The Cameraman's Revenge

For the life of me I no longer recall why I watched this when SBS showed it a long time ago (I have dim memories of it being in 1994, at which time I was doing a class on Soviet cinema; maybe that was what induced me), but I’ve always been glad I did, and I was delighted when Criterion announced it as a forthcoming title some months ago (not least because it meant I’d finally be able to actually watch it again since I can no longer watch my old tape of it). This was my first encounter with the partnership of Kalatozov & Urusevsky, whose Cranes are Flying and I am Cuba I’ve since become familiar with, though it seems to be less celebrated than either of those (Cranes being a hit in its day, Cuba a posthumous discovery). I was bowled over by it back then, though, especially by Urusevsky’s camerawork. The story is reasonably straightforward—an exploratory party of geologists goes to Siberia in search of diamonds, finds them, then everything turns to shit when a forest fire strikes, battle for survival in hostile wilderness, etc—but no less thrilling for that, and the extraordinary visual rendering of it really lifts it up with its eccentric compositions and wild angles and movements. It’s an object lesson in landscape-as-character, and a persuasive argument for the superiority of black and white film in at least some situations (I’m sure that location is beautiful in colour, but it’s more menacing—as it needs to be—in monochrome). Pleased to be able to report that, unlike in quite a few cases, this is a film that blew me away in my late teens that I haven’t cooled on years later; hopefully the fact that Criterion have endorsed it means people other than me will be turned onto it as well, however belatedly.

I don’t know, I’ve tried Yevgeni Bauer a few times over the years—the BFI’s Early Russian Cinema tapes at UNSW in 1997, the Mad Love DVD about eight years ago, and this one today (which I scammed from Youtube recently)—and I still don’t really get the acclaim. Having died as he did in 1917, he obviously went into eclipse when the Revolution hit later that year along with most of the rest of the Tsarist era Russian film industry, and what remained of his films didn’t re-emerge for decades thereafter. As such, I appreciate that he’s considered to be one of the most important figures of pre-Soviet cinema (though I’ll have to accept the judgements of others regarding some of his specific achievements), although I do so without really liking his films as such, and unfortunately I’m no nearer after seeing this. This is one of his social melodramas, in which a well-to-do young man finds himself tiring of  the crop of “sophisticated” young women he seems to have cultivated, and sets out instead to rescue a bit of comparative rough trade; he saves a young girl slaving as a seamstress in a sweatshop, but unfortunately for him her life of poverty has given her dreams of riches she’s now in a position to act upon. Which she does, ruinously. Filmed in a style reminiscent of what I remember of the other Tsarist-era films I’ve seen, slow, given to deep tableau staging rather than cutting (albeit spiced with a few interesting high angles and camera movements one might not expect from this period), but the characters are really off-putting; she basically becomes a fairly horrible person the higher she rises in society (cf. the end: he shoots himself on her doorstep, she steps over his body quite casually en route to a restaurant), but there’s something so silly about him and his enterprise that it’s hard to feel too sorry for him when she fucks him over.

The Nevsky DVD contains the reconstruction of Eisenstein’s completed-or-was-it return to Soviet cinema as a handy bonus feature. After a few years in the West, he’d come home to find the government rather more hands-on than before in interfering with film productions, and what should’ve been his first finished sound film ended up not being that. I read conflicting descriptions of the extent to which Bezhin Meadow was finished; apparently it was ready by late 1935 but changes were demanded and kept being demanded until in March 1937 production was called off entirely and whatever state the film was in by then we’ll likely never know. The footage supposedly vanished in a bombing raid in 1941, so all we have is this, the 1967 reconstruction by Kleiman & Yutkevich from extant frames of the original film preserved by Eisenstein’s wife. Being effectively a slideshow, it’s almost impossible to appraise what the film might’ve been like (though easier to envisage than the similar photo-reconstruction of London After Midnight, since it uses original film frames rather than posed stills). The story is that of, frankly, a snitch, based on a supposedly but probably not entirely true story of a boy murdered by his father for informing on him to Soviet authorities, which you’d think would actually have pleased Stalin and friends, but they seem to have been too bothered by the film being insufficiently “socialist” and more of a plain good-vs-evil story. (Compare and contrast this plot outline with that of the film’s contemporary, John Ford’s The Informer.) Apparently this reconstruction is closest to Eisenstein’s original script, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that we’re talking about a film that doesn’t exist, maybe never quite did. The most we can really say is that the Kleiman & Yutkevich version reveals something that might have been a great film… and yet I think the fact that it made a hero out of a barely pubescent police informant would always have made it hard to fully accept somehow. Who can say at this remove.

I haven’t seen this since, oh, probably the late 90s, and that was the version with the re-recorded music. Which I always thought was ethically dubious, but unfortunately I now find the Criterion edition doesn’t have the unadulterated soundtrack either (Russian end credits seem to suggest a 1986 restoration, wonder if that’s when it was fiddled with). Irritating, but not much to be done about it. Consider the film itself and when it was made, both in terms of Eisenstein’s career and the USSR as a whole. By this time, Eisenstein hadn’t finished a feature since 1929, with aborted projects in the US, Mexico and at home, and the cinematic landscape wasn’t the one he’d left behind in 1929; he had to prove himself all over again. Solution? In a time of Soviet fear of Nazi Germany, make a big historical epic about Russia kicking German arse in the 13th century. It’s been so many years since I saw it that I’d kind of forgotten just how bluntly propagandistic Nevsky is; we’re light years from the comparative humanism of Potemkin (not just because it’s also more about individual figures rather than the mass hero). I don’t think this is as good a bit of filmmaking, but it obviously worked well enough as propaganda that it had to be hidden away after Hitler suddenly became friends with Stalin. And, to be fair, it does still bear reasonably favourable comparison with later films of its action-historical ilk, because it’s in that sort of chest-beating monument vein that Hollywood likes to do… and like some Hollywood films I could name (particularly looking at you here, Black Hawk Down), its careful focus upon one event lets it be dishonest about broader history (no hint here that the historical Alexander later wound up subordinating Russia somewhat to the Mongols). Not my favourite Eisenstein, but still nice to see it again after all these years.

By the time he finally got to make this, Sergei Paradjanov had spent a decade and a half doing, well, not much; when you’ve got a government putting you in jail for years and banning you from making films after they let you go, it’s a bit hard to engage in your avowed vocation. IMDB credits him with a couple of short documentaries prior to this, but this was his first feature since 1968. Remarkably, Paradjanov clearly didn’t let 15 years of harrassment break him or the continuity of his style, cos you can still see that continuity between this and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 20 years earlier… having previously covered Ukrainian and Armenian tales, this time he takes on a Georgian legend of a fortress that keeps collapsing and which requires, well, something special to stop it falling down. Compared with Shadows, this is somewhat more straightforward in narrative terms (in that there’s a recognisable beginning and end, although at times the middle initially seems a bit opaque), and visually it’s also less immediately “what-the-fuck”… Mind you, this is still a film where the visuals kind of take precedence over the story; Paradjanov may not engage in the same sort of fuckery with lenses and camera angles, but the style is striking even so, being largely based on tableaux in fairly long-shot so that when close-ups do occur they’re quite striking. And like the other film, he gives an impressive sense of these events being removed from the world as we know it, though certainly the religious aspect of the film (particularly the presence of Islam) mitigates that somewhat. As for the act of sacrifice that ends the film, it could be read as a sop to Communist notions of giving up self-interest for the good of the many; equally, though, the foreign invaders the fortress is built to defend Georgia against could just as easily be read as those same Communists. Didn’t like this quite as much as Shadows, but still pretty good.

I was in another of those moods where I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to watch (I’ve been trying to keep to some sort of viewing schedule, but I think that’s broken down a bit), and then I recalled I still had this lying around… picked it up cheap a while ago as a library title (cos I wanted at least a bit of Starewicz on DVD) but hadn’t got around to actually watching it yet cos I kind of kept forgetting it was there. So I decided it was time to check in once again with the man who gave this blog its name…

As pioneers of cinema go, few are as arguably obscure, not to mention inadvertent, as Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Lithuania to Polish parents, the young fellow’s passion for entomology led him to become director of a natural history museum, and his other abiding interest in photography led him to try his hand at film making around 1909. However, trying to get his insect subjects to co-operate (the either fell asleep or died under the lights, depending on which story you read) was a vexing problem for him. Then he apparently saw one of the early animated films of Emile Cohl, the French cartoonist, involving stop-motion matchsticks, and decided he could pull a similar trick with his insects. After the 1917 revolution, Starewicz settled in France and continued his work there until his death in 1965. For the life of me I can’t recall how or when I first heard of him, but I do recall that back in 1995 I first read Sight & Sound magazine and I think I must’ve seen a review in that of the Connoisseur Video release of some of his films and that led me to actually order the damn thing (via the Dendy shop, back in the days when the Martin Place cinema had a shop out back), probably the first time I actually did that.

This particular DVD is, alas, not an upgrade of that (if only it were); instead it’s actually an earlyish (released in 2000) presentation of a mid-90s video release by Milestone of six Starewicz films, only two of which I’d seen before… starting, obviously, with the title film and ending with Winter Carousel from 1958, apparently his last actually finished film. In between there’s The Insect’s Christmas, a combination of insect-work and more traditional puppets from 1913, two 1920s silents (Frogland and Voice of the Nightingale, the latter presented in a hand-coloured print that is truly something to behold) and the 1934 sound film The Mascot. The latter was clearly shot silent and later subjected to some of the worst post-synchronisation on Earth (fortunately there’s only a handful of actual lines of dialogue, though each one makes me want to kill the person talking); it’s also home to a genuinely strange mix of sentimentality and the macabre. Given that Starewicz was essentially making children’s films, I can only assume with this one he was trying to traumatise some of his younger viewers for life. Revenge itself remains a thing of complete wonder, of course, a tale of infidelity and marital mistrust filmed by a vengeful camera operator as part of that evening’s entertainment and all enacted by a cast of dead insects. 100 years later it’s still stunning.

Glad I’ve got this DVD, but at the same time it makes me wish someone would do a much more definitive Starewicz DVD set; I know quite a lot of his films are lost but I also know much more than just this batch of films exists (I’ve got a few of them on tape after all), and it’d be nice not to have to jump through flaming hoops to get them in digital form.

Talking of frustrated careers, few were as frustrated as that of Sergei Paradjanov; he was blacklisted almost as soon as this film appeared, and even when they didn’t have him in prison somewhere, Soviet authorities made it difficult for him to make films thereafter. But what films he did  make… I saw The Colour of Pomegranates for the first and only time back in 1990 on SBS (THERE’s a film I’d give good money to get a good DVD of, if only one existed; the Kino disc of it is apparently a bit shit), and now I’ve seen his first acknowledged film. And HOLY SHIT. I thought some of the camerawork Urusevsky was doing for Mikhail Kalatozov at that time was extravagant, but some of this stuff can only be described as mental. And that’s just the movements and angles I’m talking about (poor David Stratton would have a stroke in the face of this film), the contents of some of those shots are another matter. Narratively I suppose you’d call it a kind of folktale, located among a specific ethnic group from the Carpathian mountains (the Hutsuls), and we’re taken totally into the world it depicts; Paradjanov’s particular achievement in telling it, though, is not just to render it timeless (though obviously Christianised, it’s hard to escape the feeling these people essentially invoke God, Jesus and St George as if those were merely new names for deities they’d worshipped for millennia) but also so far removed from what we humorously call civilisation that it might as well be another planet. Nothing if not singular stuff, and I don’t think I’m overstating by calling this one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, though clearly it’s not the sort of thing you’d inflict on someone as a first taste of non-Hollywood world cinema. Unless, of course, you really want to throw them in at the deep end. Amazing, though.

This review finds me in the interesting position of revisiting a film I’ve previously reviewed here for the first time since I started this blog… this time it’s another loaner from Brendan of the Criterion edition. Last time it was a library loan of the two-disc local version, and in time-honoured library loan fashion some dickhead before me had maltreated the second disc badly enough that my old player wouldn’t play it properly; the Criterion edition is on one disc and so this time I actually got to watch the whole thing without problems. Since last time I’ve learned that, despite my remark mocking my old VHS copy for being so poor I didn’t realise some scenes were meant to be in black and white, well, those scenes actually were meant to be tinted blue… maybe. Evidence seems to be contradictory. And it struck me in a way I don’t think I’ve felt before that this film is titanically CREEPY. I suppose I did always recognise that it was, I mean just look at the events of the story with this sentient planet sending “guests” to the men on the space station—and what the fuck was that little midget thing we briefly see trying to escape Sartorius’ lab?—but for some reason it really hit me on this viewing, it’s actually quite disturbing on a number of levels, not least the whole question of how humanity reacts in the face of an alien encounter… in this case by failing at first to recognise it is an alien, then by threatening to destroy it. Not just alien, but godlike too… except creating man (or woman, or… thing) in man‘s image. Terrific to finally see this properly, and interesting to discover it was apparently quite a commercial hit in the USSR; can’t share Tarkovsky’s disdain for the film on the ground that it was too much of a genre film.

Previous review of Solaris here.

There are some books, like Paradise Lost and Ulysses, that I tried to read when I was a precocious little cunt in my teens that I failed to finish. Not until I was into my 30s did I finally realise I should, in fact, have waited until my 30s before trying them. I’m wondering if the same isn’t true of some films I watched in my younger days of exploring film and film history, maybe I should’ve also waited until my mid-30s for them too. Particularly Tarkovsky, who proved an unexpectedly happy rediscovery last year after my earlier experiences of same had been less happy. I think this would’ve been the first Tarkovsky I saw, probably around 1993/94 (I do recall my local library had the UK Connoisseur video of it), at which time I probably found it somewhat impenetrable, a bit dull, and couldn’t say I was more than distantly respectful towards it; come to think of it, I’m not sure if I’ve even seen it again since then. Tonight’s revisit might in fact have been my first in 15 years or more, and oh how I wished this had been my first viewing. Cos I got it this time. It wasn’t impenetrable. It wasn’t dull (though there’s no gainsaying the slowness of the thing). The spiritual allegorical undercurrent on which the whole thing ultimately rests, and which takes it in a different direction to most SF (the stalker’s anguish at the end is like something out of Bergman), was finally blindingly apparent. Basically, I finally understood why Stalker is so widely acclaimed, i.e. because it actually is that good. If I’d waited until now to see it for the first time, I might not have spent quite so many years thinking Tarkovsky wasn’t interesting.

Featuring an astonishing blackface scene that even D.W. Griffith might’ve drawn the line at, and featuring an enema joke that would surely never have made it into the American action serials that inspired it, Miss Mend‘s DVD release late last year seems to have inspired a bit of amazement in the reviews I’ve read online. Soviet cinema actually produced populist films! This was what Soviet audiences wanted to see rather than Potemkin! Who knew! At the risk of sounding smug (my chief occupational hazard), this was hardly a revelation to me; if a country’s film industry is big enough (as the USSR’s was), then logically it must actually have some popular appeal, and apart from that I’ve already seen other examples of what you’d call Soviet populism, films like Aelita that are hardly obscure. Just as I’m sure Nazi German cinema wasn’t all Triumph of the Will and The Eternal Jew, so Soviet cinema wasn’t all Eisenstein and montage. (Bordwell & Thompson’s Film History says something like less than 30 “montage” films were made, and constituted very much the minority.) It’s just that, hitherto, the montage films have been the ones we know best from silent Soviet Russia.

Miss Mend was thus more in line with Russian popular taste than the montage films were, but in successfully answering the government’s call for films appealing to the masses, its makers were charged with being too “Western” and ideologically vacuous, proving some people were never happy. It survives now as a fascinating insight into how the popular culture of early Soviet Russia wasn’t necessarily that far removed from that of the West. Though inspired by American adventure serials (as witness the female titular heroine), it takes its overall form more from Feuillade’s Fantomas, i.e. a few feature-length episodes rather than several short ones, more like a TV mini-series. This probably helps the film, which seems to hold remarkably good pace over four and a bit hours without having to come up with a new climax every 20 minutes; the plot—involving a capitalist conspiracy to eradicate the USSR with a plague—should still have been broadly satisfactory in propaganda terms for the government, and the performances are winning enough to suit the film’s essentially pulp-adventurous nature, light but with some surprisingly dark flavour underlying it. It’s not high art, nor was it intended to be, and it’s pleasing to be reminded that for all the ways in which politics tries to demonise people on the other side of wherever the divide is at any given time, your average Soviet citizen of the mid-20s at least seems to have enjoyed trains smashing into cars and people jumping out of high windows and that sort of thing just like your average Westerner of the same time. Or this time, for that matter.