film means." Apart from being annoying, this insularity is particularly interesting because it is often clear in ensuing discussions that indeed our interpretations of what is being criticized in a given film, and how that criticism is presented, differ so greatly from views of Soviet acquaintances that it seems we simply have seen different films. Beyond the issue of personal taste and individual opinion, there are other issues: access to historical information, film analysis here and in the West, differences in cultural values, all of which define what we privilege and do not privilege in any interpretation of what we have seen. If Westerners share with Soviet conservatives a tendency to view innovative or controversial films as explicitly anti-Soviet, liberal Moscow intellectuals tend to view critical films as impenetrable to any but other Moscow liberal intellectuals. While they are keenly aware of the extent to which some Soviet films are made for export (Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears, for example ) and are quick to dismiss a Soviet film as"made for the West" (read "Potemkin village"), they do not understand, having no experience in a country other than their own, either that there exist in the West journalists, scholars, and émigrés with knowledge of Soviet reality, or that the very way in which the "Potemkin village" is constructed, can be both revelatory and important.(4) Those same acquaintances who are convinced of the indecipherability of Soviet cinema are nevertheless very eager that we see the next "indecipherable" film. To the logical question about where a film is being shown, the response is almost always, "You'll never find it; it's not being shown." This, of course, is hyperbole. In a culture where information is more valuable than the ruble, facts gain a currency that verges on counterfeiting. The city is filled with Muscovites, rich in knowledge that cannot be verified, followed up on, or put to much use. As with everything else in short supply in this city, tickets to films that are "not being shown" are acquired only by a complicated series of steps: first of these is always such word-of-mouth information on what is worth seeing. The second step is buying a weekly issue of the year-and-a-half-old newspaper Leisure (Dosug), the acquiring of which is a feat in itself. Published once a week, it can be bought only very early Saturday mornings; those layabeds who arrive at the kiosk after 8.00 a.m. have no chance of getting a copy (hence the sadistic name of the paper). Leisure gives virtually all film listings, including films shown at small clubs, houses of culture, and so forth. It does not list closed showings, where only members of a particular enterprise ( and their invited friends) are permitted. It is at these showings that controversial films are first run before their release to the general public. These closed showings are, on the one hand, a service to the employees of the enterprise; they are, on the other hand, a means of gauging and controlling public reaction. The film Agony (Agoniia), about the murder of Rasputin, is currently being shown privately in a number of book publishing firms, for example, and will apparently be released to open viewing sometime soon. The film's positive depiction of Czar Nicholas II has been the subject of considerable discussion and has undoubtedly contributed to the film's being held back for several years, despite the fact that it has been showing occasionally in New York at least since 1983. We have heard repeatedly from acquaintances in the Soviet film industry, both in the West and here, that such controversial films are no longer simply shelved; indeed, at a Soviet cinema session of the 1983 conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (ATSEEL) held in New York, one Soviet émigré film historian claimed that Agony was the only film at that time still condemned to being shelved. instead, controversial films are now circulated for a long time in closed screenings and, when finally released to general audiences, circulate in very few prints among the thousands of movie theatres in the entire country. Such is the case with Anatolii German's film My Friend, Ivan Lapshin, based on his father Iurii German's stories about members of the Soviet secret police in the 1930s. Having heard for weeks that this unusual film would be showing sometime in late January 1985 (Step One), we began rousing ourselves from bed several Saturdays in a row to buy Leisure ( Step Two). Finally, in the last week of January, Leisure printed a one-line announcement that My Friend, Ivan Lapshin would be playing on January 26th in only one Moscow cinema. Thus began the final Step Three. After several days of fruitless telephoning, we went to the cinema the day before the showing and were told that the film would be shown the next day only at 7.00 p.m., that tickets would go on sale that day at 4.00 p.m. and, in the curious logic so common here, at that point there would be no tickets anyway, since they were already all sold out. After an hour's tactful inquiry, rediscovered that there were in fact at least three other unannounced showings there on that same day, to which we were at last permitted to buy tickets. The whole experience was a little like standing in front of a locked door with a ring of skeleton keys, knowing that one of them, if jiggled just right and not too loudly, would let us in. The film itself has generated enormous interest here. One Soviet acquaintance described it as a devastating critique of the secret police activities in the 1930s. Another acquaintance travelled approximately 600 miles from Riga to Moscow in order to see the film. There are several reasons for this interest. First, the original stories, romanticizing the lives of the secret police, are transformed by the director-son into a depiction of the brutality, lawlessness and hardships of life in a small provincial town: communal apartments, overcrowding, lack of privacy, chronic shortages of food and firewood. The depiction of the seamier aspects of Soviet society - a thieves' den, prostitution, a raid on a hoarder's underground storehouse - are filmed in black-and-white, creating the atmosphere of old, documentary footage that has finally come to light. Other technical features of the film - open-microphone recording, alternating colour footage (though not consistently carried through in the film, the tendency is to record events of the 1980s in colour, of the 1930s in black-and-white), and the accuracy of historical detail (interiors, costumes, village scenes) - are also unusual. By de-romanticizing the depiction of life in the provinces, the director has not, however, demystified the way in which agents of the secret police are represented. The characterization of the police, and in particular of the police-chief, Ivan Lapshin, is every bit as idealized as in the literature of earlier times; Lapshin and the police are indefatigable, dedicated, honest, fair. They are almost saintly figures, who are trapped in a hellish life. Their occasional callousness is the result of the conditions with which they must deal uncomplainingly; their brutality, that of the avenging angel. German succeeds in having Soviet audiences respect and praise their depiction for two essential reasons. First, the narrative frame of the film is the reminiscences in the presence of an ageing writer, who recalls his childhood awe of Lapshin ("the servant of the people and a father to his men," to paraphrase paradoxically Lermontov's words in the poem "Borodino", about Kutuzov, the saviour of Russia during the war with Napoleon). The camera is the eyes of the child. Like Cherkassov in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, the gaunt and chisel-faced Lapshin towers above everyone else in the film. Second, the case on which Lapshin is working belongs more to the domain of the militia than to the secret police. He is pursuing vicious gangster-murderers, rather than engaged in the activities traditionally associated with the secret police: surveillance and repression of citizens, purging of dissidents from society, searching for counter-revolutionaries and "cosmopolitan" traitors. As a result, although Soviet audiences react very favourably to the honesty with which the difficulties of life in the 1930s are portrayed in the film, a Western viewer is more attentive to the ways in which the film engages in white-washing the activities and personalities of the secret police agents. From this point of view the film is exciting because it dares to address the existence of the NKVD in the years immediately before the purges, an association that most Soviet citizens also make; but it is disturbing because it refuses to challenge received ideas and official ways of describing the role of the secret police in that period, or even to undermine some of the dominant clichés in Soviet cinema. In Lapshin we still have a positive hero, however tarnished his image has become with time. "Good guys" never die in this film, nor do they die in other Soviet films, war films being the one exception to this general rule. In My Friend, Ivan Lapshin, one eviscerated NKVD member survives a long drive in the back of a truck, bumping over provincial roads. Released from the hospital after a remarkable recovery ( a real testimony to rural emergency medical procedures in the 1930s), he is gruffly reminded by Lapshin, "Don't forget to bind your guts with a towel." Having seen this film, so praised by progressive intellectuals for its verisimilitude and honesty, we find it lacking above all in precisely those two traits. The film, however, continues to play to packed theatres in at least one out-of-the-way cinema in Moscow each week. Notes 1. M. Vlasov, "Vysokaia tsena istiny" (The High Cost of Truth) in Iskussotvo Kino, 1933, n1, pp. 22-35. 2, For a discussion of the distinctions between "story line" and "plot", see the work of the Russian formalists; especially Viclor Shkiovsky's essays in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee Lemon and Marion Reis (University of Nebraska Press, 1965 ). 3. In his article, "Roll Call" ("Na pereklichke") in Film Art Iskusstvo Kino) 1984, n. 12, the film critic Konstantin Shcherbakov points out that this city of women represents on the "allegorical level" another quest for adventures by the "supermen"; and on the "earthly-prosaic level", the city is merely a provincial textile-town, where the majority of the population consists of unmarried women weavers (p. 40). 4. Fake villages erected along the roadside to camouflage the poverty and misery of the peasants from Empress Catherine the Great ( reigned 1 762-96 ) during her triumphal tours of Russia. Prince Gregorii Aleksandrovich Potemkin ( 1 73 9-91 ) was a favourite of Catherine's and responsible for the construction of these "stage sets". |
Vadim
Abdrashitov works in close collaboration with the screenplay writer Aleksandr
Mindadze. Their first two films, The Turn (Povorof) and Speech for the
Defense (Slovo dlia zashchity), are now rarely shown in Moscow film theatres,
although the latter is for sale in the US on a video cassette. Their next two
films, Fox Hunting (Okhofa na lis) and The Train Stopped (Ostanovilsiapoezd)
appear occasionally, while their latest film, Parade of the Planets (Parad
planet), had its official premiére in December, 1984 and continues to
run in at least one Moscow theatre every week.