INSIDE SOVIET FILM SATIRE.Laughter with a Lash / ed. Andrew Horton

Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash is a lively collection of sixteenoriginal essays by Soviet and American scholars and film commentators. It is thefirst in-depth examination of an important genre within the Soviet film tradition.

From its origins, humor and satire have been closely linked in Soviet cinema.Nowhere in this tradition is there the pure comic genre typified in the West infilms by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton; by contrast, Soviet comedy can best bedescribed as "laughter with a lash." Films made during the early years of the com-munist regime depicted characters and situations at a moment when the promiseof socialism had yet to be realized. By the final years of totalitarian rule, film-makers had found ways to create satiric films that powerfully indicted commu-nism itself.

Offering a general overview of the evolution of Soviet film satire during aseventy-year period, this volume also provides in-depth analyses of such classicsas Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bol-sheviks; Volga, Volga, a popular musical of the Stalinist period; and the bitter andsurrealistic Zero City, The Fountain, and Black Rose, Red Rose of the glasnostperiod. It also examines the effects of communism's collapse in 1991 on the tra-dition of satire and includes an interview with the renowned Soviet filmmakerYuri Mamin.

INSIDE SOVIET FILM SATIRE

CAMBRIDGESTUDIESIN FILM

GENERAL EDITORSHenry Breitrose, Stanford UniversityWilliam Rothman, University of Miami

ADVISORY BOARDDudley Andrew, University of IowaAnthony Smith, Magdalen College, OxfordColin Young, National Film School

OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIESFiJm and Phenomenology, by Allan CasebierChinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949, by Paul ClarkThe Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror,by Paul CoatesNonindi/ferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things, by Sergei Eisenstein(trans. Herbert Marshall)Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, by Vlada PetricRenoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks, by Jean Renoir (trans.Carol Volk)The Taste for Beauty, by Eric Rohmer (trans. Carol Volk)The "I" of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics,by William RothmanThe British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946, by Paul SwannMetaphor and Film, by Trevor Whittock

INSIDE SOVIETFILM SATIRELaughter with a Lash

Editor

ANDREW HORTONLoyola University, New Orleans

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521430166© Cambridge University Press 1993

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place withoutthe written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1993

This digitally printed first paperback version 2005

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication dataInside Soviet film satire : laughter with a lash / Andrew Horton,

editor.(Cambridge studies in film)p. cm.

Papers from the New Orleans Conference on the Spirit of Satire inSoviet Cinema held at Loyola University.

Filmography: p.Includes index.ISBN 0-521-43016-X1. Comedy films - Soviet Union - History and criticism - Congresses.

2. Satire, Soviet — History and criticism — Congresses. 3. Communismand satire - Congresses. I. Horton, Andrew.PN1995.9.C55I54 1993791.43'617-dc20 92-32195

CIP

ISBN-13 978-0-521-43016-6 hardbackISBN-10 0-521-43016-X hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521 -02107-4 paperbackISBN-10 0-521-02107-3 paperback

Foreword: If life itself is a satire . . .DR. KIRILL RAZLOGOVAcknowledgmentsEditor's note

Introduction: Carnival versus lashing laughter inSoviet cinemaANDREW HORTON

page vn

ixxi

Part One The long view: Soviet satire in contextI Soviet film satire yesterday and today 17

VALENTIN TOLSTYKH (TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BYANDREW ANDREYEV)

II A Russian Munchausen: Aesopian translation 20KEVIN MOSS

III "We don't know what to laugh at": Comedy and satire inSoviet cinema (from The Miracle Worker to St. Jorgen'sFeast Day) 36DENISE J. YOUNGBLOOD

IV An ambivalent NEP satire of bourgeois aspirations:The Kiss of Mary Pickford 48PETER CHRISTENSEN

V Closely watched drains: Notes by a dilettante on theSoviet absurdist film 58MICHAEL BRASHINSKY

Part Two Middle-distance shots: The individualsatire consideredVI A subtextual reading of Kuleshov's satire The Extraordinary

Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924)VLADA PETRIC

65

Contents vi

VII The strange case of the making of Volga, Volga 75MAYA TUROVSKAYA (TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BYANDREW ANDREYEV)

VIII Circus of 1936: Ideology and entertainment under thebig top 83MOIRA RATCHFORD

IX Black humor in Soviet cinema 94OLGA REIZEN

X Laughter beyond the mirror: Humor and satire in thecinema of Andrei Tarkovsky 98VIDA T. JOHNSON

XI The films of Eldar Shengelaya: From subtle humor tobiting satire 105JULIE CHRISTENSEN

Part Three Close-ups: Glasnost and Soviet satireXII A forgotten flute and remembered popular tradition 117

GRETA N. SLOBINXIII Perestroika of kitsch: Sergei Soloviev's BJack Rose,

Red Rose 125SVETLANA BOYM

XIV Carnivals bright, dark, and grotesque in the gJasnostsatires of Mamin, Mustafayev, and Shakhnazarov 138ANDREW HORTON

XV Quick takes on Yuri Mamin's Fountain from theperspective of a Romanian 149ANDREI CODRESCU

XVI "One should begin with zero": A discussion with satiricfilmmaker Yuri Mamin 154ANDREW HORTON

FiJmography 157Contributors 165Index 167

FOREWORD

If life itselfis a satire. . .

It's quite a thrill to open a book about Soviet film satire when the SovietUnion has disappeared, for satire has now become a fundamental char-acteristic of everyday life in the ex-USSR. It seems that the satiric vervealong with Russia's cultural tradition is, unlike the Union, still alive. Thisfact makes the present retrospective even more interesting, in a way likea postmortem.

Andrew Horton has succeeded where everybody else failed: In NewOrleans (Loyola University), he gathered a group of Russian and Americanscholars with very different backgrounds, both academic and practical,and made them speak the unspeakable: about satire in a totalitarian state.And each speaker discovered and proved from his or her own perspectivenot only that satiric films did exist, but that they constituted the most sub-versive genre in the vast domain reigned over by Socialist Realism.

In a way, the posttotalitarian seriousness we have experienced sincethe beginning of perestroika and glasnost, down to the farcical conclusionwith the August Coup (1991), proves to be a backlash from the previousAesopian power and satiric perspective cherished by many Russian,Ukrainian, Georgian, and other filmmakers in the former Soviet Union.

This book is as much testimony as it is an investigation into the un-known or, better, never-acknowledged territory of Soviet film satire. Notjust Yuri Mamin - the only filmmaker present among the scholars - butevery ex-Soviet writer relies on his or her own experience in shaping sat-ire. As for the Americans within this collection, they bring an inter textualperspective in an easy, almost nonacademic style. And one is eventempted to try and satirize the American analysis of Russian feelings (orthe "Slavic soul") about film and life as a kind of global satire. "Situationhopeless, but not serious" would thus also be a way to describe thepresent realities in the former Soviet Union.

Dr. Kirill RazlogovDirectorInstitute for Cultural ResearchMoscow

vii

Acknowledgments

I wish first of all to thank Beatrice Rehl, my editor at Cambridge Univer-sity Press, for her unfailing support, helpful critical comments, and, yes,fine sense of humor in seeing this project to fruition. My thanks to all ofthe others not represented in this collection who made the New OrleansConference on the Spirit of Satire in Soviet Cinema possible: to AnnaLawton, who was the coorganizer of the conference; and to Romana Bahryof York University; Daniel Goulding of Oberlin College; Sergei Lavrentiev,a leading Soviet film critic; and Peter Shepotinnik, an editor of the influ-ential Moscow-based film journal Iskusstvo kino. I also extend a heartythanks to Loyola University of New Orleans for providing many servicesand some of the funding for the conference together with the LouisianaEndowment for the Humanities for a minigrant that made it possible tobring Yuri Mamin to New Orleans. All photos appear thanks to SovexportFilm and the Kinocenter of Moscow. Finally, hats off to all filmmakers inall of the republics and provinces that were the Soviet Union who are stillable to see satire and humor in the darkest moments.

IX

In transliterating Russian terms and names into English, this volume ad-heres to the Library of Congress system (with the elimination of theapostrophe-designated soft sign in the text). Exceptions have been madein the case of Russian names that have become widely known under a dif-ferent system of transliteration. Every attempt has been made to standard-ize terminology and documentary references in the chapters, but thisdoes not exclude the possibility of exceptional usages in the style of in-dividual authors. There is often considerable variation in the Englishtranslation of Russian film titles. We have tried to be consistent evenwhere there are no "standard" English versions of titles.

xi

INTRODUCTION

Carnival versus lashinglaughter in Soviet cinema

I adhere to the tradition of laughing while thelash swishes. Mine is a laughter of destruction.

Sergei Eisenstein

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders dogenerally discover everybody's face but theirown.

Jonathan Swift

Headed for the promised skyWe never had a good civilization, but we always had a good culture.

Viktor Yerofeyev (Shapiro, "Ablest Soviets Flee for Better Lives")It's a dark, snowy, cold Russian night, and a large group of the Moscowhomeless have been surrounded by police and soldiers and commandedto leave their shantytown so that an American-Soviet joint venture hoteland condom factory can be built on the spot where the poor have beenliving. 'This is our land and we are not going to leave it," calls out thepresident, the leader of the homeless who acts like a not-so-distorted copyof Gorbachev and looks remarkably like Albert Einstein. But the officialforces will not listen. They move in with tanks and riot troops, crushingall in their path. The poor gather on an old steam locomotive, whichlooks a lot like the old ''revolutionary" trains of seventy years ago, and toeveryone's surprise, the locomotive starts up and heads on down thetrack with the military in hot pursuit.

Then a miracle happens. As soldiers and tanks fire at the train, the lo-comotive takes off into the winter sky, headed for "the promised land"followed by a pack of wild homeless dogs howling after it. And thoughthe tanks fire away, the train is heaven bound with the homeless and thepresident and his ex-wife and friends all aboard.

A Soviet parody of Spielberg's E.T. or De Sica's farewell to neorealism,Miracle in Milan (1951), in which all the homeless of Milan take offthrough the Italian heavens? Both. And more.1

Carnival versus lashing laughter in Soviet cinema

"The president" of Moscow's homeless folk in Eldar Ryazanov's The PromisedSky (1991) balancing between hope and hopelessness, reality and fantasy, andtears and topical satiric laughter.

The scene described is the conclusion to Eldar Ryazanov's 1991 socialcomic satire, The Promised Sky (Nebesa obetovannyej, one of the veryfew popular Russian/ex-Soviet films of 1991. It is appropriate to begin ourstudy of Soviet film satire with this recent film for several reasons. First,Ryazanov has been the undisputed master of Soviet comic satire for al-most three decades, and as Greta Slobin's essay suggests, his ForgottenMelody for a Flute (Zabytaya melodiya diyafleity, 1987) was the first full-bodied gJasnost film. Thus, The Promised Sky brings us full circle:Clearly after the August ''revolution" of 1991, we have entered a post-Soviet and, in a real sense, a post-perestroika phase. Our collection ends,therefore, at this borderline but traces back to the origins of Soviet satire


Yefim, the poor Jewish tinker (Roland Bykov), whose good humor and satiricwit help humanize the coldly Communist female commissar in Commissar(1967).

in Russian and world literature and culture. These essays bring us as faras the end of the Soviet Union: What happens next in the world of satireand culture is yet to be written and filmed.

We should add that Ryazanov's fantasy triumph with its wink to theaudience suggesting both Spielberg and De Sica suggests from the begin-ning a prime characteristic of satire: its double-edged ambiguity. Nothingis inherently funny, satiric, tragic, or absurd (Horton, Comedy/Cinema/Theory, p. 1). Context and perspective are all. (E.g., think howmuch of British humor is lost on American audiences.) Commissar (1967),a serious film about Jews in the Soviet Union, has its moments of true hu-mor and wit. Ryazanov's comic triumph is, therefore, as Eisenstein wouldsay (and we shall explain), "laughter with a lash/* for it is only a triumphwithin the film narrative. Our laughter is coupled with the realizationthat, in real life, locomotives don't fly to heaven and the homeless do getshoved away to build hotels and factories. (It is a fascinating irony that atthe same time that The Promised Sky was playing to large crowds in the

Carnival versus lashing laughter in Soviet cinema 4

Soviet Union, Americans were lining up to see Robin Williams and JeffBridges in The Fisher King, which tackles the same themes and sameamount of "magic realism" using New York City as a landscape.)

It is this territory between laughter, irony, ambiguity, reality, and comictriumph that we will explore as we focus on the intersection of satire andSoviet cinema up to and including 1991. This collection of original essaysis dedicated to the fact that even during the darkest hours under Stalin,Soviets always laughed. If the comic can represent the purest form oflaughter, then satire, our object of desire in this anthology, is by generalconsensus a form of purposeful laughter. Voltaire ends his satiric novelZadig with the words "Yes, but. . . . " In a real sense, any satirist, Soviet orotherwise, works within such a double awareness of the need to suggest a"but," an alternative vision/perspective/reality. But as these essays testify,satire is perhaps the slipperiest of genres, the one most misunderstood,abused, and in danger of falling into something else, be it pathos, bathos,self-pity, farce, or pure propaganda.

Most of these essays grew out of an international conference on Sovietfilm satire held at Loyola University, New Orleans, in October 1990. Be-sides the film critics and cinema scholars attending from the SovietUnion, Canada, and the United States, a special guest satiric filmmaker,Yuri Mamin, was present to delight and trouble us with his own partic-ular form of purposeful laughter. (See Chapter XVI, "One Should Beginwith Zero: A Discussion with Satiric Filmmaker Yuri Mamin.") The bookis thus dedicated to Mamin and to all Soviet and, what we should nowperhaps call "post-Soviet," satirists who, for various purposes, have madegenerations of viewers laugh and think; for as Mamin himself has said, "Ifsatire becomes unnecessary, it would mean that all favorable processes inour society have come to a halt" (New Orleans, October 1990). And, wemight add, as was noted at the time of the conference, New Orleans wasnot perhaps an accidental tourist to the spirit of satire, for the "city thatcare forgot," as New Orleans is often called, not only produced jazz(which itself is often a form of satire on more rigid forms of music), butalso can claim to be the center of the carnivalesque in the United States,a spirit that definitely embraces satire and parody at its purest.

The scope of this book is wide but not exhaustive, suggestive ratherthan complete. The collection divides into three sections, Part One ofwhich addresses the specifics of the nature of satire combined with abroad view of the functioning of satire within Soviet culture. Part Twoconsists of essays on specific films (by Petric, Turovskaya, and Ratchford)and on cultural/political/satiric implications, plus three essays that ex-pand our understanding of specific topics within Soviet satire: VidaJohnson's essay on satire in Tarkovsky's films, Julie Christensen's study ofGeorgian comic satire as reflected in the films of Eldar Shengelaya, andOlga Reizen's piece on black humor and Soviet culture/film. Finally, Part


Three considers the degree and kind of purposeful laughter that hasemerged since the demise of the Communist/Socialist system in the So-viet Union and, indeed, since the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

The topography of Soviet satireBeginning with the present, we can note that the comic/satiric filmsemerging from the Soviet Union under glasnost call attention to a longand distinguished tradition of Russian laughter in literature (see Hortonand Brashinsky, The Zero Hour). Much of that tradition has been influ-enced by Western models (Horace, commedia dell'arte, Shakespeare, Mo-liere, Addison, etc.), especially in the spirit of the eighteenth century andthe Enlightenment. More specifically, Russian writers of the past learnedthe techniques of satire of individuals (Plautus, Terence) and of a moreuniversal kind, comedie de caractere as practiced by Ben Jonson, Moliere,and others in which it is the "humor" or vice itself, rather than the per-son, that comes under the focus of mockery. Thus, from Gogol to Chekhovor A. N. Ostrovsky, satire and humor have generally been aimed at a "se-rious" purpose. Eisenstein, as well shall see, also followed in this tradi-tion as he states in the egigraph: "Mine is a laughter of destruction"[Notes of a Film Director, p. 108).

A review of Soviet cinema suggests how important comic and satiricstrategies have been, even if approached ambivalently, since the begin-ning of the Soviet state, as Denise Youngblood's clearly stated study of So-viet cinematic laughter of the 1920s demonstrates (see Chapter III). In fact,Boris Shumyatsky, writing during 1935 in his book A Cinema for the Mil-lions [Kinematografiya miJJionov) just before the worst Stalinist years, de-fended the importance of laughter-provoking films under communismwith these words:

Tsarist and capitalist Russia were not acquainted with happy joyful laughter intheir best works. The laughter in Gogol, Shchedrin and Chekhov is accusinglaughter, laughter derived from bitterness and hatred. . . . We believe that, ifGogol, Shchedrin and Chekhov were alive today, their actual laughter would inthe Soviet Union acquire joie de vivre, optimism and cheerfulness. (Taylor, TheFilm Factory, p. 368)

Shumyatsky was defending Alexandrov's film Happy Guys (VeseJye reb-yata), from attacks of being the "apotheosis of vulgarity." His emphasis ison the sense of good clean fun that such films offered a Soviet societywith a promising future under communism. Just how ludicrous a simpleconcept of joie de vivre turned out to be during Stalin's era is detailed byMaya Turovskaya in her revealing essay on the filmming of Alexandrov'ssmash hit Volga, Volga.


Viewed from today's perspective, however, as seen in a film such as AForgotten Melody for a Flute, the Soviet realm of comedy and satire hastilted back to the "accusing laughter" of the Enlightenment in Europe andin Russian drama and literature as well. Glasnost has provided the op-portunity to use a light touch (farcical) and heavy touch (black humor asOlga Reizen and Svetlana Boym point out) to point out the shortcomings,contradictions, and failures of more than seventy years of Soviet social-ism. Let us consider five characteristics of satire in a Soviet context.

First, irony and accusing laughter are, in fact, a potent form of survival,an alternative world view as well as a means of offense. Irina Ratushin-skaya in her searing account of her years in a women's political prison forhuman rights activities under Brezhnev's term, Grey Is the Color of Hope,frequently suggests how often the darkest events - such as the planting ofa KGB stooge within their zone - brought on deep laughter rather thanpure anger. "It was all we could do not to collapse on the grass in helplessfits of laughter. On the whole, though, the situation might be far fromfunny" (p. 88), she writes, suggesting how intimately laughter becomes,under oppression, a way of distancing oneself from the oppressors and ofcelebrating one's own sense of self, values, dignity.

These remarks suggest what we should acknowledge but what is be-yond the scope of this book, a second observation on Soviet satire: thatthe satiric impulse as demonstrated in jokes, ironic comments, and suchis a necessary ingredient of daily life for citizens within a totalitarian orauthoritarian state if they are to maintain their own sense of worth, indi-viduality, and self-esteem. Satire in such a context within a totalitarianframework thus is both offense - an attack on the system - and defense —survival itself, psychologically, spiritually, and even physically.

Luis Bunuel used to say that his mission as a satiric/surrealist film-maker was to make even the most comfortable member of the viewing au-dience feel that he or she was not living in the best of all possible worlds.As these essays proclaim, the best of the Soviet satires have held a similarposition.

A third observation is provided by the metahistorian Hay den White,building on the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who sug-gests that the ironic/satiric stance forces the "normal" culture either tochange or to formulate better its own perspective. According to White, theironic/satiric/absurdist perspective forces us (and historians in particular)to ask: "On what grounds can we assert that the insane, the criminal, andthe barbarian are wrong? . . . And why should critics criticize with wordswhile those who possess real power criticize with weapons?" {Tropics ofDiscourse, p. 282).

Our fourth distinction, which builds on the others and provides uswith the title of our introduction, is that between carnivalesque satire andlaughter, and lashing satire, has existed satire which served the State.


Satire and parody at its most carnivalesque in Alia Surikova's popular spoofon Westerns and everything else including cinema itself, The Man from Capu-chins Boulevard (1987).

Mikhail Bakhtin explains in his essay entitled "Epic and Novel" howthe novel developed out of popular satiric traditions of laughter at theexpense of the formalized genre codes of the epic. Carnivalesque satireand laughter is a popular, folk laughter of the people, by the people, forthe people, and is, in the spirit of carnival, a sanctioned, liberating attackon all authority. As Bakhtin writes: "Laughter is a vital factor in layingdown that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impos-sible to approach the world realistically. . . . Familiarization of the worldthrough laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and in-dispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and ar-tisically realistic creativity in European civilization" (The DialogicImagination, p. 23). Laughter serving the State, however, serves the op-posite purpose: the control of behavior that might challenge authority, aswe shall discuss.

Finally, I would add that satire not only appears in the daily life of thepeople, but it shows up throughout many films that would not be judged"satires" per se. Little Vera, for instance, is permeated with satiric irony,often very funny, but more often dramatic and even tragic - there is "little


Sergei Soloviev's "hyper-eccentric realism" as viewed in Assa (1988). Stanis-lav Govorukhin (right), a director of such important films as We Cannot LiveThis Way [Tak zhiV neVzya, 1990), plays a Soviet Mafia figure in this collagerock and roll antinarrative.

hope" for little Vera in the industrial wasteland of her home city. Yet thefilm itself would not be called a "satire." Such would be the case withmuch of cinema made since the advent of gJasnost, particularly postmod-ernist works such as Rashid Nugmanov's The Needle (Igla, 1988), ValeryOgorodnikov's Prishvin's Paper Eyes (Bumazhnye gJaza Prishvina, 1989)and Sergei Soloviev's Assa (1988).

We need to briefly review the development of Russian/Soviet satire, but itmay be helpful first to suggest an international context from which toview our subject. The dominant form of comedy in the world is, of course,the Hollywood version, a genre that year after year dominates the box of-fice in terms of popularity (Horton, "A Laughing Matter/' p. 30). In 1988,for instance, six of the top ten money-making films were comedies, led atthe top by Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A definite contrast in styles and di-rections of comedy arises, therefore, between the predominant Soviet and


American laughter of the late 1980s. Much of American comedy has beensteadily losing the "democratic" or populist flavor that characterized it inthe past in favor of a "Reaganite" cynical neoconservatism that ignoresmany contemporary issues such as racial strife, drugs, women's rights,and AIDS. Such comedy ultimately endorses the status quo rather thanoffering any true critique of it. (It should also be pointed out that much ofthis comedy is xenophobic: In Ghostbusters II, the evil threat to New Yorkcomes from "Carpathia" in Eastern Europe and is spearheaded by a cer-tain Janosz Pha, looking suspiciously like Sergei Eisenstein himself as in-terpreted by Peter MacNicol.)

In contrast, much Soviet satire in literature, film, and music in recentyears has become an important voice in the critical reevaluation of Sovietvalues. In this sense, even though much Soviet comedy has changed fromthe toothless laughter in the past to a brand with an accusing tone, thattone can be read as more optimistic than the smug cynicism of many re-cent American comedies; for in criticism there is the hope of awarenessand thus of change.

Dostoevsky claimed that Gogol's short story "The Overcoat" is thestarting point of all Russian prose. But Gogol was following in the satiricRussian tradition of reforming humankind through laughter, "laughterthrough tears," as he defined his purpose in creating The Inspector Gen-eral. To understand how Gogol's center of levity is anchored in a blend ofrealism and the supernatural (fantasy and the grotesque) alongside a kindof Christian sense of compassion for the insignificant and downtrodden(and to recognize how much this spirit runs throughout Russian and So-viet literature and cinema, as Valentin Tolstykh explains in Chapter I ofthis volume) is to see how radically different such satire is from the Amer-ican "Reaganite comedy" of self-absorption and conservatism of the late1980s. In Chapter II, Kevin Moss goes a long way toward explaininghow "Aesopian" (thus, very clearly how purposeful) much of Soviet sat-ire has become. In Chapter VIII, Moira Ratchford's study of Alexandrov'sCircus explains the degree to which politically "correct" satire can havea backlash effect.

But carnivalesque or joyful laughter in a satiric vein has existed aswell. Looking to the 1920s, for instance, we see that farce, satire, what wewould call "vaudeville," and commedia deJJ'arte, and American "si-lent comedies" - especially those of Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd -made a strong impression on the young Soviet pioneering filmmakers.One of Lev Kuleshov's earliest and most interesting films is the light-hearted spoof, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land ofthe Bolsheviks (Neobychainye prildiucheniia mistera Vesta v stranebol'shevikov, 1924), with actor P. Podobed appearing as a Harold Lloydlookalike, complete with the dark-rimmed glasses, in his characterizationof the American, Mr. West, who is taken in by Soviet con men through


vrcmyo (blarney) and pokarukha (deception), two national sports thathave not been dulled by seventy years of socialism. The satire of capital-ism is definitely light and the humor joyful and thus in the spirit of anda tribute to that "anything goes" flavor of American silent comedy. Fi-nally, Vlada Petric (Chapter VI), in his contribution on the film, has notedthat the "film's subtext addresses the viewer's intimate world, touchingupon ideas and judgments antithetical to the Bolshevik view of historyand society."

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom,1929) owes much of its energy and high spirits to the large number of gagsand visual jokes, employing a playful use of film language, subtle and ob-vious, that run throughout the film, many of them with underlying sug-gestions of a healthy sense of sexuality. Again, the emphasis is much moreon joyful and playful laughter than on satire and biting dark humor, in thespirit of Shumyatsky's description of Happy Guys. Finally, AlexanderMedvedkin best represents an early Soviet director who comes closest toembodying a sense of what Mikhail Bakhtin would call "carnival laugh-ter." His Happiness (Schastye, 1935) is a surrealistic comic/satiric rompthat spoofs farm life in both the tsarist and Soviet times. His innovativeuse of camera tricks, outrageous absurdity, and slapstick (a soldier rub-bing a horse's rear end, a man sitting on the throne in an outhouse, a fa-ther and son hitting each other with spoons, etc.) still evoke uproariouslaughter as evidenced by a special 1988 tribute to Medvedkin held to afull house in Dom Kino, the Filmmaker's Center, at which the eighty-eight-year-old master of Soviet satire appeared in person. Laughter with adangerous lash, Medvedkin's film is not.

And Eisenstein himself writes in his autobiography, Immoral Memories(1946), that the figure he admires most is the clown. Also, in the essay "AFew Thoughts About Soviet Comedy" he goes further to describe Social-ist laughter. American laughter is for the pure pleasure of laughter, henotes, and even Chaplin wins us over as a "grownup behaving like achild" [Notes of a Film Director, p. 110). For the Soviet Union, however,comedy must be satiric: "The time has not yet come for us to indulge incarefree laughter: socialism has not yet been built. So there is no call forlight heartedness. Laughter is a new kind of weapon" [Notes of a FilmDirector, p. 111).

None of his films is a comedy or pure satire per se, except for the shortpiece he shot as an insert for the well-known staged production of Evena Wise Man Stumbles. But traces of both are found particularly in his firstfeature, Strike [Stachka, 1924), which shows Meyerhold's strong comic/improvisational influence in the surrealistic circuslike construction, car-toonlike caricature (especially of the fat, ugly capitalists), and heavilyironic use of montage in the film. Yet in Eisenstein's hands, the satireis more pointed, more accusing, and more dialectic than in the filmspreviously mentioned. For all of the comic touches, Eisenstein's climax is


literally "deadly" serious and in the service of the State: In the now fa-mous cut, he juxtaposes the shooting of workers on strike with the slaugh-ter of a cow, ending with the message REMEMBER, PROLETARIANS! Withsuch a didactic Marxist message, Eisenstein goes far beyond the con-fines of the more general and good-natured social satire of the popularplaywright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-86) in his Wiseman and otherpopular works.

Between these twin poles of laughter - Eisenstein's highly accusatory/moralistic perspective and Medvedkin's liberating/irreverent/satiric plea-sure- the satiric and comic/satiric muse within Russia and the SovietUnion can be seen to have developed.

Satire in close-upIt is my hope that this collection represents more than simply a Soviettake on satire. I would like to think that using the Soviet film tradition, upto and including a cinema of gJasnost, helps us to further consider theslippery and difficult nature of satire in general.

Harry Levin in an essay on satire quotes the old Soviet joke about thedistinction between socialism and capitalism: " 'Capitalism is the exploi-tation of man by man and socialism is the reverse' " (Levin, 'The Urges ofSatire/' p. 12). He notes that such a joke is clearly subversive - in fact,doubly so, for it makes fun of both political ideologies, but the end resultof satire is that it has no effect.

Clearly, Ryazanov's multitude of distinguished satires from Garage toForgotten Melody for a Flute and The Promised Sky, for instance, did notsingle-handedly or directly lead to the August revolution of 1991 or thecontinuing sweeping changes throughout the various republics of the So-viet Union. But I would argue with Levin that it is part of the often-surprising nature of satire that it does make a difference, often in waysone would not expect.

In Greece during the dictatorship of 1967-74, for example, it was sur-prising to see that some of the works banned during the first year werethose of Aristophanes. Furthermore, cultural historians of the period willhave to note that when the dictators stepped down in 1974, it was not be-cause of a bloody coup but, to a surprising degree, because they werelaughed out of office. For the Greeks, political jokes, topical satire, aresimply a way of life. Likewise for the Soviets, I would suggest that satirehas made a difference both on a personal and cultural/sociopolitical leveleven if "satire" does not appear clearly delineated on surveys or scien-tific charts. The difficulty, as Levin points out, is in measuring thisdifference.

We have described satire as purposeful, even when that purpose is thepure sense of liberation sanctioned by carnival. But besides being a formof pamphleteering, propaganda, and offense against a designated target


enemy, satire does also embody laughter as psychic release and thus as asurvival tool for the individual rather than an instrument of socialchange.

Levin does rightly say that this twin mode of an urge for liberal changeand yet for conservative survival between which satire, like a radioactiveparticle, vibrates suggests that, ultimately, satire should be considerediconoclastic. That is, the satirist strives to shatter images: "The end of sat-ire is reformation, affirmed Defoe. Reformation can look backward as wellas forward. The satirist is an ipso facto moralist, promoting the good byexcoriating the bad according to his lights" ("The Wages of Satire," p. 6).The image that led Eisenstein to say he needed a lash was the dream of anunrealized socialism. The image he wished to shatter was of the past, yetthe irony has been, of course, that it is with the image of socialism as prac-ticed that so many of the practitioners of satire under gJasnost have op-erated, with their newly gained freedom of expression.

And yet several of our contributors, including Youngblood, Tolstykh,and Reizen, suggest that in a period of rapidly changing values - or theshattering of all values - reality itself becomes more absurd than a satiristcan portray, and the pressures of mere survival make the distance thatlaughter requires difficult or impossible.

On a final note, satire remains an often thankless (and too often, a dan-gerous) field of artistic discourse. As Canadian novelist Robertson Daviesnotes, "Countries that are not always sure of their own identity are un-derstandably suspicious of satirists" (Levin, "The Wages of Satire," p. 1).Our hope is that critical awareness itself as represented in these essays isnot necessarily divorced from carnival laughter.

BibliographyBakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Em-

erson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.Eisenstein, Sergei. Immoral Memories. Trans. Herbert Marshall. Boston: Hough-

ton Mifflin, 1983. Originally published 1946.Notes of a Film Director. New York: Dover, 1970.

Horton, Andrew. Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1991.

"A Laughing Matter: American Comedy & Soviet Satire in the 1980's," SovietFilm (July 1990) pp. 30-31.

Horton, Andrew, and Michael Brashinsky. The Zero Hour: Glasnost and SovietCinema in Transition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Inside So-viet Film Satire grew out of my work on chap. 6 of The Zero Hour: "From Ac-cusing to Joyful Laughter: Restructuring the Comic/Satiric Muse."

Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1989.


Levin, Harry, "The Wages of Satire," in Literature and Society. Ed. Edward W.Said. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. pp. 1-14.

Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Universityof California Press, 1980.

Ratushinskaya, Irina, Grey Is the Color of Hope. New York: Knopf, 1988.Shapiro, Margaret, "Ablest Soviets Flee for Better Lives," Washington Post. No-

vember 23, 1991.Taylor, Richard (ed. & trans.) & Ian Christie (co-ed. & intro.). The Film Factory:

Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1988.

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Also recommended are Anna Law ton's KinogJasnost: Soviet Cinemain our Time, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Nicholas Galichenko'sGlasnost: Soviet Cinema Responds, Austin: University of Texas Press,1991; and, for an excellent study of Soviet silent film, Denise Young-blood's Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935, Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1990.

PART ONEThe long view:

Soviet satire in context

CHAPTER I

Soviet film satireyesterday and today

One should begin by stating a fact: Every release of a satiric film has beena rare occurrence, almost an incidental occurrence in the history of Sovietfilm. There were periods when no satiric films appeared on the screen inyears and, when having appeared, caused desolate irritation or open dis-like on the part of the authorities and official critics. Filmmakers workingin this genre were always scarce, and there are no critics and theoreticianswho have really analyzed film satire on a systematic basis with the pos-sible exception of Rostislov Turenev, the author of critical works on Sovietcomedy. The situation is almost a paradox. Social reality, that is, literallyspeaking, overwhelmed and oversaturated everything else with tragic andsatiric events with the result that nobody is seriously interested in the de-velopment of tragedy and satire as aesthetic genres.

I combine these two genres intentionally. They are closely connectedin their ability to tell the whole truth and by the unity and community oftheir substantial basis. They are two sides or poles of human existence:Something that is tragic on one level, on another becomes the object ofexposure and ridicule. Satire is tragic and tragicomic in its essence, caus-ing audiences not simply to laugh, but to laugh with despair, indignation,or anger: "laughter through tears," as Hegel said. In speaking of YuriMamin's Fountain and Vaghif Mustafayev's The Villain, Andrew Hortonwas right to note that the phenomena depicted in these films is not funnyat all, but the audiences burst out in laughter all the time while watchingthese films (Soviet Screen, no. 5, 1990). Similar to tragedy, satire countson the emotional shock in the cinema, on the state of aesthetic dismay andindignation, and on the enlightening catharsis that tragedy or the absurdcreates in the long run.

The problem is that the demand for such a shock appears to be an un-fitting luxury under the conditions of totalitarian systems or existence inthe "barracks." Satire and tragedy demand a certain level of self-reflection and self-awareness. They emerge from this feeling of dishar-mony, the "abnormality" of daily life, thinking, and being. And they are

17

The long view: Soviet satire in context 18

inconceivable in a place where the spirit of social complacency and self-deception claim the throne.

During the period from 1960 to 1985, only five or six satiric films werereleased: Welcome (Klimov, 1964), Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours(Serov, 1976), Garage (Ryazanov, 1980) and a few, very few, others. Andthis was in spite of the growing crisis, the accumulation of social contra-dictions. The atmosphere of ideological intolerance and constant pressureon filmmakers excluded any possibility of openly conversing, of showingsocial shortcomings on screen, or of critically depicting reality that cor-respond with the nature of satiric view. That is why filmmakers had to useallegorical forms, "teasing" audiences, using Aesopian language, count-ing on the spectators catching the allusions, which undoubtedly dimin-ished the force of exposure and ridicule.

However, "the higher pressure is, the sharper satire becomes," statesShaftsbury. Thus, the situation has changed recently. There are no for-bidden themes or censors anymore. Satiric films are being shown at theinternational film festivals and are being awarded, including those al-ready mentioned: The Fountain and The ViJJain. Satiric motives andmeans are being broadly used in many films from different genres. We canremember Zero City (Shakhnazarov, 1989), Prishvin's Paper Eyes (Ogor-odnikov, 1989), Black Rose Is the Emblem for Sadness, Red Rose Is theEmblem for Love (Soloviev, 1989), and others. Influential film criticsmaintain that satiric comedy has become a leading genre and an impor-tant trend in the cinema of glasnost and perestroika. They even say thattoo many satiric films are being produced now and that the viewers feelnostalgic about the old "comforting cinema."

I consider these reservations to be groundless and talks about the"flourishing" of the satiric genre to be a huge exaggeration. True satire to-day remains as scarce as other products today. The reasons for this are dif-ferent, however. What are they?

Unfortunately, not everything that is called "satire" today belongs to thegenre. It seems that filmmakers of many of these films are busy trying todeal with their human and creative complexes that have nothing to dowith art. I don't see any special courage or artistic revelation or even anyspecial need and reason in ridiculing and mocking our distant, and evenour near, past as is "suddenly" being done by our filmmakers recently. Ido not trust these many attempts to show in black colors all that was wor-shiped or treated with respect or was silently endured yesterday. Ofcourse, it is possible to find pleasure in revenge and comfort in mischie-vousness. We can see all that on the screen in abundance. But there is nopain, shame, remorse: "tears that are not seen to the world," said Hegel.And there can be no true satire without these. But there is "eksposing"art, so named mockingly by Dostoevsky.

Soviet film satire yesterday and today 19

I don't know what others think, but I don't feel any delight when I seecharacters in films dancing on Brezhnev's portrait or a naked girl appear-ing next to Stalin's face. Real satire is always a cry of dismay and shamethat can be levelled only by a sense of humor. Speaking of true satire, Iwant to stress that Yuri Mamin is a true satirist in the purely classicalsense. I became even more convinced that this is true after seeing hisnew film Whiskers (1990). From my point of view, this film is a social andartistic event simultaneously. Outstripping all other genres, it is a satirethat exposes not the past but the present contemporary Soviet reality -perestroika - that gave birth, as we have come to learn, to its own myths,legends, fetishes. Mamin is very precise in showing phemonena, colli-sions, and characters who will soon occupy the whole scene of this his-torical drama, casting our long-suffering country in another socialexperiment, another "Big Leap" with unpredictable consequences. Whilejournalists argue about the possibility of a military or some other kind ofcoup, and how it will happen and when, Whiskers vividly describes thecircumstances and people who are clearing the way for this possible couparmed with enthusiasm and new ideas that sound like slogans or slogansthat sound like ideas.

There can be various explanations as to why satire is still so rare on theSoviet screen. In the perception of many filmmakers, this genre is not onlydangerous but too "low" because of its ideological openness and inevi-table onesidedness in depicting life and people. But another explanationseems to be more precise. There is no other art genre in which deficiencyof character and ideals is felt so deeply. Satiric character cannot existwithout an ideal or at least a longing for the ideal. Negation for the sake ofnegation is not able to give birth to satire. Sometimes, filmmakers use ex-aggeration, the grotesque, even fantasy and the absurd to hide their im-potence, unable to grasp the essence of what is going on in reality. Thus,these new films are called "chernukha" (self-exposure) films that onlypoint to the dark side of life. Meanwhile, satiric negation involves thelight spread by the ideal, from truth and hope, that laughter itself carries.People in my country are tired from "hopeless" chernukha, from the feel-ing of desperation that is so generously spilled all over the screen. Theywant to know what they can hope for, parting with the past throughlaughter.

CHAPTER II

A Russian Munchausen:Aesopian translation

Tot samyj Mjunxgauzen (The Very Same Munchausen} was one of themost popular Soviet made-for-TV films of the late seventies. The tall talesof the eighteenth century German baron, which form the basis for thescreenplay by Grigorij Gorin, are known and loved the world over. Theprototype for the legend, Hieronymus Karl Friederich, Freiherr vonMiinchhausen, fought in the Russian service against the Turks beforeretiring to his estate, where he hunted and entertained. The legendaryMunchausen was born through the publication in 1785 of Baron Munch-ausen 's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia,which made the real baron something of a tourist attraction in his ownlifetime. The original text, written in English by the German refugee Ru-dolf Erich Raspe, was soon translated into German by Gottfried AugustBurger, and within two years it had gone through six English editions andbeen translated into French as well. New editions meant new additions toRaspe's original, and translators also felt free to embellish and edit as theysaw fit.

We have then a work in Russian about a German character originallydocumented in English. For the English reader, additional interest is pro-vided by the exotic settings of some of the adventures: Russia, Turkey, theIndies. But these apparently did not interest Gorin: He did not set his playabout the baron in Russia, strangely enough, but at the baron's home inGermany, and the film was shot in the GDR. The film is not a mere screenadaptation of the baron's famous adventures. In fact, there is very little ofthe original Munchausen left in Gorin's version: the setting, the characterof the baron, some of his tall tales. Most of Gorin's plot is invented. Whatmade Gorin's Munchausen so popular? His Soviet version of the Munch-ausen stories can be read as an Aesopian commentary on Soviet reality. Ina sense, he translates the legend of Munchausen into Aesopian language,and the task of the audience is to translate that language into the practicallanguage of criticism.

Let us begin with a synopsis of Gorin's plot. Baron Karl Munchausenhas been separated from his wife Jakobina and their son Theophilus for a20

A Russian Munchausen: Aesopian translation 21

number of years. Now he wants to marry his beautiful mistress Marta, butthis requires the permission of the authorities - the pastor and the Duke.The Baroness, who does not want a divorce, has her lover Ramkopf steala page from the Baron's day book to prove to the authorities that Munch-ausen is insane. Among other things, the Baron has scheduled a war withEnglend at 4:00 on that day. He is arrested for overstepping his authority,but released immediately when it transpires that the war will not takeplace, since England has freed the colonies, the condition set by the Baronfor not declaring war. At the divorce proceedings, all goes well until theBaron declares his new discovery - an extra day in the year - and signsthe papers with the date May 32. This is construed as contempt of court,the divorce is off, Marta is upset, and pressure is put on the Baron to re-nounce all of his inventions and tall tales. The Baron consents out of lovefor Marta, but he apparently goes insane and shoots himself.

Part two picks up the story some years later. The once skeptical Jako-bina, Ramkopf, and Theophilus now preside over a growing cult ofMunchausen. They lead tours of his castle, describe his exploits, set upmonuments, and publish his works. After his death, Munchausen has be-come a national hero. But the Baron is not, in fact, dead: He is living qui-etly with Marta incognito as the gardener Miiller. Bored of living as anordinary man, he wants to come back to life, whereupon he is arrested asan impostor. All of the Baron's acquaintances testify that he is not him-self. Since he will not renounce his identity, a public test is arranged toreenact one of the Baron's exploits, the flight to the moon from a cannon.The plan is to humiliate the Baron by shooting him a few feet: The cannonhas been loaded with wet powder. But the Baron learns of this and re-places the wet powder with dry. At the last minute, the Duke determinesto avert a catastrophe by declaring the Baron to be himself, not an impos-tor, and a decree is made to the effect that the flight to the moon has beencompleted successfully. The Baron, whose motto throughout has beenthat he always tells only the truth, refuses to accept this false decree. Af-ter a few words of wisdom, he begins to climb the rope ladder into thecannon. The film ends as Munchausen continues climbing the now end-less ladder into the sky.

Before we attempt to analyze Gorin's Munchausen as an Aesopian text,let us specify just what we mean by "Aesopian." In his On the Benefi-cence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature,Lev Loseff comments on the similarity between the Aesopian utteranceand the folk riddle.1 Jurij Levin defines the riddle as "a text whose refer-ent is an object not overtly named in the text itself."2 'The pragmaticfunction of the text is to make the addressee name the object-referent."3

Similarly, the function of an Aesopian text is to make the reader name, atleast to themselves, the Soviet reality to which the text does not overtlyrefer. While they do not name the riddle object directly, riddles can be


guessed because they contain an "incomplete and/or distorted (trans-formed, metaphoric) description of the riddle object."4 The same holds forAesopian texts: While they do not refer to Soviet reality overtly, theycould not function as Aesopian if they did not contain a transformed de-scription of something that can be deciphered as a reference to Sovietrealia.

Both the riddle and the Aesopian text point to their referents at thesame time they point away from them. Devices that function to concealthe referent Loseff calls "screens"; those that function to draw attention tothe referent he calls "markers."5 Screens and markers are really functionsthat many devices and elements of the text can perform.

In an article on Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, I used the term"masking device" to describe what Loseff means by screens.6 Bulgakovtakes full advantage of the grammatical, syntactic, and lexical devices athis disposal to mask reference to the secret police. He uses, for example,the passive voice and the indefinite-personal form without mentioningthe agent or logical subject involved. Levin refers to an incomplete, dis-torted, or metaphoric description of the riddle object; Bulgakov occasion-ally employs metonymy to avoid direct reference to the agents of thesecret police. "Cars" come to pick people up and never return.7 "Thewhole floor of a certain Moscow institution" was losing sleep overthe case (p. 576). The clever reader knows how to decipher these refer-ences, filling in the gaps with the agents of the appropriate institution.

Metonymic distortion of the referent functions simultaneously as ascreen - since it does not name the referent itself - and as a marker -since it names something contiguous to the referent. Markers are hardlyneeded in The Master and Margarita because the text is set in the SovietUnion in the Soviet period and the agents of the secret police play such anactive role in the plot. Even so, Bulgakov's masking devices are often de-signed to call attention to themselves. For example, the indefinite-personal form, which avoids reference to the agent of the action, is usedwith an excess of information about everything but the subject: "On theother side of the desk [they] raised [their] voices, hinted . . . " (p. 577). Weknow where they are and can deduce their emotional state, but Bulgakovconceals their identity. This oddity functions to draw attention to themasking device and therefore to its Aesopian function.8

If Gorin's Munchausen is in fact an Aesopian text, what devices func-tion as screens, drawing attention away from the covert referent of thetext, the Soviet Union? The most obvious device is the shift in setting.Gorin sets his tale not in the twentieth century and not on the territory ofthe Soviet Union: "The action takes place in one of the many Germanprincipalities in the 18th century."9 The setting is removed both his-torically and geographically from modern Russia. Loseff cites Kostylev'strilogy Ivan the Terrible (as well as Eisenstein's film) and Lenin's Impe-


rialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism as examples of Aesopian worksin which temporal and geographical shifts function as screens for the co-vert text.10 The parallels between Ivan the Terrible and Stalin were rec-ognized by the latter dictator himself, and Lenin's work, while overtlydescribing the relations between Japan and Korea, is meant as a criticismof Russian and her colonies.

The genre and intended audience of Munchausen also act as screens.Munchausen clearly belongs to the genre of tall tales, fantastic huntingand war stories that have no real basis in fact. They are meant to be takenlightly, as amusement or entertainment. In the original text, the tales areapparently told in an inn or a pub to amuse the narrator's fellow drinkers:"Since we have time, gentlemen, to crack another bottle of wine, I will tellyou of a very strange adventure . . . " a i Traditionally, the Munchausentales have become a part of children's literature the world over. The co-vert references are of course to a very real Soviet Russia, and the covertaudience is adult.

Another typical screening device Gorin employs is translation. As thetitle reassures us, Gorin's Munchausen is "the very same Munchausen"we know from the tradition. Perhaps the story is merely an adaptation forthe stage or screen and a translation into Russian? There are severalevents and episodes that the reader will recall from the original Munch-ausen: the stag which grows a cherry tree between its antlers (openingscene in the film, 31-2 in the English Munchausen; henceforth the filmwill be designated F, the Soviet play P, and the English text E); the horsewhich is cut in two by a falling portcullis (F, P: 171, E: 58-62); the epi-sode in which the Baron lifts himself out of a swamp by his pigtail (F, P:169, E: 67); the episode in which the Baron kills a bear by holding its pawsuntil it dies of hunger (F, P: 143-4, E: 212). These direct quotations fromthe tradition are meant to support the claim that Gorin's Munchausen isthe "very same Munchausen" - in other words, not Gorin's and not So-viet at all.

Translations and quasi-translations are a popular Aesopian screeningdevice. Pushkin's "From Pindemonte," which purports to be a translationfrom the Italian, but is in fact an original appeal for freedom, andOkudzhava's "Prayer of Frangois Villon," which is also original, pro-vide examples of how this screen works. It is interesting to note thatthe title often plays a role in establishing the text as one not originatingwith the author. Gorin's Munchausen is at best a quasi-translation, sinceit does have at least some points of contact with the original version, asdetailed above.

One of the central episodes, while not a perfect quotation from the orig-inal, is a conflation of several authentic Munchausen episodes: the Bar-on's journey to the moon. In the English original, the Baron makes twojourneys to the moon, one by climbing a bean plant (E: 69), the other in a


ship overtaken by a storm (E: 181-2). In Gorin's version, he has made thejourney by being shot out of a cannon (F, P: 189, 193). Gorin has conflatedthe journey to the moon with another episode in the original, in whichthe Baron is shot out of a cannon, but only to land in a large haystack (E:166); in another he rides a cannonball to inspect an enemy town (E: 63).

But these few parallels in episodes only help point up the fact that Gor-in's Munchausen is in fact very different from the original in plot. Insteadof a collection of short, more or less unrelated stories with a great varietyof setting and character, we have a unified story set in one principalitywith a limited cast. And aside from the peripheral episodes mentionedabove, there is only a little authentic fantasy to the Soviet plot. The Baronshoots through the chimney at a duck, which falls into a platter in thefireplace cooked and ready to serve (F, P: 147); when it is not needed, hethrows it out the window and it flies away (F, P: 150).

A number of the Baron's eccentricities in Gorin's version seem to beconnected with time. In the original, the Baron owned and used the slingwith which David killed Goliath, but only because he inherited it from aBiblical ancestor (E: 155). Likewise, another ancestor was familiar withShakespeare and had him released from prison by Queen Elizabeth (E:156). But the Baron himself was present in neither case: He travels widelygeographically, but not chronologically. Gorin's Baron, however, lived inancient Greece and has an autographed manuscript of Oedipus Rex fromSophocles and another of the Bible dedicated by Matthew (P: 146,175). Heapparently controls the time of day by adding gunshots to the chimes ofhis clocks (P: 144, 150). And the stumbling block at the divorce proceed-ings is the Baron's signature with his newly discovered date, May 32 (P:163). Against the background of the screening parallels, divergences fromthe original story act instead as markers, alerting the reader to the possi-bility that Gorin's work has an Aesopian reading. Perhaps Gorin's fasci-nation with time serves to relativize the category of chronology, thus in asense annulling the shift in time in the setting. Abuladze uses a similardevice in the movie Repentance. The court scene is attended by knightsin armor and judges in medieval robes, but the defendant and plaintiffsare in modern dress, and one of the judges plays with a Rubik's Cube: Thesetting is thus everywhere and nowhere (or rather at all times and at notime). But the audience is not allowed to relegate the action comfortablyto a time fixed and closed off from the present.

Other markers in Gorin's Munchausen function to direct attention notonly away from the overt referent of the text, but to a specifically Russiancontext. When the Baron invites Jakobina, Ramkopf, and the Burgomasterto announce his decision to come back to life, he introduces his an-nouncement with the following phrase: "Itak, gospoda, ja priglasil vas,chtoby soobshchit' preneprijatnoe izvestie" (So, gentlemen, I have invitedyou in order to inform you of a most unpleasant bit of news), and himself


comments that it would be an excellent phrase to begin a play (F, P: 181).In fact it is the Mayor's opening line in Gogol's Inspector General.12 Thequotation is doubly humorous, since the hero of Gogol's play, Xlestakov, ishimself an inveterate plagiarist, ascribing to his own authorship operas(The Marriage of Figaro, Robert Je Diable, Norma), the works of "BaronBrambeus" (O. I. Senkovskij), Zagoskin's Jurij MiJosJavskij, and even en-tire journals like Moskovskij telegraf.13

There are at least four allusions to Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Inthe film, when the Baron renounces his exploits we see him in his officeburning his manuscripts, a scene strongly reminiscent of the Master burn-ing his novel in Bulgakov's work (and indirectly of Gogol's destruction ofhis work, 563). Here too it turns out that "manuscripts do not burn,"14

since the complete works of the Baron are published after his "death" (P:172,182). When the Burgomaster refuses to call him Miller, Munchausensuggests that he add pokojnyj or usopshij (late) to his name (P: 179); inBulgakov, Ivan Bezdomny puzzles over wording his statement about com-ing "to Patriarch's Ponds with the late (pokojnyj) Misha Berlioz yesterdayevening."15 When the Baron is about to repeat his flight to the moon, thesergeant-major expresses his concern that the moon is invisible becauseof the clouds. Tomas responds that any fool can make it when it's visible,the Baron likes things to be more difficult (P: 192). This response is veryclose to Korov'ev's remark to Margarita about Azazello hitting a hiddencard.16 Finally, in the play, but not in the film, the Baron and Marta maketheir exit along a moonbeam road (P: 196) just as Pilat, the Master, andMargarita do in Bulgakov's novel.17

Quotations from Russian writers like Gogol act as markers to direct thereader's attention to Russia, and allusions to Bulgakov's work aboutStalinist Moscow direct their attention to Russia in the Soviet period.What other devices act as markers or can be interpreted as veiled allu-sions to Soviet reality?

Some markers work on the level of the lexicon, in the area of what theRussians are now calling "Jingvostranovedenie." When he determines torenounce his exploits, Munchausen says that Baron Munchausen willcease to exist in five minutes, "mozhete pochtit' ego pamjat' vstavaniem"(P: 170) "You may honor his memory by standing." Rising for a minute ofsilence to respect the memory of the dead is recognizable as a Soviet rit-ual, and the very expression used to refer to it is ritually fixed in the lan-guage. Loseff discusses such stylistic markers as they are used by Shvartsin The Dragon: "in the context of a 'Grimm Brothers' tale a specificallyRussian turn of phrase, a typically Soviet word, expression, plot situa-tion, or a term linked to the mind-set of the twentieth century will be per-ceived as a linguistic or cultural malapropism, as a shift into anotherstyle."18 Later the Baroness refers to the Baron's "svetlaja pamjat' i vseob-shchaja ljubov' sograzhdan" (P: 174) "shining memory and the general


love of his fellow-citizens" - another Soviet cliche. Such shifts in style toSovietisms function as markers, directing the audience to place the entirework in a Soviet context.

Other markers allude to situations that the audience should recognizeas Soviet. When the pastor arrives at Munchausen's castle in the firstscene, he attempts to ring the bell and the pull comes off in his hand.Shoddiness of material goods is associated by Russians not with Germany,but rather with their own country. That the episode is meant as a markeris substantiated by Tomas's reaction: he comes out, chides the miscreantpastor in a kind of peasant patter, replaces the pull, and goes back in, tell-ing the visitor to try again more lightly. Perhaps it is not the case that theSoviet Union is the only place where one is regularly reprimanded bystrangers, especially by those who guard doors, but the Soviet viewerwould surely view this scene as one familiar from his or her own expe-rience. These ubiquitous door guards make the experience of simply en-tering any Soviet building something one undertakes with anxiety.

Yet another scene in the film involves the problem of entrance, thistime to a theatrical performance:

RAMKOPF. Gospoda, gospoda, povtorjaju: zakrytyj sudebnyj eksperiment. Vxodtol'ko po speciarnomu razresheniju.

TOMAS. Gospodin Ramkopf!RAMKOPF. Net, net, net, nichego segodnja delat' ne mogu. V sledujushchij raz:

nichego segodnja delat' ne mogu.RAMKOPF. Ladies and gentlemen, I repeat: it's a closed judicial experiment. En-

try only by special permission.TOMAS. Mr. Ramkopf!RAMKOPF. NO, no, no, I can't do anything for you today. Next time. I can't do

anything for you today.

Again, anyone who has attempted to go to a theater the day of a perfor-mance in the Soviet Union recognizes the scene. Anything worth seeing isinvariably sold out, and those responsible are adamant that they can "donothing" about it.

Tipped off by these markers, the audience begins to look more closelyat the whole plot as a potential Aesopian comment on Soviet life. In spiteof the screening quotations from the original, this Munchausen turns outto be substantially new. Gorin emphasizes the conflict between Munch-ausen, the private citizen who wants to marry his beloved Marta, and theauthorities, who refuse to divorce him from his wife. Munchausen alwaystells the truth, as he repeats again and again, while the authorities forcehim to subscribe to lies.

The original Adventures of Baron Munchausen are narrated for themost part in first person by the Baron himself. True, he does present thestories as authentic: "It is not to be wondered at that readers and listeners


should be at times disposed to incredulity. But if, in the company that Ihave the honour of addressing, any one should be tempted to doubt thetruth of the statements I make, I should be deeply pained by this want ofconfidence" (E: 78). The keeper of the museum at Amsterdam "tells mystory to all strangers . . . he adds to it several details of his own invention,which do grievous harm to the truth and authenticity of the narrative" (E:92). And in one of the later sections, where the narrative is in third per-son: "Now gentlemen, you know Baron Munchausen thoroughly, and Ihope you can have no further doubts about his truthfulness" (E: 138). Nomatter how much the Baron protests his veracity, however, the reader isstill at liberty to doubt the Baron's fantastic adventures.

Not so in the film. The film opens at a campfire as the Baron tells hisstory of pulling himself out of the swamp by his pigtail to a small groupof skeptical hunters. When he recounts the episode of the deer with thecherry tree between its antlers, one of the others says,

Derevo? Skazhite luchshe vishnevyj sad!MJUNXGAUZEN. Esli by vyros sad, ja by skazal sad, a poskol'ku vyroslo derevo,

zachem zhe mne vrat'? Ja vsegda govorju tol'ko pravdu.OXOTNIK. Pravdu? (vse smejutsja)A tree? You may as well say a cherry orchard!MUNCHAUSEN. If an orchard had grown up, I would have said orchard, but since

it was a tree, why should I lie? I always tell the truth and only the truth.HUNTER. The truth? (all laugh)

At this point, the deer appears in the woods nearby with a small cherrytree growing between his antlers. This episode, which comes as a pro-logue before the titles, sets up the audience for the fantasy world of thefilm, a world in which the incredible adventures of the Baron must betaken as authentic, which means that anyone who impugns their veracityis wrong. Further episodes, such as the duck shot through the chimneythat falls fully cooked and sauced into a platter and flies away whenthrown out the window, confirm for the audience the Baron's claim thathe always tells the truth. The medium of film allows Gorin and Zakharovto show the split between words and reality directly. Only occasionallyare the Baron's words at odds with the reality we see on the screen, suchas when he declares night during broad daylight. Most of the time the Bar-on's claims, fantastic as they may be, are substantiated, while those of hisenemies are shown to be false.

The turning point in the plot of the first part comes when the Baron isprevailed upon to lie:

MJUNXGAUZEN. NO ja zhe skazal pravdu!BURGOMISTR. Da chert s nej, s pravdoj, inogda nuzhno i sovrat', ponimaj eto,

sovrat'. Gospodi! Takie elementarnye veshchi mne prixoditsja ob"jasnjat' baronuMjunxgauzenu! (P: 168)


MUNCHAUSEN. But I told the truth!BURGOMASTER. TO hell with the truth, sometimes you have to lie, get it, to lie.

God, to imagine I have to explain such simple things to Baron Munchausen!

He agrees that the date is not May 32, but June 1. In the film, he is madeto stand like a schoolboy in front of the Duke to repent and recant his dis-covery. When the Baron is asked what day it is, the Burgomaster holds upone finger. 'The first of June." "Louder, please, for all," prompts the Duke.He repeats his statement. The Duke (the Burgomaster in the play, 169) con-soles Munchausen that "even Galileo recanted," to which he replies,"That's why I always preferred Bruno." The weight of this comparison es-tablishes the potential seriousness of the Baron's denial, and broadeningthe historical reference again raises the possibility that an eternal patternis intended, one applicable even in the present.

The pastor agrees to marry the Baron and Marta only if he renouncesall his adventures as well. The Burgomaster suggests that in secret he cancontinue to believe, but the Baron objects, "Ja ne umeju vtajne. Ja mogutoFko otkryto" (film only). "I can't do it in secret, I can only be open." Thesplit implied is not only between the individual and society or authority,which forces him to conform, but also within the individual himself if hebetrays his individuality by giving in to pressure.

Part II contains even more allusions to situations recognizably Soviet.According to the stage directions in the play, three years have passed (P:171). The Baron has become a legend and a national hero. His castle is amuseum, through which tourists from abroad are led, a statue of the horsecut in two by the portcullis is to be set up, Jakobina has published thecomplete edition of his adventures (P: 171-2). Even the Baron's new date,the May 32, is to be used at the trial (P: 193). What has happened? Withthe Baron safely dead, the state has found it useful to take advantage of hisadventures for its own glorification. But this is safe only so long as theBaron is dead, which is why the authorities do everything they can to pre-vent him from returning to life.

This situation is familiar to Soviet audiences from such figures as Pas-ternak, Nabokov, and Tarkovsky. Pasternak was several times officiallychided and finally expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union in 1958 for thescandal over Doctor Zhivago. His relatives were evicted from the Pere-delkino dacha in 1984. In early 1987, the 1958 expulsion was rescinded,and plans were announced to set up a Pasternak museum in the dachaand to publish Doctor Zhivago in 1988.19 Nabokov too, who was personanon grata as an emigre while he lived, can now be discussed and printedin Russia. Tarkovsky, whose films were never widely distributed orhighly praised in the official press, was nearly forgotten after he failed toreturn from the West. But no sooner did he die than an obituary waspublished20 and the authorities promised a retrospective of his films andeven showings of the two films he made abroad.21 But none of the works


of living emigres were shown or published in their homeland until thelate 1980s.

When he attempts to come back to life, the Baron is arrested and triedas a pretender. Though the defendant seems to have acquired the Baron'sgait, voice, and even his fingerprints, Ramkopf presents the following"facts" as proof that the Baron's claims are false: "the notice of the Baron'sdeath, an extract from a church book, the receipt for the coffin" (P: 185).As I have argued elsewhere, it is characteristic of Soviet culture to take thedocument (the sign) as the primary test of truth.22 While reality is takenas primary in the West, it is the word that is hierarchically more signifi-cant in the East. This is why Bulgakov can write "Raz net dokumenta,netu i cheloveka ("No document, no person!").23 The reverse also holdstrue - a document is even better than the reality it describes (the sign ismore important than its referent or, as Lotman and Uspensky would haveit, the expression is more important than the content24). Shvarts takessimilar humorous advantage of the Soviet fascination with the documentin The Dragon. Instead of a spear, the Burgomaster hands Lancelot a pieceof paper:

Eto udostoverenie daetsja vam v torn, chto kop'e dejstvitel'no naxoditsja v re-monte, chto podpis'ju i prilozheniem pechati udostoverjaetsja. Vy pred"javite egovo vremja boja gospodinu drakonu, i vse konchitsja otlichno.25

This certificate attests that the spear is really being repaired, which is certifiedby the signature and the seal affixed. Present it during the battle to Lord Dragonand everything will end splendidly.

The importance of the document is brought out again at the end ofMunchausen, when the Baron is declared to have completed a trip to themoon:

RAMKOPF. Pozdravljaju vas, baron!MJUNXGAUZEN. S chem?RAMKOPF. S uspeshnym vozvrashcheniem s limy.MJUNXGAUZEN. Ja ne byl na lune.RAMKOPF. Kak eto - ne byl, kogda est' reshenie, chto byl? (P: 195)RAMKOPF. Congratulations Baron!MUNCHAUSEN. For what?RAMKOPF. On your successful return from the moon.MUNCHAUSEN. I wasn't on the moon.RAMKOPF. What do you mean, you weren't there, when there is a decision that

you were?

So long as there is a written document to that effect, whether or not thejourney actually took place is immaterial.

At the trial, no one is allowed to recognize the Baron as himself: He isnow the gardener Miiller (Miller in the play). That this situation is un-natural is shown even by the reaction of those commanded to arrest theBaron:


FEL'DFEBEL'. Gospodi, da ved' eto . . .BURGOMISTR. KtO?!FEL'DFEBEL'. Da ved ' eto . . .

BURGOMISTR. KtO?!FEL'DFEBEL'. Ne mogu znat'! (P: 184)

SERGEANT-MAJOR. My god, but it's . . .

BURGOMASTER. Who?SERGEANT-MAJOR. But it's . . .

BURGOMASTER. Who?SERGEANT-MAJOR. I have no idea!

The split between the official version and reality is felt most strongly bythe Burgomaster, who is the Baron's friend, and who therefore tries not totestify that he is not himself:

BURGOMISTR. Gospodin sud'ja, ja staryj chelovek. Izbav'te menja ot etojmuki. . . U menja slabye glaza i sovershenno nenadezhnaja pamjat'. Ja moguoshibit'sja . . .

SUD'JA. NO vy uznaete v podsudimom barona ili net?BURGOMISTR. Ne znaju . . . Chestnoe slovo . . . Inogda mne kazhetsja, chto eto

on, inogda - net. . . Mogu li ja polagat'sja na svoi lichnye oshchushchenija v ta-kom vazhnom dele? . . . Polnost'ju doverjaju sudu. Kak reshite, tak i budet! (P:188)

BURGOMASTER. Your honor, I am an old man. Relieve me of this torment. . . Ihave weak eyes and a completely unreliable memory. I may make a mistake . . .

JUDGE. But do you recognize the defendant as the Baron or not?BURGOMASTER. I don't know . . . Honestly . . . Sometimes it seems to me that it

is him, sometimes not. . . Can I rely on my personal feelings in such an importantcase? . . . I trust the court completely. As you decide, so be it!

The language itself breaks down when Marta says she will tell the truth,that the Baron is himself:

MARTA. Ja skazhu pravdu!RAMKOPF. Togda my i vas privlechem k otvetstvennosti kak lzhesvidetelja!BARONESSA. Uspokojsja, Genrix! Esli chelovek xochet skazat' pravdu, on imeet

na eto pravo. Mne by tol'ko xotelos' znat', kakuju pravdu vy imeete v vidu?MARTA. Pravda odna.BARONESSA. Pravdy voobshche ne byvaet. Pravda - eto to, chto v dannyj mo-

ment schitaetsja pravdoj. (P: 189)MARTA. I will tell the truth!RAMKOPF. Then we will bring you to trial for perjury [literally as a false

witness]!BARONESS. Calm down, Henrich! If a person wants to tell the truth, he has the

right to. But I would just like to know what truth you have in mind?MARTA. There is one truth.BARONESS. There is no truth at all. Truth is what is considered truth at the mo-

ment.


A society which promotes such statements is surely morally bankrupt bymost standards.

The final scene in the film is depicted as a show trial, with the accenton the show. As the scene opens, the orchestra is tuning up.

BURGOMISTR. Vse pojdet po planu: posle uvertjury, doprosy. Potom posledneeslovo podsudimogo, zalpy, obshchee vesel'e, tancy.

RAMKOPF. Frau Marta, proshu vas, tochno po tekstu!BURGOMASTER. Everything follows the plan: after the overture comes the inter-

rogation. Then the defendant's last words, a salute, general merriment, dancing.RAMKOPF. Frau Marta, please, follow the text exactly!

Not only is there a text to follow and an orchestra to accompany theproceedings, but there remain in the film some hints that Marta hasbeen drugged to induce her to comply with the plan. All these details aremeant to direct the audience to the show trials of the 1930s in the SovietUnion.

So far we have dealt with general allusions to Soviet reality. There isalso one character in the film who may be intended as a parody of a spe-cific person. The character of the Duke appears only in the film, not in theplay, and it stands to reason that the ruler of a world that covertly repre-sents the Soviet Union should covertly represent its leader at the time -Brezhnev. The film portrays the Duke as inept and disinterested in poli-tics. He is more concerned with fashion: Indeed, he seems to be an ama-teur dressmaker. He describes all state problems in terms of what oneshould wear and judges people by their clothes. When he learns of thepossible war with England, he goes to the globe and asks, "Where is it,where, I ask you." "Here." "And where are we?" "We are here." He thentakes his tape measure to the globe and declares, "But it's so close!"

The Duke in the film is both protected and controlled by those aroundhim. When we are introduced to the Duke, his steward attempts to pre-vent entry to his rooms while he is indulging in his hobby:

Ego vysochestvo zanjat vazhnejshimi gosudarstvennymi delami. On provoditekstrennoe soveshchanie. Ego voobshche tarn net.

His highness is busy with state affairs of the utmost importance. He is holdingan emergency meeting. He's not there at all.In fact, he is there, in his office, which doubles as a dressmaking salon.

The Burgomaster acts both as prompter and as translator for the inar-ticulate and inept Duke. Jakobina arrives to ask about the divorce decree:

JAKOBINA. Vy podpisali proshenie barona Mjunxgauzena o razvode?GERCOG. Kto podpisal? Ja podpisal?(Burgomistr kivaet)GERCOG. Da, ja podpisal.JAKOBINA. Znachit, on mozhet zhenit'sja na Marte?


GERCOG. Pochemu zhenit'sja?(Burgomistr kivaet)GERCOG. Da, on mozhet zhenit'sja.JAKOBINA. Did you sign Baron Munchausen's request for a divorce?DUKE. Who signed it? Did I sign it?(Burgomaster nods)DUKE. Yes, I signed it.JAKOBINA. SO he can marry Marta?DUKE. Why marry?(Burgomaster nods)DUKE. Yes, he can marry.

The Burgomaster's role as front man and interpreter for the Duke is evenclearer in the last scene, where the Duke's inarticulate mutterings aretranslated into legalese:

GERCOG. NU vot chto: navernoe my tut vse byli v chem-to nepravy . . .BURGOMISTR. Gospoda! Resheniem gannoverskogo suda, v svjazi s uspeshnym

zaversheniem eksperimenta . . .GERCOG. Raz chto tak vse slozhilos', tak pust' vse idet, kak idet.BURGOMISTR. Prikazano, vysochajshim poveleniem prikazano schitat' podsudi-

mogo baronom Mjunxgauzenom.DUKE. Well here, then: probably we've all been somehow wrong . . .BURGOMASTER. Ladies and gentlemen! By decision of the court of Hannover, in

connection with the successful completion of the experiment. . .DUKE. SO long as it's turned out that way, let things go as they're going.BURGOMASTER. YOU are commanded, commanded by the highest junction to

consider the defendant Baron Munchausen.

This satire is biting enough if we can safely deduce that the ruler of a statethat represents the Soviet Union in Aesopian translation representsBrezhnev. But is there any evidence for such a satiric version?

Most of the anecdotes about Brezhnev in his last years dealt with hissenility. He and other politburo members were portrayed playing with toysoldiers or putting on mismatched socks, then sending each other homeonly to find that "the pair there doesn't match either." But the most con-sistent theme of the Brezhnev anecdotes was prompting: The invariantmotif was that Brezhnev could do nothing without a text. One anecdotehas him addressing a foreign visitor:

"Dear Indira Gandhi!""Comrade Brezhnev, it's Margaret Thatcher!""Dear Indira Gandhi!""Comrade Brezhnev, it's Margaret Thatcher!""Dear Indira Gandhi!""Comrade Brezhnev, it's Margaret Thatcher!""I know it's Margaret Thatcher, but here it says 'Dear Indira Gandhi!' "


It was joked that, at the opening of the Moscow Olympics, he five timesreads "O" followed by stormy and lengthy applause. By the head gesturesof the joke teller, the listener understands that he is reading the logo of theOlympics at the top of the page. In another anecdote, Suslov comes to thedoor three times and knocks. Each time Brezhnev gets up, puts on hisglasses, and reads from a piece of paper "Who's there?" Suslov does notanswer because he "forgot his glasses at home" or "forgot his note." Allthese anecdotes show a leader who is not in control, who relies on textsprovided by others - precisely the image presented by the Duke in Gorin'sMunchausen.

There are no other specific details that refer to Brezhnev's anecdotalquirks: his eyebrows, his accent, his medals, his aspirations as a writer.But Zakharov may be taking advantage of his visual medium in castingLeonid Bronevoj as the count. Bronevoj's demeanor and expression ofcombined weltschmerz and indifference (or is it stupidity?) do seem torecall Brezhnev.

In general, censorship varied in the Soviet Union according to the me-dium and the size of the audience. Among the dramatic media, theaterwas the freest, since it reached the smallest audience. Theatrical perfor-mances could also change from night to night, which made them harderto control: once a play was approved for production, subtle changes couldstill be introduced. It was because of this freedom that Ljubimov's pro-ductions at the Taganka Theater became so popular. But on a nationalscale, only the elite few ever saw a Taganka production. Not so film andtelevision, both of which potentially reached millions of viewers. The So-viet State early on recognized the importance of film as a propagandatool, and film became, alongside the socialist realist novel, the dominantgenre in Soviet culture. With the advent of television, the new mediumwas enlisted in the struggle to engineer human souls. Television is po-tentially even more influential, and therefore more dangerous than film.A film could be tested in front of small audiences, then given closed runs,with the number of copies controlling the size of the audience. It couldalways be pulled from distribution if it was perceived as dangerous. Atelevision program, however, reaches millions of viewers at once. This ex-plains the notoriously tight security at Gosteleradio and the general lack(until late perestroika) of live broadcasts. The changes in Soviet televisionintroduced by Gorbachev's glasnost campaign show only how importantthe medium was in Soviet propaganda. But Gorin's Munchausen waswritten, produced, and shown in the days before gJasnost. Perhaps this iswhy it enjoyed such popularity: At the time, it must have shown daringcontrast to the usual television fare.

For those who are able to translate the Aesopian language of Gorin'sMunchausen, the story undergoes a remarkable transformation in cross-ing the border from England and Germany to the Soviet Union and from


fantastic tale to drama on stage and film. In the imaginary world of thefilm, the fantastic adventures of the Baron become reality. In the originaladventures, the Baron's claims of authenticity are taken of a piece withthe adventures themselves as fictional, while in the film they are shownto be true. The result is a reversal of the hierarchy of truth and fiction, inwhich those who question the Baron's veracity and urge him to recant hisadventures appear not as spokesmen for reason, but as dictators who en-force conformity even when it means ignoring the truth. It is the author-ities and Munchausen's opponents who, in the film, place more store inthe power of language (the document) than in the reality they see beforetheir eyes. As they cannot recognize the Baron, they cannot recognize thetruth unless it is asserted in a document. Ironically, it is precisely thisimportance of the document in Soviet culture that leads to the role of cen-sorship, which requires the author to translate his story about truth andfiction into Aesopian language. Munchausen says he cannot do it "in se-cret"; his author, however, is forced to do exactly that: But Aesopian lan-guage allows him to reveal his message to the initiates.

Notes1. Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern

Russian Literature (Miinchen: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1984), p. 29.2. Ju. I. Levin, "Semanticheskaja struktura russkoj zagadki," Trudy po znakovym

sistemam, 6, no. 308 (1973): 166-90, cited at p. 166.3. Ibid.4. Ibid. p. 1675. Loseff, Beneficence of Censorship, p. 51.6. Kevin Moss, "Bulgakov's Master and Margarita: Masking the Supernatural and

the Secret Police," Russian Language Journal 38, nos. 129-30 (1984): 115-31.7. M. A. Bulgakov, Master i Margarita, in Belaja gvardija, TeatraVnyj roman,

Master i Margarita (Leningrad: Xudozhestvennaja literatura, 1973), pp. 423-812,cited at p. 492. Further references are to this edition.8. Loseff's discussion of structuredness and oddity as a marker in the context of

Levin's structuredness and unreality as features that create the internal point ofthe riddle is unconvincing.9. Grigorij Gorin, "Tot samyj Mjunxgauzen .. . ," Komicheskie fantazii (Moskow:

Sovetskij pisatel', 1986), pp. 139-96, cited at p. 141.10. Loseff, Bene/icence of Censorship, pp. 63-5.11. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (New York: Pantheon, 1944), p. 110.12. N. V. Gogol', Revizor (Moskow: Detskaja literatura, 1974), p. 29.13. Ibid., p. 64.14. "Rukopisi ne gorjat," Bulgakov, Master i Margarita, pp. 703.15. Ibid., p. 530.16. "V tom-to i shutka, chto zakryty! V etom-to vsja i sol'! A v otkrytyj predmetmozhet popast' kazhdyj!" Ibid., p. 695.17. Ibid., pp. 798, 811-12.


18. Loseff, Beneficence of Censorship, p. 135.19. Literaturnaja gazeta, 19 Feb., 1987, p. 6.20. Literaturnaja gazeta, Jan. 7, 1988, p. 8.21. Literaturnaja gazeta, Apr. 8, 1988, p. 8.22. Kevin Moss, "Bulgakov's Master and Margarita: Masking the Supernaturaland the Secret Police," Russian Language Journal 38, nos. 129-30 (1984): 115-31.23. Bulgakov, Master i Margarita, p. 706.24. Yu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspensky, "On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,"New Literary History 11 no. 9 (Winter 1978): 211-32.25. Evgenij Shvarts, "Drakon," in P'esy (Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel', 1972), pp.277-350, cited at p. 307.

CHAPTER III

"We don't know what tolaugh at": Comedy andsatire in Soviet cinema

(from The Miracle Workerto St. Jorgen's Feast Day)

Without laugher, comedy is impossible. It'sdifficult to make a Soviet comedy because wedon't know what to laugh at.

Osip Brik1

Early Soviet cinema had many triumphs, but few comedies are typicallycounted among them.2 My purpose here is not, however, to recite a litanyof failures, but rather to look at the few successes and to explore the rea-sons why the genre faced such formidable obstacles.3 While comedy wasby no means the only troubled genre in Soviet silent cinema, an exami-nation of the evolution of comedy has exceptional potential to illuminateissues important in understanding the transformation of Soviet society inthe 1920s: the cultural and political elites' disdain of mass opinion, theirpuritanical bias against entertainment, and the incipient authoritarianismimplicit in their efforts to turn a cinematic culture into a politicalculture.4 These tendencies, moreover, were quite apparent before the Cul-tural Revolution of 1928-32. By 1927, as Brik's words indicate, the USSRwas a society where even humor had to be "managed."

Before turning to a discussion of the scientific problems of film satireand comedy during the 1920s, we need to keep certain aspects of the cin-ematic context in mind. Although cinema had been nationalized in 1919and placed under the control of the Commissariat of Enlightenment(Narkompros), this control was actually nominal for most of the decadedue to deep divisions within the commissariat about the function of cin-ema in a Socialist society. Narkompros's head, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wasa cultural pluralist actively involved in cinema affairs and a vigorous pro-ponent of entertainment films in deeds, if not always in words.5 The statefilm trust, called Sovkino from 1925 to 1929, was dominated by like-minded individuals, and Sovkino pursued a policy of financing big-budget entertainment films and importing foreign, especially American,films in substantial quantities. The existence of the Mezhrabpom studio -

36

"We don't know what to laugh at" 37

heavily capitalized, quasi-independent, and famed for its success at thebox office - further complicated an already complex situation.6

But although money and power lay behind the entertainment film, therewere formidable forces arrayed against it. Narkompros's Main Committeeon Political Education (Glavpolitprosvet) led the opposition, Lunachar-sky's views notwithstanding. Young directors also tended to oppose en-tertainment films as "bourgeois," promoting their own work by way ofcontrast as somehow truly "revolutionary."7 The press was controlled bycritics who likewise believed that Soviet cinema had to distinguish itselffrom its commercial counterparts in the West. A few critics supported theefforts of avant-garde artists, interpreting cinema's "social charge" (sotsi-alnyi zakaz) as that of evaluating the masses, weaning them away fromtheir unfortunate affinity for the decadent bourgeoistaste culture.8 Moreoften, however, critics believed that cinema needed to educate the audi-ence in a more traditional fashion (even if indirectly), so films needed tobe socially significant - or at the very least, not "bourgeois."9

Given this climate of opinion, it should not be surprising that most es-tablished cinematic genres presented daunting challenges to Soviet film-makers throughout the first decade of Soviet movie production. Genrefilms were, after all, profoundly "bourgeois" products of commercialfilmmaking - that is, there was nothing intrinsically Marxist or Sovietabout them. Many 1920s Soviet filmmakers and critics who pondered this"problem" doubted that a truly Soviet cinema could be created merely bypouring new content into old forms. To make matters worse as far as theculture patrol dominating key positions in Glavpolitprosvet and the presswas concerned, the mass audience exhibited marked preference for the"basest" of the bourgeois genres - melodrama, adventure, slapstickcomedy.10 Clearly, much painful reeducation lay ahead for filmgoers, andfor filmmakers of the old school.

Yet for the time being, the "old specialists" who dominated popularcinema chose, consciously or unconsciously, to ignore these debatesabout art and enlightenment. Instead, they went briskly about theirbusiness, effortlessly turning out an array of "pseudo-Soviet genrefilms, focusing on comedy, melodrama, adventure, and historical (cos-tume) drama.11 Some of these genres were easier to "Sovietize" thanothers. Soviet popular directors found it reasonably easy to Sovietize ad-venture by making civil war movies that emphasized adventureover politics.12 Others, albeit mainly those with prerevolutionary film-making experience, also did a credible job Sovietizing the historical filmby selecting incidents from the nineteenth-century revolutionary move-ments for dramatization.13 That these were indeed popular with audi-ences can be demonstrated through audience studies and by looking atimport figures.14


Comedy and melodrama were a rather different matter, proving muchmore difficult to Sovietize. Although melodramatic elements could be in-fused into other genres, the constraints of cultural politics (specifically,disdain for films that depicted the joys and sorrows of private life) meantthat the pure melodrama was rare indeed in Soviet cinema.15 Most criticsconsidered melodrama a shockingly bourgeois product directed at for-eigners, NEP men, bourgeois specialists (spetsy), and unreconstructedelements of the petty bourgeoisie (meshchane). But the import figurestell us that audiences - workers included - responded quite warmly tosuch films.16

Yet despite the serious problems facing those who produced melodra-mas, there can be no doubt that comedy was the perennial sore spot ofSoviet silent cinema. More was written about it than about any othergenre, and though critics were constantly declaring comedy the most im-portant genre of the most important art, they just as constantly carpedabout the results.17 Relatively few major directors (notable exceptions be-ing Iakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet) were willing to risk being abusedmore than once for making the "wrong" kind of comedy.18

Why were comedies as a genre more heavily criticized and more dif-ficult to make than melodramas? The answer is not immediately obvious.As was the case with melodrama, divergence between mass and eliteopinion on film comedy was marked; comedies were extremely popularamong audiences, especially among young people and children. As wasalso true of melodrama, imported comedies constitute a significant per-centage of films on the screen. Taken separately, neither factor seems es-pecially noteworthy, but in combination, the source of the "problem"becomes more obvious.

In the 1920s, the Soviet cinema community feared the influence andcompetition of foreign films, a phenomenon that was dubbed the "inos-transhchina" (from the Russian word for "foreign").19 This phobia wasnot undifferentiated: Greatest of all was the fear of American influence,the amerikanshchina (or "Americanitis," to borrow Ronald Levaco'switty translation of the pejorative).20 Since there were few "good" Sovietcomedies, to the dismay of critics and filmmakers alike, American com-edies (Hollywood's most formidable product on the international market)were firmly entrenched. From 1921-28, 43% percent of American im-ports were comedies; more importantly, the 324 American comedies im-ported were more than three times the number of Soviet comediesproduced in the same period.21 These are staggering figures, especiallywhen one considers that the audience supposedly being Americanizedwas the youth audience.

But this is only part of the explanation. Soviet filmmakers, young andold alike, were fairly confident of their talents, and I suspect they wouldhave been less reluctant to take on American comedies if only they had


known what they could safely laugh at, to paraphrase Brik. In the begin-ning, it seemed fairly easy. Early attempts at comedy like The MiracleWorker (Chudotvorets, Aleksandr Panteleev, 1922) and CommanderIvanov (Kombrig Ivanov, Aleksandr Razumnyi, 1922) satirized religion, asubject that even apolitical "old specialists" could be sure was acceptableto the new regime. The humor in The Miracle Worker, a tale of a charlatanpriest unmasked by cunning peasants, is crude and physical, but the filmearned its place in Soviet film history as "Lenin's favorite." CommanderIvanov was more daring, a sly little romantic comedy about a Red Armyofficer who breaks down the "bourgeois morality" of a priest's daughter toget her to "register" with him without a religious ceremony.22 But howmany variations on this theme could there be?

White Guardists and foreigners were other potentially interesting sub-jects for satire, because they seemed to offer safety and scope at the sametime. It had nonetheless been clear to directors since The ExtraordinaryAdventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Neobychainye prik-liucheniia mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov, Lev Kuleshov, 1924) thatforeign themes could be just as "dangerous" as foreign films. Even thoughKuleshov's depiction of the naive fears of the ridiculous Mr. West and thebelligerent posturing of his swaggering bodyguard, Cowboy Jeddy,seemed perfectly in keeping with the stereotypical view of Americansas self-centered and ignorant, Mr. West was poorly received by critics(though not by viewers).23 While a number of other comedies employedAmerican or foreign characters for human interest, the only two majorcomedies based on foreign themes were The Case of the Three Million(Protsess o trekh millionakh, Iakov Protazanov, 1926) and Mr. Lloyd's Voy-age (Reis mistera Lloida, Mikhail Verner, 1927). Both films were actuallyset abroad - The Case concerns a debonair Italian thief and a corruptbanker; Mr. Lloyd, a White Guardist conspiracy on a luxury liner. Theyboth were heavily criticized as "bourgeois," the latter being quite literallyanathemized when it appeared.24

By middecade, it was obvious even to the most reluctant of Soviet cit-izens that the Bolsheviks were there to stay. Encouraged by the relativelyrelaxed cultural politics of the early NEP, directors of popular films begantentative attempts to satirize Soviet society, ever so mildly. Yet two of thebest such efforts, The Tailor from Torzhok (Zakroishchik iz Torzhka, Ia-kov Protazanov, 1925) and The Girl with the Hathox [Devushka s korobkoi,Boris Barnet, 1927), were nonetheless derided in the press as "bourgeois."The Tailor from Torzhok, a chaste variant of a bedroom farce starring thephenomenally popular Igor Ilinskii and Vera Maretskaia, was actually acommissioned film, intended to publicize the state lottery. Protazanovthrew in some exploitative NEP men to make it even more "socially sig-nificant," but the critics were hard to satisfy and branded the movieapolitical.25 Barnet's The Girl with the Hatbox is quite a similar picture in


that it is gently satiric. Featuring another set of popular actors (Anna Sten,Ivan Koval-Samborskii, and Vladimir Fogel), The Girl with the Hatboxbuilds its plot around the state lottery, the Soviet housing shortage, andthe need for a "fictitious" marriage (in order to get a Moscow residencepermit). Critics found it even more offensive than The TaiJor, one lam-basting it as a movie "straight from Paris" (which might have surprisedParisians).26 The real problem apparently was that both films erred in fo-cusing to too great an extent on Soviet life (not that they were too"French").

Two other funny films - The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom and TheKiss of Mary Pickford - satirized Soviet movie mania and so were simi-larly lacking in the requisite ideological and social significance. These areboth worth examining in more detail, not because they are better filmsthan The Tailor and The Girl, but because of the nature of the criticismsdirected against them. The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom {Papirosnitsaiz Mosselproma, Iurii Zheliabuzhskii, 1924) is a charming and stylish ro-mantic comedy that is among the most polished and "Western" films ofSoviet production. The cigarette girl Zina (Iuliia Solntseva) is wooed by afumbling accountant (Igor Ilinsky), a dashing cinematographer (NikolaiTsereteli), and a corpulent American businessman (M. Tsibulsky) who isbringing "high fashion" to the USSR. The film is also a cleverly executedspoof of movie mania as Zina is "discovered" by the film crew and be-comes a somewhat inept "star."

Critics panned the film in the niggardly fashion all too common inearly Soviet film criticism.27 These criticisms are telling ones. While crit-ics admitted the film was funny, they vigorously denied that it was a So-viet comedy. As an example, Ippolit Sokolov claimed the only thing"Soviet" about The Cigarette Girl was the citizenship of most of itscharacters.28 In a back-handed compliment to the film, critics Edgar Ar-noldi and Vladimir Kirshon both used "cigarette girls" as a generic termfor comedies made according to "capitalist standards."29 Yet despite thecritical opprobrium, The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom came in fifth ona list of "most seen" films, with overwhelmingly positive viewer reac-tions recorded.30

Sergei Komarov's 1927 comedy The Kiss of Mary Pickford [PotseluiMeri Pikford), like The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom, was a romanticcomedy spoofing movie madness.31 It also starred the popular comedianIgor Ilinsky - this time as Goga Palkin, an inept movie usher. After a seriesof bungling adventures, Goga bumps into Mary Pickford and DouglasFairbanks as they are touring a Moscow film studio. To save face, he isintroduced to them as a film star ("the Soviet Harry Piel") and receivesMary's gracious kiss. As a result, Goga becomes legitimized as a sex sym-bol, lionized not only by his skeptical girlfriend (A. Sudakevich), but byscreaming, fainting hordes of female admirers.


The Kiss of Mary Pickford was not intrinsically more "decadent" thanThe Cigarette Girl from MosseJprom, but its reception was considerablyharsher. In order to understand why, we need to keep in mind that thestrife in the film community had intensified considerably in the threeyears separating the two films, and that the film comedy had undergonesevere scrutiny in this period. Despite the apparent difficulties in Sovi-etizing comedy (as evidenced by the way critics viewed the early come-dies), cries for Soviet comedy became more insistent by 1926. Thisurgency probably reflects the growing popularity of American comediesas much as the perceived weaknesses in Soviet productions, althoughthis was never articulated directly.

Critics now encouraged filmmakers to "work" and "study" in order todevelop a Soviet variation of the comedic genre, methods that seem aliento the aura of spontaneity good comedies exude (whether the "spontane-ity" is contrived or not). In their franker moments, however, it is clear thatcritics understood the problems facing directors and scenarists very well.One (pseudonymous) critic noted, for example, that it was much more dif-ficult to make a comedy "ideological" than it was to insert some ideologyinto a drama.32 Striking a chord similar to Brik's candid "we don't knowwhat to laugh at," Ippolit Sokolov sagely wrote "at whom and how tolaugh is the main thing" in comedy.33

Directives issued on what comedy should not be were as numerousand specific as those telling directors what it should be. Comedy shouldnot, for example, feature an "idiot" hero like American comedies, norshould it be "physical."34 Rather, it needed to be infused with "ideology"and "social significance" (though no one speculated how this could beachieved without robbing comedy of its humor).35

So along came The Kiss of Mary Pickford, a satire with an idiot hero,plenty of physical humor, two American movie stars - and no ideology orsocial significance. The critics pounced. Vladimir Kirshon called it "com-pletely alien"; Vladimir Nedobrovo, "vulgar" and "artless."361 could findno concrete evidence of its popularity among spectators, but it is so de-lightful and was excoriated so often in the press as the exemplar of the"disastrous" state of Soviet film comedy that it is hard to believe the So-viet public did not in fact enjoy it.37 The press of the 1920s tended not towaste words on films that had died natural deaths at the box office.

Small wonder, then, that the state film trust Sovkino had so much trou-ble fulfilling its own production plans for comedy and lamented theshortages year after year.38 But the times were changing, as Soviet societygeared up, knowingly and unknowingly, for the great transformationknown as the Cultural Revolution.39 Once again, as was the case duringand immediately after the civil war, objects for satire were abundant andobvious. The campaign against "bureaucratism," for example, provideddelicious opportunities to filmmakers, as Iakov Protazanov effectively


demonstrated in Don Diego and PeJageia (Don Diego i Pelageia, 1928). Ar-guably the best and most fully realized satire in Soviet silent cinema, DonDiego twits the bureaucratic mindset as it exposes the backwardness ofvillage life. Don Diego (Anatolii Bykov), a foolish village station mas-ter who reads romantic novels, vigorously enforces the "letter of thelaw" and sends an elderly woman (played by the incomparable MariaBliumental-Tamarina) to jail for crossing the railroad tracks against thesign. It matters not to Don Diego that Pelageia could not read the sign, andit takes the combined efforts of the Komsomol and the Party to rescue her.The film was hailed as a "great event" in the development of Soviet filmcomedy, but at the same time, concerns were expressed that the filmmight be misunderstood abroad.40

It did not take long for fear and uncertainty to cloud any of the humorthat one could read into current campaigns. The only other antibureau-cratic satire of this period to be even modestly well received was TwoFriends, a Model and a Girlfriend [Dva druga, model i podruga, AlekseiPopov, 1928), a forgettable and technically very ordinary picture that fol-lowed the attempts of three young people to gain recognition for their in-vention, a box-making machine. Two Friends seems to have escaped thewrath of critics because it was so unassuming. The next year, My Grand-mother (Moia babushka, K. Mikaberidze, 1929), a scathingly witty andaesthetically adventurous attack on the Georgian variant of the bureau-cratic deviation known as "protectionism," dropped into the bottomlesspit of forgotten films.41 The same fate befell an unflinching expose ofshifting allegiances during the civil war, Nikolai Shpikovsky's A FamiliarFace (Znakomoe litsot 1929). Though this picture was not nearly as inter-esting in formal terms as My Grandmother, its wit was as sharp, whichprobably explains why it was never released in the Russian Republic.42

So by 1929, foreigners and foreign life could not be satirized; they were"too bourgeois" to be shown to Soviet citizens, no matter the message ofthe picture. Soviet life certainly could not be satirized, because it couldbe misunderstood abroad or, even more seriously, at home. The flow offoreign comedies had essentially ended. All that remained for the belea-guered Soviet audience was the antireligious comedy. The campaignagainst religion proved to be the one "campaign" that endured from rev-olution to revolution,43 and the antireligious comedy was once again asafe haven for directors hoping to make films with some audience appeal.

Iakov Protazanov, whose finely tuned sense of balance was perhaps hismost amazing gift as a Soviet filmmaker, succeeded in making the transi-tion to yet another stage of Soviet cinematic history with St. Jorgen's FeastDay (Prazdnik sviatogo Iorgena, 1930), the tale of two thieves on thelam who hoodwink a gullible crowd of pilgrims into believing a miraclehas occurred. Protazanov and his stars, Anatolii Ktorov and Igor Ilinskii,


reprised their winning partnership in The Case of the Three Million in anumber of respects. Both films were set abroad (indeed, based on foreignliterary works) and featured a gentleman thief (Ktorov) and a buffoon asfoil (Ilinskii). Both films were stylishly, if unimaginatively directed; bothwere indistinguishable from their Western counterparts. Yet The Case ofthe Three Million was attacked during the "liberal" NEP as "too Western,"while St. Jorgen's Feast Day was termed "valuable and well-made" dur-ing the Cultural Revolution, a period in which everything "bourgeois"and "Western" was virulently attacked.44

How can this be explained? Although the Cultural Revolution is notconsidered to have ended until late 1931 (or early 1932), St. Jorgen's FeastDay represents the transition to the postrevolutionary comedies of Social-ist Realism. It is a satire with a cotton-candy center-professionallymade, but cinematically quite ordinary; realistic on the surface, but purefantasy at its core. It is exactly the sort of film people needed in hardtimes - true popular entertainment.

But we should not mistake this surprising denouement for a happyending; the legacy of the 1920s is too complicated for simple solutions, astrue in comedy as in all other aspects of Soviet cultural and social life.Soviet "film critics" (and I use this term to include those activists whowanted to use film for political or social goals, whether or not they wrotereviews) genuinely wanted to serve the people, but they mistrusted thepeople at the same time. They knew the "masses" liked comedy, so theywanted them to have comedy (in theory), but the "right" kind (in prac-tice). Since artists - even popular artists - are fundamentally individual-istic, filmmakers were at loggerheads with critics throughout the 1920sover what was funny and what was "acceptable." Except in a few rarecases - like Don Diego and PeJageia - humor and political rectitude weremutually exclusive.

During the Cultural Revolution, artists were compelled to enter the ser-vice of the state, as the critics (and some directors) had wanted. But thecritics were compelled to enter it too, and postrevolutionary culture (bywhich I mean Stalinist culture after the Cultural Revolution) took an un-expected shape. The diversity of NEP film comedy-of CommanderIvanovs, miracle workers, tailors, cigarette girls, Don Diegos, and Mr.Wests - was gone, replaced by the breezy good cheer of Alexandrov's TheHappy Guys [Veselye rebiata, 1934), The Circus (Tsirk, 1936), Volga,Volga (1938), and The Shining Path [Svetlyi put, 1940).45

NotesThe research for this article was supported in part by grants from theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, the International Research &


Exchanges Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and theUniversity of Vermont. I would like to express my thanks to Vlada Petricfor his thought-provoking remarks on an earlier version.

1. Osip Brik, 'Na podstupakh v sovetskoi komedii,' Kino-front, no. 3 (1927): p. 14.Of course, Brik's words must be taken as ironic; he knew very well what wasfunny and what was not.

2. Since virtually all the films classified as "comedies" in Sovetskie khu-dozhestvennye filmy: Annotirovannyi katalog, vol. 1, Nemye filmy (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1961) were also "satires," I shall use the terms interchangeably.

3. Studies of Soviet film comedy are fairly rare. R. N. Iurenev, Sovetskaia kinoko-mediia (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), is the standard history, but Vitali Poplovsky,"Waiting for Comedy: A Glance at the Development of Soviet Film Laughter,"trans. Natasha Andreeva, New Orleans Review 17, 1 (Spring 1990): 88-93, pro-vides a pithy and insightful overview. As far as I know, Richard Taylor, "A "Cin-ema for the Millions": Soviet Socialist Realism and the Problem of Film Comedy,"Journal of Contemporary History 18, 3 (July 1983): 439-62, which centers on the1930s, is the only scholarly analysis (aside from this essay) of the cultural politicsof Soviet film comedy.4. These issues may also be seen as an exaggerated version of the centuries-old

high culture-low culture debate.5. Lunacharsky was the author of a number of highly controversial film scripts

and shamelessly promoted the acting career of his wife, Nataliia Rozenel. For adiscussion of his activities on the cinema front, see Denise Youngblood, "Enter-tainment or Enlightenment? Popular Cinema in Soviet Society, 1921-1931," inNew Directions in Soviet History, ed. Stephen White (Cambridge University Press,1992), pp. 41-61.6. Of the comedies discussed here, Mezhrabpom produced The Cigarette Girl

from Mosselprom, The Tailor from Torzhok, The Case of the Three Million, TheGirl with a Hathox, The Kiss of Mary Pickford, Don Diego and Pelageia, and St.Jorgen 's Feast Day.

7. Obvious exceptions to this generalization are Boris Barnet, Fridrikh Ermler,and on occasion, Abram Room - all directors of popular films.8. Examples of this sort of film criticism can be found in Kino-/ront, Zhizn

iskusstva, Lef, and Novyi lef.9. The chief press organ promoting cinema as a tool of cultural enlightenment

was Sovetskoe kino, published by Narkompros's Glavpolitprosvet, but this view-point was also frequently expressed in Kino, Kino-front, and even in Sovetskiiekran, the mass circulation film magazine.10. Tragedy and drama were at least "art."11. Obviously, any attempt at categorization of an art form as complex and idio-syncratic as cinema will have its limitations and exceptions, and so does this one.12. Examples are Little Red Devils (Krasnye diavoliata, Ivan Perestiani, 1923), TheTripol Tragedy (TripoJskaia tragediia, Aleksandr Anoshchenko, 1926), Wind(Veter, L. Sheffer, 1926), and The Forty-First (Sorok pervyi, Iakov Protazanov,1927).13. The Decembrists [Dekabristy, Aleksandr Ivanovskii, 1927) and The Poet andthe Tsar [Poet i tsar, Vladimir Gardin and Evgenii Cherviakov, 1927) are the most


notorious examples; a discussion on this genre can be found in Denise Young-blood, " 'History' on Film: The Historical Melodrama in Early Soviet Cinema,"Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 11, 2 (June 1991): 173-84.14. Only 6% of the French films that entered the USSR, 1921-28, were adventures;only 4% of German imports of the same period fell into this category. Virtually nohistorical pictures were imported. These conclusions are based on my analysis oftitles listed in Iu. Greiding, "Frantsuzskie nemye filmy v sovetskom prokate," Kinoi vremia 4 (1965): 348-79, and N. Egorova, "Nemetskie nemye filmy v sovetskomprokate," ibid., pp. 380-476. Details of this analysis can be found in DeniseYoungblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the1920s (Cambridge University Press, 1992).15. Until Fridrikh Ermler began making his series of socially critical melodramasin 1926, the genre was invariably dubbed "salon melodrama" or "boulevardmelodrama."16. Of both French and German imports, 1921-8, 67% were melodramas, andwhen The Bear's Wedding, a Soviet melodrama up to "Western" standards, fi-nally reached the screen, it was a runaway hit. These figures are based on analysisof Greiding, "Frantsuzskie nemye filmy" and Egorova, "Nemetskie nemye filmy."17. See, e.g., A. Dubrovskii, "Opyty izucheniia zritelia (Anketa ARK)," Kino-zhurnal ARK, no. 8, (1925): 9.18. Several of Protazanov's pictures will be discussed here, along with Barnet'sThe Girl with the Hathox. Barnet's second satire of NEP life, The House on Trub-naia Square (Dom na Trubnoi, 1928), which is a pointed critique of the new bour-geoisie, also caused him difficulty.19. This "protectionism" was not, of course, exclusive to the Soviet film industry.20. See Lev Kuleshov, "Americanitis," in KuJeshov on Film, ed. and trans., RonaldLevaco (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 127-30.A history of American influences on Soviet cinema can be found in Denise Young-blood, " 'Americanitis': The Amerikanshchina in Soviet Cinema," Journal of Pop-ular Film and Television, 19, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 148-56.21. Based on analysis of E. Kartseva, "Amerikanskie nemye filmy v sovetskomprokate," Kino i vremia, no. 1 (1960): 193-325.22. This picture eventually got into trouble when it was exported as The Beautyand the Bolshevik, a retitling which is quite apt.23. See, e.g., Vladimir Erofeev, "Prikliucheniia mistera Vesta," Kino-gazeta, nos.17-18 (1924): 2, and Viktor Shklovsky, "Mister Vest ne na svoemost," Kino-nedelia, no. 21 (1924): 3.24. For reviews, see, e.g., M. Zagorsky, "Tapioka - Ilinskii - teatr - kino,"Sovetskii ekran, no. 38, (1926): 5 (on The Case of the Three Million) and KhrisanfKhersonsky, "Reis mistera Lloida," Kino, no. 39, (1927): 3. A more detailed dis-cussion of The Case of the Three Million can be found in Denise Youngblood,"The Return of the Native: Yakov Protazanov and Soviet Cinema," in Inside theFilm Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge, 1991), pp.116-17.25. See, e.g., Khrisanf Khersonsky, "Komicheskaia i komedii," Kino-zhurnal ARK,nos. 11-12 (1925): 27-8.26. Osip Beskin, "Neigrovaia filma," Sovetskoe kino, no. 7 (1927): 10. (In the1920s, the Russian word for "film," now "film," was the feminine gender, "filma.")


27. See, e.g., la. M., "Papirosnitsa ot [sic] Mosselproma," Kino-nedelia, no. 44(1924): 8.28. See, e.g., A D[ubrov]sky, "Pokhozdeniia Oktiabriny," Kino-zhurnal ARK, no. 3(1925): 34. (These comments were made in the context of a review about another"failed" comedy.); Ippolit Sokolov, Kino-stsenarii: Teoriia i tekhnika (Moscow:Teakinopechat, 1926), p. 55.29. Edgar Arnoldi, Komicheskoe v kino (Moscow: Kinopechat, 1928), p. 4. (Thisbook features an apologetic introduction by Vladimir Nedobrovo explaining whyArnoldi used so many American examples to illustrate his points.); Vladimir Kir-shon, "Listki iz bloknota," Kino-front, nos. 13-14 1927: 10.30. Dubrovskii, "Opyty izucheniia zritelia," p. 8.31. Peter Christensen notes the film's similarity to the American comedy Sher-Jock, Jr., which starred Buster Keaton. This film was shown in the USSR in 1925(see Kartseva, "Amerikanskie nemye fil'my), so it is highly likely Komarov saw it.32. See "Grustnoe v smeshnom," Sovetskii ekran, no. 32 (1927): 3; and Pochtar,"Smekh i ideologiia," Kino, no. 2 (1927): 4.33. Ippolit Sokolov, "Kak sozdat sovetskuiu komediiu," Kino-front, no. 4 (1927):14.34. See Sokolov, "Kuda idet sovetskogo kino," Sovetskii ekran, no. 37 (1926): 3Tsentralnyi gosudarstzennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (1926): 3; (TsGALI), f.2496, op 1, ed. khr. 23, "Zakliochewie proektu orientirovochnogo stsevarno-tematicheskogo plana Sovkino na 1927-1928 g.," pp. 36-41.35. "Sovetskaia komicheskaia," Kino, no. 16 (1927): 2.36. Vladimir Kirshon, Na kino-postu, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1928. p. 10;V[ladimir] N[edobrovo], "Potselui Meri," Zhizn iskusstva, no. 48 (1927): 11.37. See, e.g., M. Bystritskii, "Besprizornaia (Po povodu Potselui Meri)," Kino, no.38 (1927): 3; R. Pikel, "Ideologiia i kommertsiia," ibid., no. 41, p. 2.38. See Tematicheskii plan Sovkino na 1928/29 g., ([Moscow]: Teakinopechat,1928), p. 6.39. The literature on the Cultural Revolution is fairly substantial; see, e.g., SheilaFitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1978); Peter Kenez, "The Cultural Revolution in Cinema," SlavicReview 47, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 418-35; Denise Youngblood, "The Fate of Soviet Pop-ular Cinema during the Stalin Revolution," Russian Review 50, no. 2 (April 1991):148-62.40. Don Diego and Pelageia was heavily promoted; see, e.g., A. Aravsky, "Don Di-ego i Pelageia," Kino-front, no. 2 (1928): 20-21, and M. Bystritskii, "Shag vpered(Don Diego i Pelageia), Kino, no. 3 (1928): 3. A revealing prerelease discussion ofthe film can be found in TsGALI, f. 2494, op. 1, ed.khr. 99, "Stenogramma sobraniechlenov ARK po obsuzhdeniiu kino-filme Don Diego i Pelageia Demina [sic], 1dek. 1927." For more details, see Youngblood, "The Return of the Native," pp.114-16.41.1 do not know the Georgian title of this film, which received only one reviewand apparently had a limited distribution. The Pacific Film Archive hasa copy.42. This film was made for the Ukrainian studio VUFKU, but Sovetskie khu-dozhestvennye filmy gives a title in Russian only. The style is so similar to thatwonderful satire of Soviet chess mania, Chess Fever [Shakhmataia goriachka,


Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovskii, 1925), that it would seem Chess Fe-ver should be mainly attributed to Shpikovskii. Naum Kleiman has recently res-urrected A Familiar Face, and it was shown at the Cleveland Cinematheque in1989 under one of its alternate titles, The Scoundrel (Shkurnik).43. The two revolutions alluded to are the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and theStalin Revolution of 1928.44. See A. V, "Prazdnik sviatogo Iorgena," Kino, no. 51 (1930): 4.45. Vitali Poplovsky also believes that the dominance of Alexsandrov (and IvanPyrev) in the 1930s epitomized the decline in cinema culture; see "Waiting forComedy," New Orleans Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1990), p. 89.

CHAPTER IV

An ambivalent NEP satireof bourgeois aspirations:

The Kiss of Mary Pickford

The most celebrated Soviet films have not been comedies. From Pu-dovkin's Mother to Tarkovsky's Stalker to Abuladze's glasnost-era Repen-tance, most of the deserved critical praise has gone to the weightiestfilms. Relatively little attention has been given to humorous films bothold and new, and it remains to be seen in our day of greater Russian ac-cess to the West if future Soviet comedies will bear any resemblance toNEP film satires concerned with the desire for Western products andbourgeois lifestyles.

One of the lesser known (but most accessible for rental in the UnitedStates) of these NEP film comedies is The Kiss of Mary Pickford (PotseJuiMeri Pikford) released by Mezhrabpom-Rus in September 1927. This gen-uinely amusing hour-long film directed by Sergei Komarov makes use ofnewsreel footage of the mobs of people who greeted the visit of DouglasFairbanks and Mary Pickford to Moscow in July 1926, and it was popularwith audiences when it was released. Komarov (at the time of our confer-ence one of the senior members of the Soviet film community) was one ofthe graduates of Kuleshov's workshop, and by mixing newsreel and fic-tional footage, he followed the example of Pudovkin in the comic ChessFever (1925). The original idea for the film is by Anatoly Lunacharsky, thePeople's Commissar for Enlightenment. This attribution, as Richard Tay-lor notes (1979: p. 168), is attested by the Sovietskie KhudozhestvennyefiVmy. Annotirovannyi katalog (vol. 1, p. 219), but the treatment for thescenario is not included in the selection of Lunacharsky's film writingspublished in Moscow in 1965. Perhaps for this reason, the film has failedto receive attention in current monographs on various aspects of Luna-charsky's career.

Like Kuleshov's 1924 The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in theLand of the Bolsheviks, The Kiss of Mary Pickford concerns the relation-ship of the Soviet Union and the United States, but from the reverse per-spective. Whereas the earlier film mocks American perceptions of astereotypically barbarous Bolshevik state, The Kiss of Mary Pickford sat-irizes Soviet wild admiration of American film stars and thus of American48

An ambivalent NEP satire of bourgeois aspirations 49

bourgeois culture in general. However, on close inspection the film ap-pears to be ambivalent toward American commercial cinema, and it par-tially legitimizes the adulation of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford,Hollywood's own royalty.

Lunacharsky, who had a particular interest in humorists such as Swiftand Shaw, knew that comedy was hard to channel and that it could becounterproductive to the Soviet cause if not clearly aimed. Although Lu-nacharsky was no longer commissar after 1929 and the NEP period thathad produced films such as The Kiss of Mary Pickford was over, his ideason satire in his famous essay of 1931, "Cinematographic Comedy and Sat-ire," can still be helpful in analyzing the film. Written as part of a debateon the films of Medvedkin in 1931, Lunacharsky opposed the position ofNusinov, who declared that humor was not compatible with the proletar-ian project. Part of the debate concerned the often recurring question ofwhether satiric comedy was socially constructive or ultimately destruc-tive of social cohesiveness. And in back of this question stands anotherunstated one: Is comedy a defense of society against those individualswho are out of tune with it and thus slowing down progress, or does com-edy celebrate a temporary revolt against social authority? This larger the-oretical issue makes Lunacharsky's statement provocative even though itrepresents the last stage of his career, when he was not speaking as a pub-lic official.

Not surprisingly, Lunacharsky takes a position that it is society or thecollective that is comedy's standard of value. The individuals who are outof touch with society's needs are subject to being laughed at. Peasantsclinging to the old way of life are cited as an example. Lunacharsky feelsthat humor is necessary for the proletariat if it wishes to rid itself of cur-rent internal defects in the Socialist system, namely, bourgeois mentalityand decadence (p. 116). However, there is the possibility that humor willnot be used appropriately, for unless the object of criticism is clearly la-beled, it can unintentionally lend support to the adversaries of commu-nism. Lunacharsky claims that Yuri Olesha's recent play The List ofBenefits (the story of a Russian actress in Paris) has been used by capital-ists in this very fashion. In general, for Soviet art, pure comedy is decid-edly dangerous most of the time. It needs to be deepened by satire with aprecise target.

Lunacharsky criticizes Plekhanov, who believed that one cannot createa beautiful artwork with a false ideology. To Lunacharsky, this is demon-strably false, as any number of religious artworks of the past show. As forthe present, what matters is that reality be considered dialectically, andthis idea allows for the treatment of materials in a way that departs fromphotographic realism, or "kodakismo" as he calls it. Thus, a comedy suchas Erdman's The Mandate is successful because it is makes good use ofhyperbole while still being grounded in the realistic. Its object may be


fantastic, but it remains a realistic spectacle. He concludes that all expres-sive means are legitimate to the proletariat, although one should avoidhumor as an end in itself, as represented by the gratuitous gag.

Lunacharsky appears to be adopting the emphasis on social significa-tion in comedy, as expressed by Henri Bergson, to the specifics of theCommunist society. As Bergson says in "Laughter":To understand laughter, we must put it back in its natural environment, which issociety, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is asocial one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investiga-tions. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It musthave a social signification (p. 65).

The theoretical problem that arises from Bergson's definition of comedyis examined by Morton Gurewitch:

There is a certain knottiness in Bergson's idea of the social good. What societydemands of its members, he says, is an "increasingly delicate adjustment of willswhich will fit more perfectly into one another" (p. 72). Those who, through theirunconscious, machine-like behavior (whether commonplace or nobly quixotic),frustrate this need for ever subtler harmony are by definition comic persons, pun-ishable by laughter, yet Bergson's assumption that society can be depicted as anincreasingly resilient entity is extremely dubious. How far can an ideal sociabil-i ty -"an increasingly delicate adjustment of wil ls"-be carried in a world ofinhibiting legal and administrative machinery?. . . The idea that society-as-organism can, ever more subtly, laughingly liquidate that part of itself whichhardens into society-as-mechanism is a fantasy. (1975: pp. 31-2)

If we use Bergson's focus on "something mechanical encrusted upon theliving" (p. 92), we can see that, in Lunacharsky's terms, it is bourgeois lifethat is something mechanical still encrusted on the vital Soviet state. AsCommissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky had to continually face thisissue of fine tuning the State through art. Gurewitch's theoretical questionbecame a real one when satires such as The Crimson Island and The Sui-cide were not perceived as leading to the fine tuning of society and wereclosed or banned.

As an NEP satire, The Kiss of Mary Pickford deserves to be comparedwith the plays of Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, Katayev, and Erdman, in thismode. (See Segel, 1979.) However, it is first neither an attack on the pur-suit of money nor an expose of government bureaucracy, through such aproblem as the housing crisis. Second, it is not structured around a con-trast between any Communist and bourgeois characters. In fact, the Com-munist Party is not even mentioned. Third, it does not use acting as astarting point to investigate the nature of theatrical illusion, as does Bul-gakov in The Crimson Island, which was written about the same time.

The film is lighter in touch than these other works. Indeed, it was solight, that it received a good measure of hostile criticism, as Denise }.


Youngblood (1985: pp. 153-4) has pointed out. Most likely with the filmin mind, the noted dramatist Sergei Tretyakov spoke out in New Lef in 1928against the " 'Pickfordization' of the everyday worker's life" (1988: p. 266).

The Kiss of Mary Pickford should be situated with reference to Amer-ican silent comedy as well as NEP satire. It is quite possible that the filmwas influenced by Buster Keaton's great comedy Sherlock, Jr., released inthe United States in 1924 and, according to E. Kartseva, imported to theUSSR, in 1925. In this film, Keaton, who works as a cleanup person andprojectionist at a movie theater, tries to win the love of his girlfriend bybecoming a great detective like Sherlock Holmes. He falls asleep and"projects himself" as Sherlock, Jr. into a mystery film about a jewel theft.Back in real life, he does succeed in solving the mystery of the theft of awatch and in gaining the love of his girlfriend. Thus, in each film a bum-bling movie theater employee is successful in winning a woman's love af-ter he reinvents himself on the model of a popular culture hero. Hesucceeds because he creates a more dynamic self through the emulatedmodel. The Kiss of Mary Pickford does not challenge Sherlock, Jr. on anartistic level, but it does attempt to capitalize on what Adrian Piotrovskyin 1927 saw as the hallmarks of American film comedy: the acrobaticstunt, the eccentric use of objects, and the buffoon mask-image of thecomic hero (1981: p. 138).

The Kiss of Mary Pickford, although it is not a masterpiece, neverthe-less offers a more complex and ambiguous satire than Lunacharsky's com-ments would allow. I do not mean to claim that Lunacharsky was unableto follow his own principles, for I do not know to what extent, if at all, hetook part in the actual filming. (His name is not given in the film creditsof the print that I have seen.) Instead, the film departs from the positionshe was to propound in 1931. It does indulge at times in the pure laughterthat he finds potentially dangerous, and it ultimately rewards the bum-bling hero, who gains the love of his girlfriend by acting out their bour-geois fantasies to the best of his abilities.

The film can be divided into three parts. The first sequence introducesthe plot in four scenes. At an audition, we learn that Dusya, an aspiringyoung actress, is being courted by Goga, who turns out to be an usher ina movie theater. Goga embarrasses her first at the movie theater, where heis unable to live up to Dusya's fantasies for a boyfriend like Douglas Fair-banks, currently starring in The Mark of Zorro. (As it is 1926, the SovietUnion is still overwhelmingly a net importer of films [Leyda, 1983: p.205].) Later he pathetically crashes her birthday party, which he com-pletely ruins with his ill-conceived attempts at derring-do. Goga goes tothe Laboratory of Experimental Studies, where he is unexpectedly de-clared a cinema professional at the highest level.

In the second sequence (six scenes), Goga gains access to a movie stu-dio, where he is cleaning floors. He then has the luck to be hired as a


stuntman just about the time that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanksare arriving in the city. After succeeding accidentally at a few stunts, heis hailed as the new "Harry Piel." (Unfortunately, most prints of the filmin the United States indicate Goga as the "Russian Doug" at this point.)When Mary comes to the studio for a talk and tea, she asks to do a lovescene with Goga. During the scene, she kisses him on the cheek.

In the final sequence (four scenes), Goga becomes the object of hyster-ical adulation by the star-struck film goers, for he bears the mark of MaryPickford on his face. They are so wild that they pursue him and tear offsome of his clothes. Dusya uses the current of an electric wire to keepthem away from Goga. He deliberately gets rid of the imprint of Mary'slips, and resumes his old life as an usher. Now, however, he has the loveand admiration of Dusya, not her scorn.

Three aspects of the film are particularly important for their ideologi-cal implications: the tests at the Laboratory of Experimental Studies, thecharacterization of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and the fans' re-action to the kiss on Goga's face. The scene at the Laboratory of Experi-mental Studies is perhaps the most difficult to interpret. The laboratory isinitially sinister with its three white-clad doctors and huge, lumbering or-derly. Goga flees into the lab after we see a man first brutalized in silhou-ette in the office window then carried out unconscious to the end of theline of waiting applicants.

In the first test, Goga is put under cold water and then under hot to seewhat his reactions are. He is told that he has scored very high, but he hasdone little else but react naturally to the different stimuli. The water ruinsthe photograph of Dusya that he has kissed for good luck. He commentsthat she has not passed the test as he has.

The second test requires that Goga try to keep his balance on a flatwheel that is being turned round and round very swiftly. Eventually hedisappears, and the scientists ask if he has been vaporized. Then they re-alize that he has been thrown off. Here he has at least shown some skill asa potential acrobat.

The third test involves a sight gag. Goga is made to stand on his handsbehind a screen. Presumably the length of time he can hold this positionwill be measured. After a while, the scientists look behind the screen tosee that somehow Goga has squatted on his haunches and put his shoeson his hands extended above his head.

For these three trials, Goga is awarded a diploma indicating that heis a cinema professional at the highest level. Even if we consider thatthis is really not the test for a movie star as Goga wished, but for an anon-ymous, effaceable stuntman, the result is still surprising, since Gogawas so completely inept at the jumping stunt he had attempted atDusya's party.

On one level, the satire in this scene may be on the reflexology ofVladimir Mikhailovich Bechterev (1857-1927). In 1923, Bechterev gave a


lecture entitled 'The Personality of the Artist in the Light of Reflexology,"and he added chapters on creativity to the third edition of his major writ-ten work General Principles of Human Reflexology in 1925. At his Psy-choneurological Academy, he had a laboratory for the investigation ofwork and a vocational consulting bureau.

In addition, the lab scene may be a satire of Meyerhold's interest in re-flexology in his biomechanics method of teaching acting, and as satire, itgives a wildly exaggerated rather than a fair representation of this actingtechnique. As Mel Gordon points out in his article, ''Meyerhold's Biome-chanics/' "drawing on the scientific methodologies that were then currentin Soviet industry and culture (Taylorism) and in Soviet psychology andeducation (reflexology)," Meyerhold developed biomechanics (1974:p. 75). In biomechanics, writes Konstantin Rudnitsky (1988: p. 93), the"human body was perceived as a machine: man had to learn to controlthat machine."

Two of the collaborators on the film, Vadim Shershenevich and IgorIlyinsky, were from the world of the theater and were all acquainted withthe work of Meyerhold. First, the film scenario was elaborated by Sher-shenevich along with the film's director Komarov. Shershenevich, a poet,translator, theorist, and dramatist, was at one time a codirector with BorisFerdinandov of an experimental theater (Rudnitsky, 1988: pp. 254, 347).As Konstantin Rudnitsky (1981: p. 419) points out, Shershenevich andLunacharsky had stood on different sides of the fence over Meyerhold'scontroversial production of Gogol's Inspector General in 1926. The formeropposed it, and the latter supported it. Unfortunately, as Anna Lawtonnotes in her 1981 book on Shershenevich, his career after 1926 is notwell documented.

Second, the film starred Igor Ilyinsky, a former student of Fedor Kom-misarzhevsky, who joined Meyerhold from 1920 to 1938, and who thenwent on to perform at the Stanislavsky-oriented Maly Theater for manyyears. Since 1924, he had already appeared in at least four films atMezhrabpom-Rus: Aelita, The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom, The ThreeMillion Case, and Miss Mend. He had a very successful career in films asa comic actor. In fact, according to Richard Taylor (1983: p. 452), Ilyinskywas "possibly the greatest box office draw in the Soviet cinema of the latetwenties." In his memoirs, he has both unflattering and complimentaryremarks about Meyerhold's directorial style:

When I would try to stop, to argue or to ask him to explain, some scene thatwasn't clear to me, he would say: "You're not getting it because you're near-sighted. Watch me carefully and repeat what I do. Then you'll get it right."

I could not work that way. It was beneath my dignity as an actor. I was a youngactor perhaps, but an actor all the same, and not a monkey. (Schmidt, 1980: p. 27)

Ilyinsky saw a danger in the biomechanics approach to performance.He felt that there was a possibility that a "completely real stage world"


could be lost underneath a "conventionalized conglomeration" (Schmidt,1980: p. 28):

I had to find those roots and work them over within myself as an artist. Meyerholdcame to value my ability to accomplish his ideas physically, and so always ap-preciated my work more than he would some dead, formalistic, but absolutely ac-curate copy of his sketch. Of course, I was never free from the form of the sketch,but I always tried to live onstage, to be a living person, and not to reproduce me-chanically, according to biomechanical laws, some emasculated directorial out-line, (p. 28)

However, Ilyinsky does try to be fair to Meyerhold and resists the wide-spread tendency to caricaturize biomechanics. He reports that the essenceof this method can be shown with respect to the demonstration of fear.The actor must not begin by growing scared and then running. Firstone must run by reflex and not grow scared until afterward, for then onesees oneself running. This means that one does not enact the emotion offear but one expresses it on stage by a physical action (Meyerhold, 1963:p. 170).

The significance of the lab scene can only be understood with respectto the depiction of the acting styles of Mary and Doug. The reflexologymethod is shown to be just as inadequate as overacting. Mary and Dougrepresent in the framework of the film a credible balance in acting styles.They neither overemote nor subject the human to the mechanical. Thefirst action of the film is Dusya's dreadful audition for a film role. Sheoveracts hysterically, and she is told by the sarcastic director to try itagain with more feeling. In the movie theater, not only Dusya but every-one else including Goga is impressed by Fairbanks's performance in TheMark o/Zorro. However, Goga is also angry, for he realizes that he cannotcompete for Dusya against Doug. When Mary performs her love scenewith Goga (Ilyinsky dressed up as the Russian actor with whom she didplay a scene in 1926), she gives another one of her ingenue performancesthat won her legions of fans.

Pickford and Fairbanks seem slightly ridiculous, but as visitors not asactors. They appear, not surprisingly, a little bit out of place at tea in theirtraditional Russian accoutrements. Doug jumps over a bar to show his ath-letic prowess and takes a hammy bow, but nothing they do affects theirstatus as performers.

Once Doug and Mary have gone off, the crowd's hysterical pursuit ofGoga leads to his romantic reconciliation with Dusya through the work-ings of mimetic desire. When Goga is kissed by Mary, mimetic desire ap-pears in two forms. First, and most prominently, the obscure Gogabecomes a celebrity not for what he is, but because he has the mark ofMary Pickford's grace. The people are not really interested in him at all.Second, the kiss indicates to Dusya that Goga must really be desirable af-


ter all, since Mary has picked him out of a crowd and chosen him for herromantic costar. The crowd surrounds him after Mary leaves, and theytear off half of his clothes. He travels in a flashy car for celebrities and isgiven new clothes. His fans buy tickets just to have a look at him eating ina private dining room. When a female fan tries to kiss Goga, Dusya jeal-ously pulls an electric cord out of a lamp and sends the current into Gogato get rid of his admirer. Then she attaches the current to the door handle,starting a chain reaction in which many fans start to quiver uncontrolla-bly. Finally, Goga and Dusya are exhausted from fleeing the hystericalpeople, so in public he washes off the kiss. We then see the fans collapsemechanically into a motionless heap on the stairs, for they cannot take theshock when the kiss is erased. In short, Dusya overcomes her anonymousrivals for Goga's attention.

At the end of the film, we cut to a brief scene in which Goga is onceagain in his usher's uniform at the movie theater. Whereas before Dusyawas unwilling to be escorted by him unless he changed out of his uni-form, now she is willing to enter with him while he wears his occupa-tional dress. However, the message of the film is not unequivocally thatDusya now loves Comrade Goga for being himself rather than a replica ofa swashbuckling Western filmstar. She loves him because it is the closestshe will ever get to loving Douglas Fairbanks.

The comedy is ambivalent because Goga's ludicrous attempt to becomea movie star is coextensive with his heroic pursuit of the woman he trulyloves, and the film does not satirize the desire to find love and romance.The film also does not show Russian audiences to be infatuated by spe-cifically American film stars. In the second scene of the film, after theshowing of The Mark of Zorro, the movie crowd goes into raptures whentwo Russian stars, Rogozhin and Malinowska, pass by. Compared with thethree scientists at the lab and the fans, Goga is multidimensional. The sci-entists, in so far as we see them, have bracketed out everything from lifeexcept the treatment of the human as a reflex mechanism. In counter-point, the adoring fans act in the manner of Pavlov's dogs when the stim-ulus of a movie star is put into their environment. Compared with thescientists and fans, Goga is human and admirable.

Goga's bourgeois aspirations to become a stunt actor make us laugh.However, this type of laughter, as Bergson points out, can be legitimizing.He writes:It has often been said that it is the trifling faults of our fellow-men that make uslaugh. Evidently there is a considerable amount of truth in this opinion; still, itcannot be regarded as altogether correct. First, as regards faults, it is no easy mat-ter to draw the line between the trifling and the serious; maybe it is not because afault is trifling, that it makes us laugh, but rather because it makes us laugh thatwe regard it as trifling; for there is nothing that disarms us like laughter. Butwe may go even further, and maintain that there are faults at which we laugh,


even though fully aware that they are serious, Harpagon's avarice, for instance.And then, we may as well confess - though somewhat reluctantly - that we laughnot only at the faults of our fellow-men, but also at times, at their good qualities,(p. 149)

Whereas presumably Lunacharsky would have us laugh at a characterlike Goga because his fault of imitating the bourgeoisie is serious, the ef-fect of the film will probably be quite different. Because we laugh at Go-ga's crashing of Dusya's birthday party, his actions during the ridiculousscientific tests, and his pursuit by the hysterical fans, we tend to find hisbourgeois faults trifling. In addition, the sight gags during the lab test, hisimitation of a mannequin to avoid his boss, his spilling a glass of water hehas hidden in his suit jacket pocket, and the high-angle shot treatment ofhis eating his solitary celebrity dinner all associate him with the so-calledpure comedy that Lunacharsky finds dangerous to the effectiveness ofSoviet satire.

Wylie Sypher, commenting on the ambivalence in the nature of com-edy in his analysis of Bergson, suggests that Freud can help us to under-stand the side of comedy that Bergson, with his stress on social utility,does not fully investigate:Comedy is a momentary and publically useful resistance to authority and an es-cape from its pressures, and its mechanism is a free discharge of repressed psy-chic energy or resentment through laughter. . . . The ambivalence of comedyreappears in its social meanings, for comedy is both hatred and revel, rebellionand defense, attack and escape. It is revolutionary and conservative. Socially, it isboth sympathy and persecution. (1956: pp. 241-2)

The Kiss of Mary Pickford is "both attack and escape." It takes on thetopical issue of the validity of acting styles as well as Soviet imitation ofthe bourgeoisie, thus engaging the audience in a complex way. The filmoffers an escape for the demands of the antibourgeois campaigns of the1920s by allowing the triumph of the hero with one hand while attackingSoviet consumption of Hollywood films with the other. The example ofThe Kiss of Mary Pickford can be instructive when we turn to current So-viet comedies, for our evaluation of specific films will depend on our ini-tial premises, particularly whether we feel that laughter labels somethingas relatively trifling or serious, and whether we see comedy as a supportof or a temporary revolt against society.

BibliographyBechterev, Vladimir Michailovitch. General Principles of Reflexology: An Intro-

duction to the Objective Study of Personality. 4th ed. Trans. Emma Murphy andWilliam Murphy. New York: Arno, 1973.

Bergson, Henri, "Laughter." In Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday, 1956.


Gordon, Mel. "Meyerhold's Biomechanics." Drama Review 18, 3 (Sept. 1974):73-88.

Gurewitch, Morton. Comedy: The Irrational Vision. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1975.

Hoover, Marjorie. Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater. Amherst: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 1974.

Kartseva, E. "Amerikanskie nemye filmy v sovetskom prokate." Kino i Vremia 1(1960): 193-325.

Law ton, Anna. Vadim Shershenevich: From Futurism to Imaginism. Ann Arbor,Mich.: Ardis, 1981.

Lunacharsky, Anatoly. "La Commedia cinematografica e la Satira," Bianco e Nero34 (Jan.-Feb. 1973): 115-21.

O kino: StaVi. Vyskazyvaniia. Stsenarii, Dokumenty. Moscow: Iskusstvo,1965.

Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. 3d ed. Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1983.

Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Le Theatre theatral. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.Piotrovsky, Adrian. 'Towards a Theory of Film Genres." In Russian Formalist

Film Theory. Ed. and trans. Herbert Eagle. Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1981.

Rudnitsky, Konstantin. Meyerhold the Director. Trans. George Petrov. Ann Arbor,Mich.: Ardis, 1981.

Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905-1932. Trans. Roxane Permar. Ed. LesleyMilne. New York: Abrams, 1988.

Schmidt, Paul. Meyerhold at Work. Trans. Paul Schmidt, Ilya Levin, and Vern Mc-Gee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980.

Segel, Harold. B. Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present.New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Sypher, Wylie, ed. Comedy. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956.Taylor, Richard. "A 'Cinema for the Millions': Soviet Socialist Realism and the

Problem of Film Comedy." Journal of Contemporary History 18, 3 (July 1983):439-62.

The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929. Cambridge University Press,1979.

Tretyakov, Sergei. "Happy New Year! Happy New LefVf Russian Futurism throughIts Manifestoes, 1912-1928. Ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle. Ith-aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Youngblood, Denise J. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1985.

CHAPTER V

Closely watched drains:Notes by a dilettante onthe Soviet absurdist film

1. While sitting in the bathroom, a man realizes that life stinks. No wayout. No meaning. No sense.

The first time I read Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus was in high school.This is what I remember: the image of a man in the bathroom, facing achoice, to sink or to float. I also know what he chose.

2. While sitting in the bathroom, a man realizes that he will never get hotwater again, not to mention new water pipes. Apparently our old man ex-istentialist was right: Life is absurd. Only, the man in the bathroom doesnot know it. He has never read Camus. He does not care. All he caresabout is the crooked water and sewerage system. This is a scene (or itcould be a scene) from Fountain, a Soviet film of the era of glasnost.

3. The absurd is eternal, but absurdism is not. Specifically, it was born inpain and deceased in peace some time between The Myth of Sisyphus(1942) and Fountain (1988). Unlike the absurd, which belongs to nature,absurdism was produced by culture. As with any artistic "-ism/' it had itsown time.

4. Albert Camus, since he was crazy enough to declare that "Sisyphusmust be regarded as happy," is often regarded as a prophet of absurdism.Shakespeare was another candidate, nominated by Jan Kott in his cele-brated Shakespeare Our Contemporary. However, in the history of dramathere was a figure much closer to what will become absurdism than thebard of Avon: Anton Chekhov, a Russian. Camus's theory of the absurdperfectly matches Chekhovian existentialism. Chekhov's Three Sisters,written in 1900, ends with the words (spoken by one of the sisters) thatCamus could have used as an epigraph: "It will be clear to us. What seemsnow to be punishment will be revealed. It will. And the meaning of suf-fering. Until then, what do we have but work? I will work" (quoted fromDavid Mamet's adaptation, American Theater, July-Aug. 1991). Sonya,Uncle Vanya's niece, echoes: "We shall live. We shall live . . . ."58

Closely watched drains 59

These are the ends of the painful middle. There, in the nonclimacticmiddle, in the very heart of Chekhov's drama, people lunch and eat tea,while their lives are being ruined. They talk to each other and don't lis-ten. Those who listen don't hear. Those who hear are deaf. Words are deadand entangle people with their lifeless fetters. Conflicts are unsolvableand endless. To end them means to die. To live means to make a choice.Sound familiar? Camus, Ionesco, Beckett. So, was there absurdism in Rus-sia? There could have been, but there wasn't.

5. Soviets came to power seventeen years after Chekhov's Three Sistersand thirteen years after his death. They loved putting -isms in their lex-icon, but these were mostly political -isms. The only -ism allowed in cul-ture was "Socialist Realism," which was just as obscure, demanding, andruthless. All other cultural -isms, behind a dreadful mask of "modern-ism," were ostracized and executed as "alien to the consciousness ofthe proletariat."

When the time for absurdism had arrived in the West (and it had notarrived until this century made its dreadful discoveries and singed its bi-furcated soul in the gas cameras), Russia was in the heat of another -ism,this time named after Stalin. So was Russian culture. And so was film, thevanguard of the culture, its "most important art."

Wonderland, created on the Soviet screen at the time, was flooded withlight; clouds appeared only to vanish under the sun, and night came asnothing but a prelude to dawn. Wonderland was inhabited by happy guysand gals who were generously endowed with flesh but were completelydevoid of substance; a singing people with blank memory, free of anycomplexes, and more soulful than R&B. In that Wonderland, a lullaby per-formed the function of Valium and a march served better than Vivarin.People made love, using just their vocal chords, through song, but friend-ships were valued higher. Evil was not challenged; it was mocked andpunished. The country was run according to the yet-to-be-written tran-scripts of the Party congresses. All this might be very well absurd, buthere again we encounter a noncoincidence of the absurd and absurdism.

When fresh air was let into the incubator of Soviet culture in the mid-1980s, it became clear that it was not so easy to be a seventy-year-old baby.Making its first steps in all the -isms that the West had passed long ago,Soviet arts had to "rediscover a bicycle."

6. Regarding absurdism, there was another obstacle for the Soviets' "backto the future" gambit. It should be rather difficult to speculate on theabsurdity of being when you do not expect your water pipes to ever getwet again.

The alternative had been found almost twenty-five years ago in a bor-dering East European country. The Czech New Wave, among all other


innovations it has brought to the screen, has created a new artistic body,with the guts of absurdism and a face reflecting all the twists of the Com-munist being. In analogy to Socialist Realism, it could be called Socialistabsurdism. As represented by Milos Forman [Black Peter, A Blonde inLove, The Firemen's Ball), Vera Chytilova (Something Different, Daisies),Jiri Menzel [Closely Watched Trains, Larks on a String), and others, So-cialist absurdism dealt with the absurd caused by the Communist regime,not by God, or even a social structure. The generic absurdist techniqueswere not what Socialist absurdists were flattered with. Their action anddialogue did actually make sense, which would not, in turn, flattermaitres Ionesco and Beckett. They spoke of the absurd in a cool tone, ap-propriate for a docudrama. That is what made Socialist absurdist films soscarily funny and so hilariously frightening.

7. The first attempt to penetrate the arena of Socialist absurdism in Sovietfilm was made under Brezhnev, in 1980, by Eldar Ryazanov in Garage. Be-ing a direct, although timidly inferior, response to Fellini's A ProvaD3Orchestra [Orchestra Rehearsal), released a year before, Garage materi-alizes all oppositions between Western and Eastern, existentialist and So-cialist perspectives.

In Fellini's chamber masterpiece, a microuniverse of musicians, whorehearse a new symphony in an ancient church, develops from an apa-thetic society of estranged individuals into a destructive horde. They pro-duce chaos and death in their mutiny against the conductor.

In Ryazanov's reflection of this structure, a group of people is confinedto a break room of their environmental institute, full of greenery but lack-ing oxygen for the spirit. The interest, holding them together and provok-ing apocalyptic visions, close to Fellini's images of ultimate destruction,is the number of private garages provided by the state. Simply, there aremore candidates than garages, which causes trouble.

In the genesis of Ryazanov's universe, God and music of the prototypeare replaced by the regime and its values. In the genesis of Socialist ab-surdism, the incongruity of Communist cause and existentialist effectplays the role of a conductor's baton.

8. Under new political circumstances, the comedic exploration of thefield went further. The characters of Yuri Mamin's Formanesque short,Neptune's Feast, are thrown by the local Party authorities in freezing-coldwater to please the visiting Swedes with the * 'traditional demonstration ofRussian spirit" - "walrus swimming." After the last attempt to fake theperformance - by using pipes with hot water to warm up the ice-coveredlake - fails, the whole village, with "what-the-hell" recklessness, ends upswimming, under the victorious sound of Prokofief's "Battle on Ice" fromEisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. Only, the Swedes have left.

Closely watched drains 61

The "composer" in Yuri Mamin's Fountain (1988) who "flies away" with hishome-constructed wings, escaping the confines of his apartment building for afew seconds before crashing to the ground.

In Mamin's next feature, Fountain, the Party banners are being used tosupport the roof of a collapsing apartment building. When the banners nolonger help, the drunk construction workers are brought in to hold theroof for a sip of vodka. Eventually, the building collapses, burying, amongeverything else, one of the tenants' dreams to grow flowers for the localmarket in the tropical climate of his bathroom.

In Karen Shakhnazarov's Zero City, a flip-flop paraphrase of The In-spector General, a Soviet yuppie inspector comes to a remote Russiantown only to find himself part of a ludicrous puzzle without a clue, a lab-yrinth with no way out. The secretary of the plant office that he has beensent to inspect appears in full nude before him. In a restaurant, he isserved a cake in the shape of his own head for dessert. A psychic boy tellshim that he will never escape.

9. Socialist absurdism, like existentialist absurdism, operates with mod-els. Unlike existentialist absurdism, it creates models of the oppressed so-ciety, not of the universe. The firemen's club, the garage coop meeting, the


"walrus" village, the collapsing apartment building, and Zero City are allmodels of the same prototype. A society that has locked itself inside andlost the key. A society whose only vital force is self-destruction.

The end, however, is almost happy. Apocalyptic optimism is the lastclue to bring Socialist absurdism back to its forefathers, Camus and Co.The bottom line is always faith in the human being. In the coda, there isa lonely man in a boat, floating, despite the psychic boy's prediction,away from the labyrinths of Zero City. The boat, like a fallen leaf in apond, is still and fragile. The dawn mist is moist and thick.

10. Back to the ill-fated firemen. They should not remain alone on the So-cialist screen. They should be joined by cops who have arrested eachother. And secret agents who have framed their own boss. And Partymembers who have banned their own party. And immigration officialswho asked for political asylum. And farmers who burnt their harvest onlyto buy bread from Canada. Truly, Russia is the land of opportunity, atleast, for an absurdist mind.

PART TWOMiddle-distance shots:The individual satire

considered

CHAPTER VI

A subtextual reading ofKuleshov's satire The

Extraordin ary A dven turesof Mr. West in the Land of

the Bolsheviks (1924)

All of us made movies - Kuleshov created theSoviet cinema.

Vs. Pudovkin

While Dziga Vertov is considered the founder of the Soviet revolutionarynewsreel and the unstaged cinema (neigrovoi fil'm), Kuleshov is acknowl-edged as the one who radically changed Russian staged cinema [igrovoifil'm), by introducing a completely new approach to the film narrativeand the actors' performance. While Vertov came to cinema with a tech-nological background, after experimenting with sound recording (the"Laboratory of Hearing'*), Kuleshov began his career as a set designer forEvgeni Bauer, the most prominent Russian film director of the tsarist pe-riod. As a result of their different backgrounds, Vertov dedicated his en-tire life to advancing Soviet cinema toward a "truly international andultimate language of cinema, absolutely separated from the language oftheater and literature," while Kuleshov invested his energies in provingthat movies can function both as an entertainment and a "genuine cine-matic art with its specific language of expression." Between these two -in many ways antithetical - attitudes belong the work and theory ofEisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Ermler, Kozinsev, and Trauberg. Con-sequently, a critical examination of these filmmakers could not be fullyunderstood without taking into consideration the practices and conceptspromoted by Vertov or Kuleshov.

In his productive unit (produktivnoe ob'edinenie), Vertov instructedhis "kinoks" (kinokij1 how to capture everyday events "unawares" (vras-plokh), by avoiding to shoot "substitutes of life" (surrogaty zhizni), whilejuxtaposing the shots according to the montage method, which he labeled"film-eye" (kinoglaz). In his workshop (masterskaya), Kuleshov and themembers of his collective (chleny koJJektiva) exercised physical impro-visations (fizicheskie improvizatsii), designed to improve the performer'sexpressive means and master the art of mise-en-scene. What Vertovsought to extract from naked reality, Kuleshov tried to produce in the65

Middle-distance shots: The individual satire considered 66

laboratory; both aimed at penetrating beneath the perfunctory appearanceof reality or the physical aspect of human conflicts.

Even though concerned with different potentials of the medium,Vertov's and Kuleshov's ultimate goals were to develop unique ways ofpresenting events on the screen-be they spontaneous or performed.Vertov coined the term "life as it is" (zhizn' kak ona esV) to explicate hisdirectorial principle "film truth" (kinopravda); Kuleshov wrote essaysabout the movement conceived by the director (rezhisserom zadanoe /iz-icheskoe dvizhenie) to elaborate on the method employed in his film fac-tory [kinofabrika). Like Vertov in his early theoretical writings, Kuleshovproclaimed that artificiality, as such, is alien to the film medium, espe-cially painted decor, makeup, and theatrical acting. "Cinema," he pro-nounced, "needs realistic] material." Yet it is important to make adistinction between Vertov's and Kuleshov's ideas of the "real material"as the basis for constructing a film: For Vertov, it meant recorded life facts(zhiznenye fakty), while for Kuleshov it implied the performer's libera-tion from theatrical cliches (teatral'nye stereotipy). Once the actor de-cides to adhere to such stereotypes, Kuleshov insists that he or she mustcomment on them through parody-which is reminiscent of Vertov'sclaim that the cinematographer should "lay bare" his or her interventionwhenever rearranging the actual event before the camera.

Together with Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Vertov and Kuleshov were thefirst Soviet revolutionary "theorizing filmmakers" who insisted on thefull interrelation between theory and practice. At the outset of the newSoviet film production, Kuleshov wrote: "By its artistic nature and struc-ture, film - as an autonomous art — does not have anything in commonwith a staged play. . . . Above all, film should be reduced to the level ofthe recorded theater, let alone function as its shadowy imitation. Cinemashould be viewed as a separate, independent art. . . . The impact of a filmmust be — cinematic."2 Evidently, Kuleshov's struggle for the specifics ofcinema [spetsifika kino), along with his search for the appropriate filmicmeans of transposing various genres established in theater and literatureinto the cinematic structure, places him - together with Vertov and Eisen-stein - among the veterans who encouraged generations of Soviet film di-rectors to create works of extraordinary cinematic values. The basicmembers of the Kuleshov collective were Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Bar-net, and Sergei Komarov, while in a short period of time, several actorsbecame the leading Soviet film actors, such as Vladimir Fogel, Peter Gal-adzhev, Alexandra Khokhlova, and the youngest member of the work-shop, Irina Vsevolodnaya (Meyerkhold's daughter).

Inspired by American silent slapstick, the detective genre, Griffith's ed-iting technique, and the use of light practiced by the German expression-ist filmmakers, Kuleshov developed his own theory of the medium,summarized as follows:

A subtextual reading of Kuleshov's Mr. West 67

The essence of cinema lies in the composition and juxtaposition of the shots. Toachieve a cinematic impact on the screen, it is not important what is filmed in ashot, but how one shot replaces the other, and in which way they are structured.3

One can imagine the official reaction to such a "formalist" concept ofart, which subsequently forced Kuleshov (like so many other outspokenSoviet artists) to devise a strategy of hiding his views. But as the Stalinistcontrol over arts intensified, the possibility of such a strategy was re-duced; in 1937, Eisenstein admitted "serious political mistakes" inconceiving his (aborted) film Bezhin Meadow, while Kuleshov was con-stantly criticized; and after the 1935 Congress of Film Workers, he wasforced to confess to his "formalistic" errors.

For those familiar with the style of his major films, it may seem para-doxical that Kuleshov exhibited such an antagonism toward the histrionicexpression in cinema, persistently demanding that the theater actorsbe "forever expelled from the film studio." In 1920, he declared, "Filmdoes not need professional actors, but only 'naturshchiks,' i.e., peoplewho by themselves (as made by their 'papa' and 'mama') represent ma-terial for cinematic expression" (italics added). In the same article,he poses the question "What is naturshchik?" followed by a definition:"It is a man with a prominent appearance and well-trained body, capableof performing in front of the camera any kind of physical movementor facial expression of inner emotions, always faithfully following thedirector's suggestions."4 Following this attitude, Eisenstein later devel-oped his concept of typage (tipazh), as exemplified in Strike (Stachka,1925), particularly in the director's casting of the "negative" charac-ters (policemen, factory owners, informers, anarchists, provokers, andlumpen-proletariat).

As one may assume, Kuleshov's idea of acting in front of the cameraderives from the tradition of Meyerhold's "biomechanics," which places agreat emphasis on actors' physical behavior as well as symbolic mise-en-scene. During my doctoral research at VGIK (the All-State Institute of Cin-ematography) in 1965, I often attended film acting classes led byKuleshov's wife, Alexandra Khokhlova: As a guideline, she used the"method" developed by the famous French theatrologist Francois-Alexander Delsarte (1811-1871), widely known for his systematic elabo-ration of "expressive mime" (Je mime expressif), and physical movement(Je mouvement physique) as the essence of scenic art [Vessence d'art sce-nique). She reconfirmed to me that it was the Delsarte type of acting thatthe Kuleshov collective (kollectiv Kuleshova) employed from the earliestdays of its existence. I also discussed with her the importance of exam-ining the relationship and reciprocal influence between the Kuleshovmethod of acting and the FEKS school (Factory of the Eccentric Actor),as conceived by Kozintsev's and Trauberg's manifest "eccentrism"


(ekstsentrizm), fostering dynamism of the music hall in mise-en-sceneand cherishing the actor's physical movement.

The Kuleshov method (method KuJeshova) was incompatible withStanislavsky's method, (sistema StanisJavskogo), which demanded thatthe actors be utterly realistic, and wholly identify themselves with thecharacters, while subordinating expressive means to their "inner emo-tional life." Contrary to this, Kuleshov (like Meyerkhold) insisted that theactors begin to create their parts by building up "the rich, flexible, andsubtle mechanism of exterior expression" [bogatyi, gibkyi i tonkyi appa-rat vneshnei vyrazitel'nosti). For Stanislavsky, the emotion was the solesource and control of the actor's each and every reaction; for Kuleshov,the exterior expression was both the goal and the means of the actor's per-formance. Especially in Mr. West, the interpreters' expressive meansprove to be highly stylized, thus making it easier for the actors to alienatethemselves from the characters, which confirms the association of theKuleshov method with Brechtian "Verfremdungseffekt" (the alienationeffect). Intentionally distanced from the interpreters, Kuleshov trans-formed his mise-en-scene into mise-en-shot by means of a rhythmic in-teraction among the actors' movement, alternation of shots, and thefunction of light. The interpreter's body and face, farcical gestures andburlesque mime, are the director's main vehicles of controlling not onlywhat occurs on the screen, but also what he or she thinks about the char-acters and their interaction. Through such a distancing directorial proce-dure, the satiric power of the film is brought to the fore in the mostdynamic sequences, some of which are brilliant examples of the silentfilm comedy and which helped the Soviet viewer to read the subtextualmeaning of the image, hence to understand the real target of the satire.

Mr. West demonstrates, in the clearest manner, all the aspects/charac-teristics of Kuleshov's directorial style. The collective's first full feature,The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks,(working title: How This Will End? [Chem eto konchitsya?]) was adver-tised as "the pamphlet on the capitalists' lies about the Soviet Society andan American citizen who believes in such propaganda: conceived and ex-ecuted in the style of the most popular genre of the bourgeois cinema -the detective film (kinodetektiv)."5

The reviews testify that the Soviet viewers were entertained by the bur-lesque "adventures" of the American senator Mr. West, who childishlybelieves that a group of street hooligans (who kidnapped him upon hisarrival to Moscow) are genuine Bolsheviks. But it is also possible that thesame audience saw the film as a parody on the Soviet system as well, asystem in which such adventures could not take place - even in a fic-tional world. With little comparative deliberation, one could realize thatthe underground "network" of the hoodlums is inconceivable in a total-itarian police state like the USSR. As a consequence, the film's plot could


Alexandra Khokhlova, who laughs it up in Lev Kuleshov's double-edged com-edy that is both a spoof of America and a celebration of American silent filmcomedy, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolshe-viks (1924).

be read both as a satire on the American propaganda against the Commu-nist society, and as a humorous - and quiescent - critique of the existingautocratic political order in the Soviet Union. It seems plausible thereforethat the Soviet audience, while laughing at the "absurd" situations of Mr.West (who by his looks and behavior resembles Harold Lloyd), intimatelyrelated the kidnappers' "atrocities" to the methods used by the GPU(Stalinist secret police) behind the closed doors of their monstrous enter-prise. The Soviet audience probably laughed at Mr. West's crazy exploits,while discreetly chuckling at the presentation of an environment thatwas a parody of what they knew was the practice common to the Bolshe-vik establishment.

Mr. West is structured in a way that affects the viewer on both narrative(diegetic) and psychological (subliminal) levels: The naivete of the plot(dramatic conflicts) and the stylistic exaggeration of the action (mise-en-scene) invests Kuleshov's satire with numerous subtextual implications.No doubt, from today's perspective it is easier - and more appropriate -to recognize the film's subtext as a parody of both capitalist and Bolsheviksocial orders; however, one should not dismiss the possibility of the


film's "subversive" impact on the consciousness of the contemporary So-viet audience. At least the sophisticated viewers were capable of accept-ing the formal/stylistic execution of the film as a means of associating theparodized world with the conditions that initiated, even requested, sucha parody.

Absurdity of dramatic conflicts and oddity of mise-en-sc&ne are carriedto the extreme that generates a distrust in the film's primary signification.As a result, the manifest message becomes transparent, henceforth turn-ing against the filmic text, in the process of which the film's form disso-ciates itself from the plot, fostering its own import that subverts theintentionality of the narrative. For example, the caricature of the baron-ness (Khokhlova), particularly her fancy dresses - in spite of her pomp-ous conduct (intended at mocking the vamp as seen in the Americansilent movies) - could readily affect the viewer's nostalgia for such cloth-ing (condemned as "alien" to the Socialist society), perhaps even nurturea discontent in those spectators who were dispossessed (by force) of theirbourgeois belongings. One should keep in mind that Soviet actresses likeKhokhlova were privileged to purchase (abroad, or in the special storesinaccessible to the ordinary people) luxurious outfits and wear them inpublic, without being denounced as bourgeois. In Protazanov's sciencefiction parody Aelita (1924), for example, the Moscow bourgeoisie attendthe clandestine ball: Dressed in worn-out garments, under which theywear a luxurious wardrobe, they dance and drink champagne while re-membering "the old beautiful times," before they wrap themselves againin shoddy rags to return to their Soviet reality!

Another twofold signification of Kuleshov's satire is Mr. West's trial,which, in many respects, reflects the Bolshevik's own legal system: Thedeath penalty (smertnyi prigovor), reached without any deliberation bytwo "cojurors" who constantly nod while looking at the "people's judge,"could be seen as a mockery of autocratic justice. The most transparentscene is that in which a "positive" character (the party official and/or rep-resentative of the GPU) appears deus-ex-machina at the door of the roomin which Mr. West is incarcerated by his kidnappers. Patronizing in atti-tude, wearing a leather jacket (associated with the Soviet secret police), hepoints his pistol toward the crooks. To dramatize the situation, Kuleshovfirst shows a leather-gloved hand slowly appearing through a slightlyopen door, then the pistol in close up, and finally the "liberator's" headcovered with a leather cap, all of which stimulates the viewer's associa-tions outside the narrative context. The very casting of a typage for thepart of the Bolshevik (lacking any personal, let alone emotional, expres-sion) also contributes to the audience's "second thoughts" about the char-acter. Near the end of the film, when the same Bolshevik guides Mr. Westthrough the Moscow streets, bringing him to Red Square, the face of the


"liberator" remains equally impersonal-a bureaucratic executioner ofthe Party's order to make sure that the foreigners' impressions of the So-viet Union correspond to Lenin's claim that it is "the most advanced so-ciety in the history of mankind." Along the same line of propaganda, anintertitle (after Mr. West had realized that his kidnappers were not trueBolsheviks) irresistibly ridicules common official slogans stating that theBolshevik society is superior to the capitalist one. Personally, I recallhow, immediately after the war in Eastern Europe, people discreetlylaughed at a popular song whose "libretto" claimed that "America as wellas England / Soon will be proletarian lands!"

A similar ideological anticipation is contained in the intertitle that an-nounces Mr. West's telegram to his wife in America:

DEAR MADGE,I SEND YOU GREETINGS FROM THE SOVIET RUSSIA.BURN THOSE NEW YORK MAGAZINES, AND HANGA PORTRAIT OF LENIN IN MY OFFICE.LONG LIVE THE BOLSHEVIKS!YOUR JOHN.

The wording of this radiogram is typical of the Bolshevik dictumslaunched during the campaign against capitalism, denounced as thegreatest evil of humankind. Conceived as a personal message, the inter-title turns into a derision of Party rhetoric, especially its unrealistic atti-tude toward social values. Even the use of the famous "Kuleshov effect,"which creates the impression that Mr. West himself inspects the militaryparade in Red Square, sharing company with well-known Party dignitar-ies (including President Kalinin) has an ironic overtone: Such an extraor-dinary treatment, especially of an outsider, has been consideredinconceivable, if not ludicrous. Again, the audience has been tempted torespond with laughter both to the coup de cinema achieved by the jux-taposition of the authentic archival footage (marching soldiers, Partybosses) and the staged shots involving dramatic personae: This cinematicfantasy, evidently, was possible only in the movies!

Ideologically, the most dubious shot is the final close-up of Mr. Westlooking directly into the camera with an expression of enormous relax-ation. The viewer naturally wants to know the actual source of the pro-tagonist's pleasure. Does it emerge from his realization that theBolsheviks are not so bad as the Americans think, or from the fact that hehas finally been liberated from the type of torture imposed on him in theguise of the Bolshevik common practice? But what actually was Mr.West's experience in the "true" land of the Bolsheviks, on the basis ofwhich he sent a laudatory cable to his wife? On the diegetic level, it wasmerely a brief stroll through Moscow streets, followed by an unexpected


observation of the military parade, supervised by the Party guide! In ad-dition, just before the finale, a short montage sequence of the factorymachines and workers (edited in the style of Vertov's "film truth" news-reel) has been attached to Mr. West's "adventures/' lacking any image ofhis own. Obviously, this was the director's concession to political censor-ship (apparently, the insert was not anticipated in the original script),which makes Mr. West's conclusive excitement even more ambiguous inregard to his capacity of distinguishing between the reality and the fan-tasy about the land of the Bolsheviks. In contrast to Mr. West's oblivious-ness, the "experienced" Soviet viewer couldn't be unaware of thisdistinction, though unable to express it publicly.

The Communist vision of the future has always been self-serving,totally divorced from natural historical development, albeit based onthe Marxist concept of history. With this contradiction in mind, it wouldbe interesting to find out how Mr. West was seen by those Russianintellectuals who were acquainted with the American Utopian novelLooking Backward: [2000-1887), written in 1887 by Edward Bellamyand widely popular in Russia both before and after the October Revolu-tion. In 1917, 85,000 copies were reprinted; in 1918, 200,000; and in 1919and 1922 new reprints were made.6 The protagonist of Bellamy's novel,the American citizen Mr. West, returns to the year 1887 from the year2000, when the Utopian scheme of industrial organization allows anequal share allotted to all persons in the products of the nation. Kule-shov's protagonist, Mr. West, after visiting the first Socialist country at theoutset of the twentieth century, returns to the United States, where the"outdated" social system continues to exist. Within such historical con-text, Kuleshov's film gains a particular significance for modern Sovietviewers who currently witness a reversed socioeconomic "development"at odds with the predictions of Marxist historians. It was Mr. Gorbachevwho, after visiting America, initiated a transformation [^perestroika")of Communist society into what is labeled "market [read: capitalist]economy." The present reality in the former Soviet Union may inspirea new "Kuleshov" to produce "The Extraordinary Adventures of Com-rade Gorby in the Land of the Capitalists" (with Woody Allen as theprotagonist)!

Structurally, Kuleshov's film does not use Aesopian language to con-vey its latent message in a metaphoric/satiric manner; instead, the film'ssubtext addresses the viewer's intimate world, touching ideas and judg-ments antithetical to the Bolshevik view of history and society. It is thefilm's subtext that encourages the audience to assume a critical attitudetoward the primary level of filmic diegesis, while constantly questioningthe validity of what is criticized in the film and what were the subliminalintentions of the critic (author). In this dual process of understanding thefilmic structure, all manifest messages undergo a deconstruction, thus be-


coming "funny" not only for what they reveal on the thematic/narrativelevel, but also for how they are constructed. Just as Kuleshov stated in1924, in cinema, the form (structure) is more important than the content(narrative) of the shot(s).

Based on an original script by Nikolai Aseyev, used merely as a pretext(povod) for an improvisational collaboration with the members of theKuleshov workshop, Mr. West exhibits many features of the Kuleshovmethod, including the famous "Kuleshov effect." Without analyzing themclosely, it might be useful to pinpoint some of the film's most evident ex-pressive means:

1. "Biomechanical" style of "gestural" acting, (often turned into acrobatics),particularly during the physical conflicts and characters' emotional forays.

2. Intensification of the facial expressions (pantomime) especially in close ups.3. Acting without makeup ("igra bez grima"), in the style of the Russian cabaret

and American music hall.4. Eccentric design of the costumes, "embellished" by symbolic details (five-

pointed star, hammer and sickle).5. Expressionistic use of light and chiaroscuro shot composition to achieve a

"mysterious" atmosphere (*7ug's light effects").6. Geometric blocking of the actors' movement and their interaction - mise-en-

scene - designed in the manner of the circus numbers, particularly during thefights and "shootouts."

7. Use of the iris/mask to focus on details or to alter the screen's format, thusincreasing the tension of the scene.8. Enforcement of the action's pace through rapid cutting and parallel editing,

particularly in the chase sequences.9. Distinct shooting angle as a means of emphasizing someone's point of view or

dramatizing the situation.10. "Last-minute rescue" as a variation of Griffith montage convention.11. Accelerated motion for comic purposes, used during chases and burlesquemise-en-scene.12. The "Kuleshov effect" (in the closing sequence) showing Mr. West "partici-pating" as a dignitary, at the military parade, at Red Square in Moscow.13. "Special effect" imagery to indicate the character's inner frustration, night-mare, or fantasy ("Everything begins to spin before Mr. West's eyes").14. Dynamic camera movement, as the most effective means of creating the cin-ematic "mise-en-shot," in the chase sequences.15. Parodic function of the titles conveying the political "message," while con-taining humorous implications about the characters and the environment inwhich they live.

Through an appropriate interaction of all these expressive means,Kuleshov succeeds in turning a rather simplistic and often trivial plot intoa dynamic comic structure with a broader ideological signification andimpressive cinematic impact. Accompanied by an imaginative combina-tion of the popular Russian (Soviet) and American (music-hall type) score


performed on the piano (as Kuleshov suggested), Mr. West attracts eventoday's audience on both thematic and formal levels.

Notes

1. "Kinoks" is the English translation of Vertov's term kinoki (plural) implyingpeople involved with and enthusiastic about cinema (kino), i.e., Verov's followers.2. Lev Kuleshov, "Iskusstvo svetotvorchestva," Kino, Moscow, no. 12 (1918);pp. 1-2.3. Lev Kuleshov, "Amerikanshchina," Kino-fot, Moscow, no. 1 (1922); pp. 14-15.4. Lev Kuleshov, Iskusstvo kino, Tea-kinopechaV', Moscow (1929), pp. 3-4.5. See Nikolai Lebedev, Ocherk istorii kino SSSR, Moscow, "Iskusstvo" (1965),p. 219.6. See Sylvia Bowman, Edward Bellamy Abroad (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 11.

CHAPTER VII

The strange case of themaking of Volga, Volga

Once upon a time, the KGB came to Aesopand got him by the ass. The meaning of thisfable is clear; we don't need such fables!

The musical comedy Volga, Volga holds a special place in the history ofSoviet film. According to official histories, it is one of the best film com-edies, having been awarded Stalin's Award of the First Degree. When re-viewing the history of Soviet film, we see that this picture exemplifies thetype of Stalinist propaganda film that illustrates the slogan "Life becamebetter, life became more joyful." And though Volga, Volga does not arouseas much passionate controversy as the notorious Cossacks of the Kuban(1950) directed by Ivan Alexandrovich Pyriev, it comes very close.

In the case of Volga, Volga, there are two absolutely aggravating circum-stances. First there is, apparently, Stalin's personal order, about which G.Alexandrov, with his usual naivete (or something much worse) reportedto a correspondent of the evening newspaper Vercherajaya Moskva, "Af-ter our films Happy Guys and Circus our task was to create a film comedywithout any romantic and melodramatic distractions." If we take into ac-count that the work on the film started in 1936, that it was distributed in1938, and that Stalin's award was given in 1941, the meaning of Stalin'sorder becomes clear. In the second place, it was Stalin's favorite pictureand he watched it many times.

But to analyze this film in light of Stalin's attitude toward it, as, for ex-ample, has been done with Mikhail Bulgakov's play The Days of theTurbins (1926), would mean to continue dancing to the leader's tune eventoday. I think the incubation period is over, and now a film historian canlook at this film dialectical ly, both from the sociopsychological content ofthose times and objectively without any ideological point of view. In thisway it will turn out, at least as I see it, that Volga, Volga is one of the mostabsurd pictures in the history of Soviet cinema, a point that I assume Al-exandrov did not suspect in the least. And the history of the making of thefilm appears even more absurd than the film itself.75


I see my essay as proceeding by hypothesis since I must piece togetherthe whole story with only the available fragments and discover directionsthrough indirections. Too much information is still missing. Neverthe-less, I will try to do my best without pretending to offer a full analysis ofthe film, an act that would require a more rigorous and sophisticated planto be able to separate the concept from the final result.

In general, today's "presumption of guilt" against the film is based onthe fact that this film does not match up with the reality of life at thattime. But because Volga, Volga was made between 1936 and 1938, it mayqualify as the most distorted work in Soviet cinema second only to Cos-sacks of the Kuban.

The notion of genre in this case is not taken into consideration at all.Fortunately, our conference as a whole treats the question of genre. But Ido not wish to limit myself to satire only, though Volga, Volga presentsan officially acclaimed, truly classically satiric figure in the bureaucrat,Byvalov, played by Igor Ilinsky. Rather I wish to broaden the theme ofour discussion to speak of parody, the grotesque, and the absurd, for thesethings may become more effective than satire. And then it will turnout that it is impossible to think of a situation more absurd than theone that occurred during the shooting of this most "thoughtless" slap-stick comedy.

There exist several announcements of Volga, Volga and documents thataccompanied the release of this film. Any film art historian would havebeen at his wit's end had he discovered these. The announcements for thepicture printed in Czechoslovakia reads, "Script by A. Erdman, M.Volpin, G. Alexandrov, and director of photography, V. Petrov." In theDemocratic Republic of Germany, however, we find the following: "Di-rected by G. Alexandrov and cameraman, V. Pereslavtsev." The Italian an-nouncement is even further afield: "Written and directed by G.Alexandrov and cameraman, V. Pekov." If we look at the original certifi-cate of the film's registration, we discover that the scriptwriter and direc-tor is G. Alexandrov and that the cameramen are V. Petrov and V.Pereslavtsev. But in the detailed catalogue of 1961, we find again that thescript was written by M. Volpin, N. Erdman, and G. Alexandrov and thatthe director of photography was V. Petrov.

At the same time in many press accounts of the shooting, we look invain for Petrov or Pereslavtsev but find instead that direction is by G. Al-exandrov and that V. Nilsen was his codirector and director of photogra-phy. Furthermore, this report was not published at the beginning of theshooting but after three months work along the Moscow River, as well asthe Oka, Volga, Kama, and Chusovaya rivers. Even before shooting began,Alexandrov and Nilsen took a trip throughout the Urals. So the picturebecame totally confused.

The strange case of the making of Volga, Volga 77

Lyubov Orlova, the striking star in Alexandrov's Volga, Volga (1938).

But everything becomes clear if one remembers that the film was pro-duced in the 1930s. Reprisals among filmmakers, as well as among rep-resentatives of other arts in general, were relatively few. Volga, Volga,however, was an exception. With the few references available, a re-searcher can imagine the following scenario for the film's creation.

G. Alexandrov directed Happy Guys from the script written by N. Erd-man and V. Mass, and V. Nilsen was the cameraman. By that time, N. Erd-man had already become the author of the famous play Mandate that wasstaged in Meyerhold's theater where his previous play, Suicide, had al-ready been forbidden. It happened after the preview by a governmentcommission headed by L. Kagamovitch. Meyerhold's intercession as wellas Stanislavsky's, who also wanted to stage the play in his own theater,


failed to help. And when the filmmakers were on location during theshooting of Happy Guys, V. Katchalov being a little high, recited one ofErdman's fables in Stalin's presence. (These fables are sometimes attrib-uted to V. Mass.) As a result, both authors were arrested on locationand exiled to the Siberian town of Emiseysk. The verdict was relativelymild because the 1930s had only just begun. After his release, Erdmanwas deprived of some rights, such as the freedom to live in Moscow,and he had to move to the town of Kalimin situated a hundred kilometersfrom Moscow together with M. Volpin, who was also just released fromlabor camps.

Apparently G. Alexandrov invited them to work on Volga, Volga at thissame time. Was this being faithless to a friend? Was it courage? Or was hebeing light-minded or spoiled? Thus, Alexandrov's coauthors were know-ingly disgraced and could only return to Moscow illegally.

The director of photography and codirector, V. Nilsen, who was, on theother hand, a very respected follower of orders, was generously awardedby Stalin on the eve of the Ail-Union Conference.

But when the shooting of Volga, Volga was nearly over, V. Nilsenwas arrested. There was a halt to production, and a director of pho-tography was not immediately appointed, hence the discrepancy in thevarious credits. Yet this was not all. According to the evidence given bya remarkable actress, M. V. Mironova, whose part was already reducedduring the editing so as not to compete with the performance by Alexan-drov's actress wife, Orlova, the production manager, Zahak Darvetsky,was also arrested.

The political editor at the time concluded: "The artistic level of thisfilm is not high enough. It is too drawn out. There are many trite comicsituations, scenes at the Olympiad at the end of the film are absolutelyfalse."1 He then made the following recommendation: "To cut out thewhole eleventh reel (the end of the film). To cut out the episodes depict-ing turmoil during the Olympiad - the scene in which the captain pullsStrelka's pants down, the whole scene of love being declared betweenStrelka and Alosha that takes place under the table, the table collapsing,the chairman running around with the prize."

We should, however, be fair to the director, who did not sacrifice ei-ther the falling pants or the episode under the table. But he had to giveup something.

V. Smekhov, the actor from the famous Taganka Theater, recalls the ep-isode that N. Erdman told him:Yes, when the film was ready and only the credits were lacking, it was shown toStalin, and Grisha (Alexandrov) came to Kalinin where I was serving my exile andhe told me, "You see, Kolya, our film has become the leader's favorite comedy.And of course you understand that it will be a lot better for you if your name doesnot appear in the credits. Do you understand?" And I said, "I understand."2


That this episode refers to Volga, Volga is confirmed by N. Mandeb-schtam, who was in exile in Kalinin with her husband at the same timeas N. Erdman. So we arrive at the "presumed guilty" status: It is impos-sible to imagine a more absurd history than that of this joyful comedy'sproduction. But what was the degree of N. Erdman's participation in mak-ing the carefree Volga, Volga? And were the scenes of Byvalov written infact with the "satirical pen" of the "mandate" author as K. Mintzremembers?3 And were there others? Was it true that he referred to thefilm as a total mess? Visuals - the image, picture - are primary in cinema,and Erdman was a man of letters. Was N. Mandelstain's suggestion that"Erdman doomed himself to silence if only to just keep alive" correct?4 Inparticular, she remembers him telling of a plot of a play, built on the deal-ings of an ordinary citizen and bureaucracy as a "farewell fable" about theGPU (Political State Administration, the predecessor of the KGB). Wasthis the last thing Erdman talked about? Were the verses written in 1921a prophecy?

Time's colorless riverpulls me impulsively or gently.Do what you want, but don't doomme, a criminal for misery.

Nobody today will be able to answer these questions completely and fi-nally. But in reading his interludes written to some other authors' plays oreven his fleeting everyday jokes (when in NKVD's musical ensemble,where he was taken along with Volpin during World War II and was givena trenchcoat, he said, "You know, Misha [Volpin], it seems as if they cameto arrest me"), you understand that in his heart, Erdman never changed.

Someone — K. Mintz perhaps — notes that the young Erdman wrote cou-plets and sketches before he wrote Mandate, which were just as importantas his serious plays. But it is just in the Russian tradition that cabaret -even political cabaret — and other lesser arts are not held in the same re-spect they command in Germany and France.

In light of everything just mentioned, I'd like to put forward an hypoth-esis that I am unable to substantiate. Getting back to Volga, Volga, I repeatthat I find it to be one of the most absurd films in Soviet cinema, a self-parody of the genre, though I suspect that Alexandrov, though well mean-ing enough, was not shrewd enough.

What goes for Erdman in Volga, Volga is perhaps his creative heritage.As stated in the film's initial synopsis, it is traditionally considered thatVolga, Volga deals with the "richness and prosperity of the people's tal-ents in our country. Within the limits of this theme, the film depicts bu-reaucracy, sluggishness and careerism in a satirical way."

In fact the town of Melkoretchensk, which is shown in the first half ofthe picture, is one of the most amazing parodies in the film. During the


twentieth year of Soviet power (the film was being prepared to commem-orate the jubilee), what do we find in Melkoretchensk? There is a generalflourishing of people's talents and a universal idiocy. I don't knowwhether a contemporary satiric writer could invent such a dreary spotwhile depicting the era of five-year plans. The telegraph was practicallyunknown in this town. Let's recall how the joyful Strelka delivers a tele-gram to Byvalv that announces a parade of folk talent. The fastest meansof information comes across the slowest means of transport, which is theferry boat that is stuck in the middle of the river, and the telegram has tobe delivered by means of song as in past days: Civilization stumbles onthe town of Melkoretchensk. The telegram is being taken to Byvalov, theofficial object for satirical exposure, by a water carrier who is unthreat-ened by unemployment, for in this town they have not only no telegraph,but no water pipes as well. The only telephone in town that night con-nects Byvalov sitting in his office on one floor with someone on the nextfloor, but even this is shown not to be working.

The whole town is busy doing only one thing: singing and dancing. Ifwe turn to the genre of fable we remember a well-known tale by Krylov,"The Dragonfly and the Ant": "You were singing all the time. It's a seriousbusiness, so we can go and dance now." In Volga, Volga, not a single in-stitution in town minds its business: They don't feed you in the localdiner. A janitor doesn't look after the building or clean the yards or streetsbecause everybody is singing and dancing under the leadership of theindefatigable Strelka, the letter carrier (though letters are apparentlysecondary to telegrams to her). Musical fusions of classics and balalaika,also representing a high degree of parody, are brilliantly realized byJ. Dumaevsky.

If we return for a minute to Erdman's works, we shall find in them acomparison with his satirical plays Mandate and Suicide in which themain characters (i.e., the intelligentsia), were in one way or another lateto accept Soviet power. The object of parody in Volga, Volga is forthe first time that "sacred beast" which was always something called"the people."

One can suggest that the images of Melkoretchensk were inspired byforced acquaintance of the authors with small towns where civilizationhadn't dropped in despite the fact that this was the twentieth year of So-viet power. This is true even more so of Melkoretchensk's means of trans-portation. The town has only one ship, which is a paddle boat built in thelast century and not in Russia. (It was a gift from America.) With hugepaddles it nevertheless moves very slowly as Melkoretchensk's amateursingers and dance ensemble set sail for Moscow where the Olympiad isgoing to take place. Their rival competitors use even more ancient raftsand vessels. These were medieval Viking-like vessels, built for the film


Stenka Razin (1937), that Alexandrov for the fun of it decided to use inVolga, Volga. Furthermore these boats have the kind of pilots and cap-tains who stand by the steering wheel and manage not to miss a singlesandbar. At one point, one of them stamps his foot and falls through all ofthe ship's decks. Luckily enough, the "Great Helmsman" (one of Stalin'snames) himself did not pay attention to this parody even though manypeople were being killed for saying much less.

Melkoretchensk's Russia turns quite unexpectedly into some sort of in-dustrial super power. Squadrons of planes, white steamboats, and othersigns of the new Socialist era are all over the place, and the absurdism ofthe sudden change leaves no doubts whatsoever as to the sense of parodyenthusiastically embraced by the director.

The cloudless festivity of Alexandrov's screen kitsch together with thefilm's structure make the film quite offensive to my point of view. But Al-exandrov's cinema is the subject for deeper research, which I cannot gointo here.

In conclusion to my hypothesis suggested earlier, I'd like to quoteM. V. Minonova, the remarkable actress, friend to Mass and Erdman,and one of the last living members of the Volga, Volga cast. She says,"Volodja Nilsen was exiled: He was the director of photography, andZahar Dosetsky was exiled as well during the shooting: He was one ofthe best production managers. People kept disappearing. And sometimesit happened just like that: You would be sitting with your friends, threeof you, and one of them told a joke. Your other friend laughed andyou didn't. The next day the friend who told the joke was missing. Whichof us informed on him? Maybe some of the rooms were bugged. My hus-band always had a briefcase ready in our hall with a toothbrush andso forth.

"So people were gradually disappearing from our film. When we fin-ished shooting, the cameraman was gone. Alexandrov was not too brave aman, as you know. And if he only understood what had happened. By theway, I thought about it then too. If he understood, maybe he wouldn'thave made the picture at all. This crazy ensemble was too much of a par-ody. Then all of the ships and steamboats.

"My part ceased to exist. Alexandrov cut it out. It was a love story withJutyshkin, a parallel romantic story, but it was impossible, of course.

"Zahar Daretsky disappeared as early as during preproduction. He wasa famous production manager. I have no doubts that the script was writtenas a parody. But if Grigory Vasilevitch understood that, he wouldn't havedirected the picture. And we talked about it with Mass and Vladimir Za-harovitch, who would later say, 'Alexandrov was not so brave to direct itknowing what he was doing.' "


Notes

1. Protocol N. 538/38 (Soviet Film Archives, Moscow), dated April 11, 1938.2. N. Erdman, Plays, Letters, Documents: Contemporary Remembrances (Moscow:Iskusstvo Publishers, 1990).3. Ibid., p. 401.4. Ibid., p. 443.

CHAPTER VIII

Circus of 1936: Ideologyand entertainment under

the big top

Stalin clearly understood the value of film as a means of implanting of-ficial myths among the masses. He focused particularly on the most pop-ular genres — such as the musical comedy - as an innocuous and willingvessel for ideological edification through entertainment. One of the mostwidely seen musical comedies in the Soviet Union, Circus (1936), is aclassic example of Stalin's use of film as an expression of his ideologicalworld view. It is also the first conscious attempt to produce a musicalcomedy according to the model of Socialist Realism.

Movies for the millions: Combining ideology and entertainmentCircus was the second in a spate of musical screen hits by director GrigoryAlexandrov between 1934 and 1940, marking the golden era of the musi-cal comedy in Soviet cinema. His other major films during this periodwere Happy Guys (1934), Volga, Volga (1938) and The Radiant Road(1940), all massive successes. It is no accident that the height of the mu-sical comedy coincided with the darkest hours of the Stalinist terror. AsSoviet reality became ever more twisted, Stalin raised the volume on pro-paganda by recruiting all mass media to the task of maintaining the myth-ical illusion that life had indeed become brighter and happier.

Focusing on cinema's ability to reach the entire Soviet nation, both ru-ral and urban, literate and illiterate, Stalin used film to legitimize andconsolidate his position in the Kremlin palace. In a country where the in-telligentsia was but an island in a sea of peasants, the popularization of anofficial myth through film was much more effective than the use of ratio-nal arguments in achieving a particular political aim. As Stalin once said,"Cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. Our task is to make gooduse of it."1

Boris Shumiatsky, the head of Soviet cinema at the time, responded tothis challenge by ordering film directors to combine ideology with massentertainment. In a 1935 decree entitled "Movies for the Millions," Shu-miatsky asserted that the Soviet public needed such genres as drama,83


comedy, and fairytale because of their "energizing emotions, cheer-fulness, . . . joie-de-vivre and . . . laughter. The victorious class wants tolaugh with joy. That is its right, and Soviet cinema must provide the au-dience with this joyful Soviet laughter."2 These seemingly innocent pro-ductions would become one of the main vehicles for conveying thelegitimizing myths of Stalin's rule on the Soviet screen in the 1930s.

From Happy Guys to Circus: The politicization of cinemaThe first musical comedy that truly epitomized Shumiatsky's prescribedfusion of ideology and entertainment was Circus, released in 1936. It rep-resented a marked contrast to Alexandrov's 1934 comedy, Happy Guys.The differences between the two films reflect a key shift in the govern-ment's cultural policy and the general political pathos between 1934and 1936.

In Happy Guys, Alexandrov strove to "de-ideologize" the script, claim-ing that "Soviet comedy had become too problematic and had ceased be-ing funny."3 He defended laughter for laughter's sake and produced aneccentric, slapstick jazz review with only a hint of ideology compared tohis subsequent productions. Two years later, with the release of theheavily politicized Circus, Alexandrov was singing a different tune. In-stead of relieving the script of its "ideologically loaded moments," as hehad done with the Happy Guys,4 he took the original work of Kataev, Ilf,and Petrov and imparted such a strong ideological slant to it that the au-thors withdrew their names from the film credits in protest.5 Defendinghis political rehashing of the script, Alexandrov later claimed, "We fearedthat the genre of light eccentric comedy [used in Happy Guys] would beunsuitable for conveying significant social substance, and so we turned itinto a melodrama."6 Ironically, two years earlier, Alexandrov had de-fended the legitimacy of his "light eccentric comedy" against conserva-tive critics attacking its lack of social substance. By adopting the format ofa melodrama in Circus, Alexandrov also disassociated himself fromEisenstein's "montage of attractions," which he had adopted in HappyGuys. He turned instead to the more conventional plot development pro-moted by Shumiatsky and the burgeoning Stalinist school of filmmakers.

In addition, while the lyrical stars of Happy Guys basically sang,danced, romanced, and just goofed around, by 1936 Alexandrov de-manded a stronger sense of social purpose in his characters. He assertedthat the heroes of Soviet movies should not just sing, but also "create,struggle and conquer."7 These images were the hallmark of what KaterinaClark calls "the heroic age," when "the new Soviet man" portrayed in art,literature, film, and theater surpassed all human limitations to achieveunprecedented feats.8 If these new Stalinist heroes were to sing at all,their songs were to convey a highly principled, patriotic love of one's

Circus of 1936: Ideology and entertainment 85

homeland, not merely a romantic love between a man and a woman, as inHappy Guys. In short, these heroes were meant to be larger-than-life mod-els for the masses. They were to be the personification of genuine socialistvalues, meant to teach the Soviet nation the true path to socialism.

Numerous factors contributed to the marked differences betweenHappy Guys and Circus. The official imposition of Socialist Realism atthe 1934 Congress of the Union of Writers, just as Happy Guys was beingreleased, imposed heavy-handed ideological strictures affecting all sub-sequent films. Shumiatsky's 1935 decree entitled "Movies for the Mil-lions" further specified the impact of Socialist Realism on film,demanding clearly constructed plots, understandable characters, andconventional montage. At the Ail-Union Creative Conference of SovietCinema Workers held in 1935, the new Stalinist school of filmmakers de-nounced the abstract, intellectual experimentalism of the revolutionaryschool of filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, etc.) and instead promoted thecreed of Socialist Realism that aimed to make cinema accessible to themasses.9 As a former apprentice of Eisenstein, Alexandrov may have feltunder particular pressure after this conference to distance himself fromthe censured director. In the meantime, Stalin himself was gaining an in-creasingly powerful grip on Soviet cinema by centralizing film produc-tion in the hands of a single state agency - the GUKF - and by closelyinspecting almost every film before its release.10 Thus, between 1934 and1936, the last sparks of spontaneity in Soviet cinema died out, as exper-imentalism gave way to an officially established code.

Circus as a cinematic ode to the Constitution of 1936:The historical contextCircus was the first musical comedy to reflect these far-reaching changesin the film industry. Modeled on the formula of Socialist Realism, it wasexactly what Shumiatsky had prescribed, an ideal fusion of ideology andentertainment that served to convey legitimizing myths to an unsuspect-ing audience. The principle myth that Circus embodied was the StalinistConstitution of 1936.

The production of Circus unfolded simultaneously with the writing ofthe Constitution, which was accompanied by great fanfare, panegyrics,and a huge campaign to "encourage" public participation in what wasproclaimed to be a "historic democratic process." Stalin used all means ofinfluence at his disposal to convince the Soviet public and the world atlarge of the authenticity of these claims, and the cinema was a key ele-ment in this media barrage. Liubov Orlova, the star of Circus, wrote inher memoirs that every time she heard a radio report on the preparationof the Constitution, she would notify songwriter Lebedev-Kumach, whowould then compose his own "musical declaration" of the Constitution to


include in the movie's score.11 The theme song, "Song of the Motherland,"clearly reflects the spirit of the Constitution. Its verses proclaimed, "Wewrite the international Stalinist law in golden letters, words whose gran-deur and glory will never fade with time"12 and echoed the document'scentral tenet that "every person has the right to study, play and work."The refrain reinforced the sense of well-being and security advanced bythe Constitution, asserting, "I know of no other country where one canbreathe so freely."13

Like the movie Circus, this internationally touted Constitution was inand of itself a spectacular "trompe l'oeil" that created a largely convinc-ing facade of prosperity, democracy, and equal rights throughout the So-viet land. It is surprising in retrospect how many major figures worldwideseemed to have believed that this document represented actual fact. Ac-cording to historian Nicholas Timasheff, when the 1936 Constitution be-came public, "the general impression abroad was that dictatorship wouldbe curtailed, democracy introduced and political freedom established."14

Its central assertion was that the USSR had finally achieved true social-ism. In the Socialist economy, there was no unemployment, no poverty,no economic crises, and no class exploitation. All antagonistic classes -kulaks, speculators, merchants, and capitalists - had been liquidated.There remained only the peasants, the workers, and the intelligentsia. Asa result, the USSR had become a great family of nationalities in which allminorities were equal before the law and racism was spurned.

This glowing scenario had enormous political benefits for Stalin. In-ternationally, by presenting an image of internal unity and strength, Sta-lin undoubtedly hoped to deter Nazi Germany from carrying out itsexpressed plans to "liberate the Ukraine from the Moscow yoke" and dis-member the empire.15 In addition, he hoped to gain the confidence of theWestern powers, whose cooperation in countering the growing wave offascism was becoming a matter of increasing concern to him. By portray-ing the USSR as a prosperous constitutional democracy, Stalin tried toshed his image of dictatorial pariah and secure acceptable relations withthe West. Domestically, the mythical veneer provided a convenient sub-terfuge for Stalin's ruthless drive to attain absolute power through massterror and repression. It created the impression that life had indeed be-come happier and more prosperous under Stalin and that there was trulyno other country where people enjoyed such freedom and collectivewealth. Stalin encouraged a xenophobic sense of security by contrastingthis socialist "Garden of Eden" with the projected misery and terror offascist and bourgeois countries.

The plot of Circus skillfully weaves four themes from the constitutioninto its melodramatic base: the antagonism between socialism and fas-cism, the superiority of the USSR over the United States, the genuine egal-itarianism of the Soviet system, and the image of the USSR as the ideal


refuge for victims of fascism and capitalism worldwide. In brief, the plotsketches a symbolic "love triangle" between a victimized American, a vil-lainous Nazi, and an exemplary Soviet hero. The film begins as stunningAmerican circus performer Marion Dixon flees the United States to es-cape being lynched because of her mulatto child, the result of a past affairwith a black man. She ends up in a circus troupe in the USSR, where hermanager, an abusive Nazi figure named Kneishitz, tries to possess her byblackmail, threatening to cause her public disgrace by revealing the "ter-rible secret" of her child. Marion, however, develops a romance with So-viet circus performer Martynov, who teaches her the superiority andgrandeur of socialism through his principled actions and successful at-tempt at a circus feat that surpasses anything in the American troupe'sown repertoire. When Kneishitz finally plays his last card and paradesMarion's child around the circus ring to defame the young woman andrepel Martynov, the Soviet audience instead embraces the boy in true in-ternationalist spirit and sings him a lullaby. Kneishitz's scheme is foiledand Marion joins her true love, the unruffled Martynov, in her new andpermanent homeland.

Martynov versus Kneishitz: The battle between socialism and fascismThe innate antagonism between socialism and fascism - as played out be-tween Martynov and Kneishitz - is a guiding force in Circus. Alexandrovconveyed this theme as a black and white struggle between good and evil,ensuring its accessibility to even the most unsophisticated audience. Al-exandrov also leaves no doubt as to the depth of this antagonism: In onescene, the two stare angrily at each other through a window, and thepanes quickly freeze over from the chill of their mutual hatred. Accordingto Alexandrov's biographer, Ivan Frolov, the "Russian [Martynov] and theGerman [Kneischitz] are representatives of different systems - the worldof imperialism and its cult of quick money and dirty business on the onehand and the world of socialism, preaching high moral and humanitarianprinciples on the other."16 Each "system" attempts to win the heart of theAmerican, and the guiding values of each are revealed by their differentmethods of achieving victory.

Kneishitz's tactics are ruthless and uncivilized. He tries to woo Marionby seducing her with expensive furs, blackmailing her, and threateningphysical harm to her love interest, Martynov. In the last case, he temptsMartynov's trapeze partner, Raika, into eating too many sweets, knowingthat she will gain weight and throw off the delicate balance of the duo'saerial stunts. As a result, Martynov is injured, though not fatally (he isafter all the good guy), and Kneischitz's plot inevitably fails. Another ofKneishitz's despicable schemes is to reroute a love letter that Marion hadintended for Martynov so that it falls into the wrong hands and nearly


causes the heartbroken American to leave the USSR in despair. But noneof these blows are fatal. Instead, they only strengthen Martynov's resolveto defeat the evil forces of fascism.

In contrast to Kneishitz, our Soviet hero is a strong paternal figure, gen-tly leading Marion to the "correct" path by serving as a living example ofgood Socialist values and decency. In one episode, he uses the civilizedmedium of music to win her over, singing the praises of socialism in"Song of the Motherland" and teaching her to sing in tune with him andwith true conviction. According to conservative film critic RostislavIurenev, Martynov exercises patience and compassion in inspiring inMarion "a keen awareness of that great, strong, and kind country wherepeople live joyfully and freely."17 In this way, Alexandrov effectively con-trasts the amoral and treacherous methods of fascism with the lofty prin-ciples of socialism.

Alexandrov's use of caricatures is also effective in magnifying thebattle between good and evil. As the "face of fascism," Kneishitz is a trulydespicable and villainous creature, with a thin black moustache; pierc-ing, ratlike eyes; and a sinister cape. He exudes a false prowess by puffinghimself up artificially with an inflatable muscle suit that enlarges hischest. When Kneishitz's comical apparatus accidentally deflates at onepoint, the audience sees "fascism unmasked" in all its treachery and cow-ardice. The fascist German is not as formidable as he seems and is merelybloated up with lies and deception. This episode clearly reflects the po-litical pathos of the time, when the "razobJachenie," or unmasking, of fas-cist villains became a daily headline in the news and a key element toStalinist mass political ritual. The image of the villain in disguise wasoriginally a key component of the Russian fairytale that Stalin adopted forhis own purposes and exploited to its most grotesque extreme in the in-famous show trials of 1937-38.

In stark contrast to Kneishitz, Martynov represents Alexandrov's visionof the new Soviet man. He is classically handsome and clean cut with astrong jaw, broad shoulders, a dazzling white smile, and cutting blue eyes.Guided by unyielding principles rather than capricious emotions, he val-iantly defends the dignity of his motherland against fascism's aggressivetendencies and capitalism's claim to superiority. However, he comes off asa very wooden and one-sided character, resembling one of the many face-less workers on billboards throughout the Soviet Union. Perhaps Alexan-drov was trying too hard to make amends for his "errors" in Happy Guys,in which he cast jazzman Leonid Utesov as an eccentric, lovesick shep-herd, obviously not the epitome of the positive hero that would later be-come a required element in all films. With the government's growingintolerance for political mistakes in art, Alexandrov could not afford totake any risks.


The superpower "race for space"Another central theme in Circus is the superiority of socialism over cap-italism, and consequently, of the USSR over the United States. One at-tribute of socialism's superiority is the fact that whereas Marion recoilsfrom Kneishitz in terror, the Soviets are not intimidated by the fascist'sthreats. When Raika discovers Kneishitz's wicked schemes, for instance,she does not flee but instead boldly pursues him. The American belle,however, seems to need the moral support of the Soviet Martynov behindher before she feels strong enough to defy Kneishitz.

Martynov strives to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system byshowing that he himself - as a typical Soviet man - can surpass even themost impressive American. He promises to take Marion to unprecedentedheights, literally. After watching the American circus troupe's trapeze andcannon act called "Flight to the Moon," he resolves to perform an evenmore difficult feat, calling it "Flight to the Universe." Reflecting the cultof the aviation hero that became popularized by Stalin in the 1930s, Mar-tynov enters the arena accompanied by winged motorcycles and dressedin a Flash Gordon—style outfit, complete with cosmic helmet and elabo-rate wings. He catapults into the air and actually begins flying around un-der the big top defying all laws of gravity and proving the superiority ofthe Soviet system.

This image of the superhuman powers of the new Soviet man exempli-fied the soaring spirit of the 1930s, which Clark has called an era of "ide-alism verging on mysticism."18 It was a time of Stakhanovites and arcticexplorers, death-defying superachievers that Stalin promoted as "the par-agons of the new master race."19 Martynov's aerial acrobatics showedviewers that, under the conditions of socialism, human beings could sur-pass all physical limitations and leap from prosaic reality to a superiorplane in a single bound. Ironically, however, this scene glorifying the su-periority of the Soviet man actually could be taken right out of a BusbyBerkeley musical. Martynov's stunt is followed by a grand spectacle offormation dancing as slim, sequined women bearing hundreds of tinytorches and ribbons create a human wedding cake in motion, its variouslayers rotating in opposite directions.

The amazing strength and prowess exhibited by Martynov in his"Flight to the Universe" clearly produces the desired impression on Mar-ion, who resolves to stay with him in this land of fairytales come true.Thus, while Circus leaves no doubt about the superiority of the USSRover the United States, it implies that certain Americans may be "con-verted" to the cause of socialism and even adopt the USSR as their sec-ond homeland. Marion's conversion takes on the character of a religiousrevelation with erotic overtones. She is drawn to the pure goodness of


socialism and rejects the glamorous evils of capitalism, falling in lovewith Martynov and all that he represents. In Iurenev's words, "Marionfeels love and at first a confused, then a powerful sense of that large,strong, and kind country where people live joyfully and freely."20 HereMartynov takes on the role of a politically mature mentor who helps theheroine develop a true Socialist consciousness, thus playing out a classictheme in the Socialist Realist novel of the 1930s.21

Reflecting the conservative social values promoted by Stalin at thetime that reinforced the traditional roles of men and women, Martynovadopts a strong paternal attitude towards Marion, who sees in him a virilehusband and father for her child. When Martynov strikes up a tune - inthis case "Song of the Motherland" — she follows. "Marion repeats him inan increasingly loud and confident voice," Iurenev notes. "Her eyes spar-kle with happiness. Her voice blends with the strong, pure voice of herbeloved."22

Marion's new homeland: The great family of Soviet nationalitiesThe culmination of Marion's conversion to socialism takes place in thefilm's dramatic climax, as Kneishitz parades her mulatto child around thebig top, expecting to disgrace the young American in the eyes of Martynovand the entire Soviet public. Instead of reacting with horror, however, theSoviet audience begins laughing at Kneishitz's pathetic scheme, then jeer-ing at him with malicious sneers characteristic of the officially promotedattitude toward unmasked "enemies of the people" at the time. DrowningKneishitz's foul-smelling racism in a medley of voices united as one, themultinational Soviet crowd begins crooning a lullaby to the frightened lit-tle boy. Alexandrov effectively pans across an ethnically diverse audienceof Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Jews, and Negroes, who sing separateverses in their own native tongue, then join together to sing the refrain ina perfectly harmonious Russian. As Alexandrov wrote, "The SovietUnion is portrayed as the only country in which the national question isresolved, in which genuine internationalism exists in actual fact."23 So-viet viewers absorb this message through the gentle and imperceptiblemedium of the lullaby as its lyrics reassure listeners of all origins that "ahundred paths, a hundred roads are open to you." The Soviet circus di-rector ends this touching scene on a comical but ideologically orthodoxnote by announcing to the crowd: "This means that in our country welove all children. Have as many black, white, red, even blue, even pink-striped, even dappled gray babies as you'd like."24

Following on the heels of the lullaby scene, the carefully staged finaleof Circus portrays the Soviet family of nationalities marching in unisonacross Red Square, all dressed in the same dazzling white turtlenecks.The leading role of the Russians is symbolized by Martynov's place at the


head of the parade. Strong, confident, and possessed of exceptionallyAryan features, Martynov brandishes the banner of socialism on high andsets the pace for the rest of the nation. Frolov compared Martynov to theclassic hero of Russian "byliny," describing him as "a stately blonde . . .bearing the Russian name Ivan and resembling a 'bogatyr' of ancientchronicles."25 This scene draws unmistakable parallels with the parade ofHitler youth in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. It reveals the ev-olution of Soviet cinema toward a totalitarian model as it began to assim-ilate many of the film formulas used by Hitler and Mussolini to achievethe desired propaganda aims.

While Nazi directors contrasted the "brilliant virtues" of the Aryanswith the "negative influences" of the Jews, however, Alexandrov con-trasted the idyllic image of Soviet internationalism with the racism ofcapitalist and fascist countries, particularly the United States. In hisbook Epokha i kino, he wrote: "Singing the praises of Soviet laws andthe internationalism of Soviet society was all the more convincingwhen contrasted with the barbaric, hateful, racist laws of fascism. I en-countered fascists, and offensive incidences of racism more than oncein the U.S.A. I gathered the materials for the prologue [of Circus] fromeyewitness accounts."26 As Circus opens, the viewer does indeed experi-ence racism's ugly underbelly by viewing Marion's desperate escape fromthe mob of American rednecks seeking to lynch her. Iurenev gives aparticularly melodramatic account of this scene, clearly conveying his ut-ter disgust and indignation: "For only a moment we see the sweaty faces,flabby stomachs, porkpie hats and striped suspenders of the Americanmerchants, for only a moment we hear their belabored breathing,their beastly yelps: 'Get her!' But we remember [these images] for along time."27

Alexandrov's use of such powerful melodramatic episodes aimed toimpress the desired ideological values onto the hearts and minds of So-viet audiences. Among all the cinematic genres, melodrama possesses aunique ability to engage the deepest emotions of the viewer and thus toappeal to passion rather than reason, to the irrational rather than the ra-tional. This was one of Stalin's most effective methods of conveying to themasses the legitimizing myths that reinforced his rule. As Alexandrovwrote in 1937, "We tried in this film to mobilize all the strength andpower of the genre to convey the main, political message mercilesslymocking and unmasking the fascist policy of racism."28 By vicariously ex-periencing Marion's terrifying encounter with a mob of racists, the Sovietviewer undoubtedly felt a far deeper and more lasting sense of distressand disgust at American racists than by simply reading a newspaper ar-ticle about the Ku Klux Klan, particularly since many older Soviets at thattime were still illiterate and relied largely on films for information aboutthe world outside their small villages.


Whether or not Circus achieved the desired ideological impact can sofar only be deduced, since empirical research on this subject is in its earlystages and has not yet produced any concrete results.29 However, it isknown that Circus was immensely popular, drawing an audience of 4 mil-lion in Leningrad and Moscow during the first month after its release.30

The majority of Soviets who lived through the thirties remembers thismovie and particularly its theme song, "Song of the Motherland." Forsome Soviets, these memories inspire a nostalgic yearning for a time ofgreat idealism and collective fervor. For others, they are only a bitter re-minder of the yawning gap between fact and fiction during the years ofthe terror.

In either case, however, Circus was clearly a milestone in the history ofSoviet cinema comedies. It signaled a transition from "razvlechenie" to"razoblachenie," from entertainment to unmasking, from laughter forlaughter's sake to the subordination of comedy to political aims. It was thepolitical candy apple that secured Alexandrov's position as a master di-rector in the eyes of the "Great Teacher." From that point on, the musicalcomedy took on an increasingly propagandists role in Soviet cinema, act-ing as a brilliant facade of laughter and gaiety while, behind the scenes,millions suffered unspeakable tragedy.

Notes1. A. Latyshev: "Vziaf eto delo v svoi ruki," Sovetskii Ekran, no. 22 (1988):

32-5.2. Richard Taylor, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents

1896-1939 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 369.3. Ivan Frolov, Grigorii Aleksandrov (Moskow: Izd-vo "Iskusstvo," 1976), p. 23.4. Ibid., p. 62.5. Ibid., p. 61.6. Ibid., p. 62.7. Ibid., p. 67.8. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1985).9. Luda Schnitzer and Jean Schnitzer, Histoire du cinema sovietique, 1919-1940

(Paris: Pygmalion/Gerard Watelet, 1979), pp. 336-46, and Taylor, The Film Fac-tory, p. 348.10. Viktor Matizen, "Dalekaia iunost' sovetskogo ekrana," Sovetskii Ekran, 18(1988): 61-4.11. Frolov, Grigorii Aleksandrov, p. 64.12. These lines also recall the grandiose slogans of Hitler's "Thousand-YearReich."13. Vasillii Lebedev-Kumach, Stikhotvorenii i Pesni (Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisa-tel', 1950).14. Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat (New York: Arno, 1972), p. 94.


15. P. P. Postyshev, Pod znamenem Stalinskoi Konstitutsii (Partizdat TsK VKP (b)1936), p. 65.16. Frolov, Grigorii AJeksandrov, p. 76.17. Rostislav Iurenev, Kratkaia istoriia sovetskogo kino (Moscow: Biuro propa-gandy sovetskogo kinoiskusstva, 1984), p. 232.18. Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 137.19. Ibid.20. Iurenev, Kratkaia istoriia, p. 233.21. Clark, The Soviet Novel22. Iuvenev, Kratkaia istoriia, p. 234.23. Frolov, Grigorii Aleksandrov, p. 64.24. Iurenev, Kratkaia istoriia, p. 237.25. Frolov, Grigorii Aleksandrov, p. 64.26. Grigorii Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino (Moscow: Izd-vo "politicheskaia liter-atura," 1976), p. 190.27. Iurenev, Kratkaia istoriia, p. 230.28. Ibid.29. Soviet film critic Maya Turovskaya is currently conducting research on Sovietaudience preferences of the 1930s that will shed greater light on the social impactof such films as Circus.30. Frolov, Grigorii AJeksandrov, p. 73.

CHAPTER IX

Black humorin Soviet cinema

It is quite well known that the more rotten something is in any nation,the blacker is its humor. Thus, black humor appears during the cru-cial moments of the "rotten nation" of history, either during wars,stagnation periods, or revolutions. Black humor does not appear dur-ing perestroikas - especially those imposed from above - but that is an-other story.

Of course, black humor does not appeal to every nation. It has to havecertain cultural roots. For example, even at the most depressing momentsof German history, black humor never really took root. Whereas in Spain,it happened to become one of the most popular instruments for preserv-ing a sense of sanity in society. In Russian culture, the tradition of blackhumor goes back to skomorokhi (itinerant minstrels) entertaining peopleat fairs, Jubochnaya Jiteraturea ("chap" literature - popular illustratedbooklets and prints from the seventeenth century to the 1917 revolution)and through the masterpieces of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky,and others down to our days.

It is here that the discrepancies between national traditions and be-tween life-styles comes into focus; because what a foreigner sees as"black" and absurd, may for a Soviet citizen happen to be his or her ev-eryday life. For example, in Eldar Shengelaya's Blue Mountains (1984) wecome across a certain office that looks like a microcosm of destruction:Within this office occur earthquakes, floods, disorder, distress, corrup-tion - try to name a misfortune that does not take place there. And sureenough, the average foreign viewer considers this cinematic situation as ametaphor, while no Soviet citizen would ever look at the film metaphor-ically. Why should we? It is our everyday life, maybe a little bit farfetched but still depicted in a realistic manner. Take the Institute of FilmArt in Moscow at which I work as another example. It looks exactly likethe building in Blue Mountains. For more then five years now, it has beenunder reconstruction, with holes in the roof and floor, hot water flowingfrom the pipes that never work even on the coldest winter days. But wecarry on somehow, have become accustomed to everything, and even do94

Black humor in Soviet cinema 95

Varlam (Avtandil Markharadze), the dictator who, once dead, never seems tostay buried in Repentance (1984), Tengiz Abuladze's allegorical "comic trag-edy" that stunned audiences with its satiric attack on Stalinism and totalitari-anism in general on the eve of glasnost

not pay attention to our discomfort. To a large degree, therefore, black hu-mor is a matter of perspective and distance.

Our socialism has created a real superman - Homo sapiens who canconsider as quite normal libraries that are closed or ruined, churchesused as stores, and personal dignity looked on as some irrelevant factor atall levels. The rhetorical question in the final scene of Tengiz Abuladze'sfilm Repentance (1984) - "Which road leads to the Church?"-has oneand only one answer: "No road, or maybe there is one way ou t -no tthrough a direction but through style, that is, through laughter"; becauseat least this Homo sovieticus superman can laugh. The ability to laugh atoneself is either a sign of high culture or of great despair, or both. In anycase, the color of such laughter is black.

Black humor in Soviet cinema points in two directions. One is in cre-ating the image of our everyday life in more or less realistic forms,through which the crippled and unnatural existence of our lives speaksfor itself. This way is the most widespread one, as witness Blue Moun-tains, Zero City (1989), and many earlier films of the stagnation period.

The second "direction" is more rare since it is more like the Spanishversion. The situation and characters here seem incredible or grotesque,


in the manner of Goya's later work, for example. Here authors do whateverthey choose with their subjects as if they are made of chewing gum. In theexperimental atmosphere of film, nobody pays attention to the mixture oftimes and places, to the fact that some characters appear in medieval cos-tumes in modern circumstances, and those already dead stand in one linewith the living. An extraordinary example of such a charade in which realhistorical characters mix freely with imaginary ones, in which one couldtake an imaginary figure for a historical one and vice versa, is Repen-tance. It is also an example of the naive Soviet mentality in perceivingcinema: Once I overheard a conversation in the course of which a sim-ple elderly woman persuaded a friend to go and see Repentance. "It isa very good picture," she insisted. "It deals with Lavrenty Beriya." "Is hein the movie himself?" asked her friend. "But of course!" was the imme-diate answer.

One could hardly believe that she didn't even notice that the maincharacter of the film was called Varlaam, that he was an imaginary figure,that his fate has little in common with the history of Stalin's KGB chief,that Beriya has been dead for quite a while by then, and that Varlaam isplayed by a Georgian actor. That Repentance is metaphoric and has noth-ing to do with realism meant that this woman, and also many other Sovietviewers accustomed for generations to believe that screen reality was ac-tual truth, were led astray.

It might be due to this nearly religious fate of Soviet cinematic art thatblack humor as a satiric language form so popular in the arts of other to-talitarian regimes was not widespread in the Soviet Union. Black humorjust was not understood, though one could expect the public to be pre-pared for metaphoric thinking by the great works of Russian literature.Unfortunately, very few of the Soviet masses read Gogol, Dostoevsky, orSaltykov-Shchedrin.

But at least one metaphor persistently appeared in Soviet black humorcomedies: that is the image of illness and death as representing the realstate of society. And here one could notice how the change of the times isreflected in this theme. If the unfortunate hero of Leonid Gaidai's comedyA Fiancee from the Other World (1957) was not able to get married be-cause, according to a special certificate, he was accidentally considereddead, Varlaam, the truly dead protagonist of Repentance in 1984, couldn'tlay in peace as his enemies constantly dug him up.

Gaidai's figure, alive though considered dead, was a victim of the bu-reaucrats, a human being against the system; Varlaam, however, repre-sents the system himself: He is its child and victim, and at the same time,he can never be buried because history and memory never die.

There is yet another theme that wanders among black humor treat-ments of death and illness. One could identify it as a dentist theme. Suchfilms as 33 by Georgy Danelia or The Adventures of a Dentist by E. Klimov

Black humor in Soviet cinema 97

are especially notorious. After all, a toothache as Klimov presents it con-tains a dual meaning: It is painful but funny. It is as if a toothache werecreated to combine tragedy and farce, to become a representative of blackhumor in everyday life, and to turn into a great metaphor the Soviet abil-ity to cry through laughter.

I am reminded of a well-known tale about the great Tamerlane's mencollecting taxes in a little village. People were crying but he still asked formore until they stopped crying and started laughing. "Now they havenothing left" was the dictator's verdict. And right he was: People laughwhen they try to defend themselves. In which case it is always for the bet-ter to let sleeping dogs lie. But here and now in our Russian present re-ality, if somebody would wake us up would we . . . laugh?

CHAPTER X

Laughter beyond themirror: Humor and satire

in the cinema ofAndrei Tarkovsky

The very title of this presentation ought to produce at least a chuckle, ifnot hearty laughter, from readers. But to recognize that the very idea ofanalyzing Tarkovsky's films for their humorous content is in itself funnyand perhaps even preposterous, one needs (a) to know the films them-selves (they are generally seen as complex, weighty, serious, philosoph-ical and metaphysical ruminations on the human condition, tendingmore to tragedy than comedy) and (b) to understand the myth createdaround Tarkovsky's persona over the span of an almost-thirty-year career,both in the Soviet Union and in the West. Inseparably linked to his highlyautobiographical films, Tarkovsky was a "martyr," persecuted by an un-caring Soviet cinema bureaucracy, and, like his fellow countryman Alex-ander Solzhenitsyn, a "prophet" who railed against the materialism andloss of spirituality in contemporary societies, whether in the East or theWest. Thus, I am not only trying to offer an original interpretation of Tar-kovsky's work, but, hopefully, with the full complicity of my audience,attempting to undercut what has become a highly pompous rhetoric onTarkovsky. Even in my title, then, one is immediately faced with the di-alogic nature of comedy and the conspiratorial relationship between au-thor and reader in producing laughter. I hope you will join me in thediscovery of a "new" Tarkovsky, whom Susan Fleetwood, the English ac-tress who played the lead in his last film, The Sacrifice (Offret, 1986), de-scribed in the following manner: "When I hear people say in solemntones, 'Oh, you worked with Andrei Tarkovsky/ I remember this cheekylittle chappie who was doing the most outrageous things, pulling facesand gamboling around" (interview, 1988).

In the recently published Comedy/Cinema/Theory, Andrew Horton el-oquently summarizes in his introduction how the comic functions: "Likelanguage and 'texts' in general, the comic is plural, unfinalized, dissem-inative, dependent on context and the intertextuality of creator, text, andcontemplator."1 How often have teachers of Russian literature, culture,and film had to explain to American students what is "funny" in the textthey have been contemplating? Or conversely, how often have they98

Humor and satire in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky 99

laughed in what would be considered "the wrong place"? A case in pointfrom Tarkovsky's own films: Several of his heroes trip and fall, usually totheir knees or flat on their faces. At this point in the films, I personallyobserved hesitant laughter in American audiences. Despite sensing thatsomehow this is not meant to be comic, the audience - brought up onphysical slapstick humor such as the career-making pratfalls of ChevyChase - reacts automatically nevertheless. The Russian audiences do notlaugh at all, perhaps intuiting that the fall, which occurs at a crucial mo-ment in each film (e.g., right before Boriska, the young bell caster willdiscover the "right" clay in Andrei RoubJev [Andrei Rublyov, 1966, re-leased 1971], or before the Writer sets out on his soul-searching journeyinto the Zone in Stalker [Stalker, 1979], or before Alexander torches hishouse in The Sacrifice), is a physical gesture that humbles the hero inpreparation for a fateful spiritual awakening or creative endeavor. Al-though perhaps not meant to be funny, these awkward falls may in factalso have been used by Tarkovsky to underscore his heroes' frail mortal-ity — as the comic so often does - and thus to make our identification withthem all the stronger.

Tarkovsky's humor, whether gently poignant or sharply satiric, is onlymodestly funny, as there are no happy endings, no freewheeling or cathar-tic laughter. Just as comedies have not as a genre been deemed worthy ofthe highest artistic award, the Oscar in American cinema, the tradition ofthe "difficult" and "serious" film as the only worthy carrier of aestheticand ideational import has excluded the comedy from the cinematic pan-theon of Soviet films unless its function was to satirize social and polit-ical ills. The two contemporary masters of Soviet comedy, Georgy Daneliaand Eldar Ryazanov, have both tended to make "sad" comedies (as Dane-lia subtitled his Autumn Marathon [Osenny mara/on] 1980), which arejust as likely to leave the viewer teary-eyed as laughing. Comedy, whetherin literature or film, has throughout Russian and Soviet history alwayshad a "higher" purpose than just producing joyous laughter.

When the greatest of all Russian comedic writers, Nikolai Gogol, iden-tified his style as "laughter through tears," his formulation was to deter-mine not only the future writing of comedies, but to shape the critic'sview of comedy as a viable literary and, in the twentieth century, cine-matic genre. For Gogol, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Saltikov-Shchedrin, Ostrov-sky, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Ilf and Petrov, Bulgakov, Voinovich, Iskander,and countless other writers, laughter always had an underlying "serious"purpose, to satirize all aspects of life, to say what could not be saidopenly, but also to do so by appealing often to our sentiment. Much of thehumor in Russian satiric literature was produced by the author's manip-ulation of the so-called skaz narrator, whose rich colloquial, but oftensubstandard speech was funny in and of itself, but which also allowed theauthor or implied author to distance him- or herself from the character's


actions, expressions, and worldview. The difficulty of reproducing theequivalent of this kind of subjective first-person narration in cinema (suc-cessful usually only in the child's perspective/voice-over in films such asElem Klimov's Welcome [Dobro pozhalovat'], 1966) has made good screenadaptations of comedies rare indeed. Recently in Yuri Kara's Balthazar'sFeast ([Pir BaJ/azara], 1990), very little humor is left from the originalstory Sandro of Chegem by Fazil Iskander, one of the best contemporarySoviet satirists. While constantly striving to imitate the satiric literary tra-dition (often through screen adaptations), the best Soviet comedies (be-ginning with, of course, silent films) have fully exploited the visualpossibilities for humorous antics and gestures, thus combining verbal andvisual humor.

Tarkovsky's modest endeavors to use comic elements in his films onfirst glance seem to fall squarely in the tradition of satiric humor with a"serious" purpose. As we shall see, however, his transition from a reli-ance on words to a more complex, grotesque visual imagery in his lastfilms raises, as does so much of his work, fundamental questions aboutthe boundaries between the comic and the tragic, and thus about the veryessence of being human.

The only humorous moment in Tarkovsky's first feature film, Ivan'sChildhood (Ivanogo detstvo, 1962), is characteristically both funny andsad, as the twelve-year-old hero, a war scout with a lifetime of experience,upbraids an older officer. This reversal of the traditional parent-childroles serves as a poignant commentary on the madness of war. Two films,The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1974) and Stalker, offer bitterly sarcastic and argu-ably humorous (I find it so, while some of my Soviet colleagues do not!)verbal jousting between characters, which - in a very traditional man-ner - serves to expose both the characters' and the society's shortcom-ings. The endless circuitous arguments between the unseen narrator ofThe Mirror and his tired wife, as she cooly studies herself in a real mirror,are interspersed with the narrator's pointed, mocking, and unfortunatelyfunny comments: When his wife tells him that she is in love with an un-published writer, he quips, "Is his name perchance Dostoyevsky?" Orwhen she bemoans the absence of present-day miracles and wondersaloud who it was that the burning bush appeared to, he cannot remember,then adds, not to their son, Ignat - seen burning branches in the yard -whom the father clearly considers a dunce.

In Stalker, Tarkovsky uses the sarcastic sparring of two characters, theWriter and the Professor, to expose this supposedly Western country ofthe future as none other than the Soviet Union itself. The embitteredWriter, who is searching for faith and inspiration, speaks in typically So-viet cliches. As he, the Professor and their guide, the Stalker, meet in a barto begin their journey into the Zone (the mysterious forbidden area cre-ated reputedly by a meteor from outer space), the Writer comments, "Al-


coholism is the scourge of the people, so let's have beer instead." Theoriginal script had "coffee" instead of "beer," and Tarkovsky's change isagain both funny and a sad reflection on a very serious Soviet problem.As the Stalker keeps trying to wean the Writer from the bottle he is car-rying, the Writer again proffers that he is simply having a drink like halfthe population, as it is the other half that really gets drunk. His mostmemorable statement evokes a particularly graphic visual image, as hecompares the profession of writing to the act of extruding hemorrhoids.When they are finally close to their goal in the Zone - the room in whichall wishes come true - a telephone rings in the outer room where thethree men have paused. When again the Writer answers, saying "No, thisis not the polyclinic," there is no doubt left about where all this is takingplace: The perennial wrong numbers reached on the telephone in the So-viet Union are legion, and there are many comic stories built on this sit-uation. One could argue that this humor is too obvious and cheap, andwhile there are critics who despise the whole script of Stalker while ad-miring the film's visual beauty, one must admit that such pointed com-mentary functions as a shorthand means of building a "conspiratorial"understanding between filmmaker and viewer. After all, here Tarkovsky isfollowing the well-trodden path of writers and filmmakers in using verbalhumor for satiric purpose.

Soviet critics may be disappointed because they have learned to expectmore than conventional forms from Tarkovsky, which he, in fact deliversin several key scenes, one from the early film Andrei RoubJev and twoothers from the very end of his last films, Nostalgia [Nostalghia, 1983)and The Sacrifice. All three scenes involve a kind of "fool." In an earlyscene from the medieval epic Andrei RoubJev, three monks come upon alocal jester entertaining an audience of simple villagers. The buffoon'sscatological, bawdy song and lewd antics ending with the dropping ofhis pants (combining verbal and visual comic elements) is at first glanceinnocent and primitive humor meant to relieve momentarily the hard-ships of life in a hungry, barren country. The scene, however, ominouslyends with the brutal beating of the performer by the prince's men, who,we will discover only much later, were called in by one of the monks. Thebuffoon is only the first in a series of persecuted artists who experiencethe brutality and oppression of power. But Tarkovsky may also choose abuffoon to call attention not only to the plight of the artist throughout his-tory (as the scene has usually been interpreted and the parallel to theSoviet Union made), but also to show that laughter, here in the carniva-lesque form espoused by Bakhtin, is in itself subversive and thus a threatto the established order. Typically for Tarkovsky, it is produced by an art-ist — a simple man of the people - as art is open to anyone who dares tocreate and dares the consequences of that original and profoundly sub-versive act.


Tarkovsky was drawn in Andrei RoubJev and in his last two films to thetraditional Russian figure of the yurodivy, the "fool in Christ," or "holyfool." From medieval times, such figures wandered the countryside, half-mad, half-holy, their incomprehensible, often comic antics and pro-nouncements revered by the populace. They lived outside of socialconventions and spurned the temporal powers of the rulers. In their chap-ter on Soviet satire in The Zero Hour: GJasnost and Soviet Cinema inTransition, Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky identify the impor-tance of this figure in Russian culture, particularly in defining the comicin both the literary and cinematic traditions.2 Two modern-day "holyfools" in Tarkovsky are of course his last two "heroes," played signifi-cantly by the same actor, Erland Josephson. In Nostalgia, the local mad-man Domenico, who locked his family up for forty years, and whopreaches the coming of the Apocalypse, in a terrifying final gesture poursgasoline over himself and burns himself alive before an unbelieving anduncomprehending audience. As he writhes on the ground, his "double,"apparently another madman, copies his every gesture, as the brokenrecord of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" blasts over the large Roman squarepopulated by immobile onlookers. The only "human" emotion is exhib-ited by Domenico's chained dog who howls for his master. While noviewer will laugh at this grotesque scene, the series of awkward, purelyphysical gestures are almost slapstick in quality.

Tarkovsky's final film also ends with a burning scene. The hero, Alex-ander — an ex-actor, writer, and philosopher - destroys his own house inorder to fulfill a vow he has made to God. Like Domenico, fearing that theApocalypse is at hand, that the final nuclear war has started - and every-thing in the film seems to point to that — Alexander takes a vow of silenceand promises to destroy all that is dear to him. But the scene of the inepthouse burning is full of comic elements, starting with Alexander's trip-ping as he carefully goes about piling up the furniture and, after severalattempts, getting the pyre to begin to burn. When his family returns fromthe walk he has sent them on, a single long take shows Alexander runningback and forth in front of the now impressively burning house, totallyconsumed in flames, as everyone chases him, with different charactersfalling in the puddles that surround the house. Alexander's disjointedrunning back and forth as everyone tries to get him into the ambulance —whose sudden appearance is never explained - his attempts both tospeak and to be silent, and his alternately foolish or mad facial expres-sions make this unsettling scene particularly excruciating to watch. Thelong take — at six minutes usually misidentified as the longest in the film,when, in fact, the longest is the opening scene at nine and a half min-utes - seems even longer because the viewer is caught up in this repeti-tion of what begins to make a potentially tragic situation ludicrous andfunny. When asked about the burning scene, Josephson himself simply


observed that, in life, the boundary between the comic and the tragiccan be very fine (interview, 1988). Tarkovsky here uses the traditionalRussian figure of the yurodivy, slapstick, and grotesque visual elements toexplore the complexity of human existence where that boundary is elu-sive indeed.

As Russians would say, it is "not accidental" (ne sJuchayno) that Tar-kovsky became so popular in the transitional glasnost period, beinghailed as both martyr and prophet, as his films seemed to reflect the deepspiritual angst of artists, critics, and viewers alike. Although always per-ceived as the most serious of filmmakers, I would argue that it is preciselyhis ambiguous presentation of human existence and human beings asboth comic and tragic that has tapped into the needs of an audience thathad lost all moral, social, economic, and political bearings. In these years,comedy somehow would just not do. We should remember that through-out Russian and Soviet history, comedy - whether in film or literature —thrived under a political system that did not permit open criticism, andsatires used an "Aesopian" language to comment critically on all aspectsof social and even political life. Thus, it is not surprising that when allpolitical controls were removed and all restrictions lifted with the com-ing of glasnost, comedy and laughter - always standing in opposition tosomething - seemed to have died. The recent slew of "dark" films (cher-nukha), of hard-hitting often humorless exposes of Soviet reality, have leftSoviet audiences desperate for a simple hearty laugh! Even the broad useof farce, slapstick, and the grotesque in such films as Sergei Soloviev'sBlack Rose is the Emblem for Sadness, Red Rose is the Emblem for Love(Chernaya roza-emblema pechali, krasnaya roza-emblema lyubvi, 1989)or in Karen Shakhnazarov's Zero City (Gorod zero, 1989) have providedonly momentary relief from obsessively "dark" films. Most Soviet filmsplaying in Moscow in 1989—91 belonged to the "melodrama" and "moral"category, and a "comedy" was rare indeed.3

Even the most talented comic filmmaker of a younger generation, YuriMamin, whose early film Neptune's Feast (Prazdnik Neptuna, 1986) wasriotously funny, increasingly lost his sense of humor through his next twofilms, made in this unsettling period. A critical scene in his next film,Fountain (Fontan, 1988), switches at one point from the zany shenanigansof the motley inhabitants of a building about to collapse (read the SovietUnion) to the sobbing plea of one of the characters addressing the audi-ence directly — with no irony implied or felt - asking how could one pos-sibly live in these desperate times. The film manages to recapture itscomic trajectory, however, which Mamin's last film Whiskers (Baken-bardy, 1990) fails to do. Occasionally funny scenes (a sculptor moldinga clay head of Lenin into one of Pushkin) cannot rescue a very bitterand unsubtle diatribe against the rise of antisemitism and dangerousright-wing political movements in present-day Russia. As the prominent


Russian critic Maya Turovskaya noted at the 1990 conference on Sovietfilm satire, the "laughter" seemed to have disappeared from Gogol's for-mulation, and only the "tears" are left. While the title of the conferencecould perhaps have been, "Where is the Humor in Soviet Film," a satis-fying postscript can now be added. It survives! When both Daneliaand Ryazanov came out with new comedies in 1991 - The Passport [Pas-port] and The Promised Sky (Nebesa obetovannye) respectively - critics,artists, and audiences heaved a great big sigh of relief that comedy wasnot dead.

Notes1. Andrew Horton, ed., Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univer-sity of California Press, 1991), p. 9.2. Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky, The Zero Hour: Glasnost and SovietCinema in Transition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 188.3. In the film listings for metropolitan Moscow to be found in the weekly news-paper Dosug (Leisure), films are categorized along broad classifications suchas comedy, sci-fi, war, melodrama, historical, political, and those "which raisemoral questions."

CHAPTER XI

The films ofEldar Shengelaya:From subtle humor

to biting satire

A recognized master of Soviet Georgian cinematic comedy, Eldar Shenge-laya is best known in the USSR for the mixture of humor and sadness,fantasy and reality, that characterizes his most famous films, An UnusualExhibition (1968) and Screwballs (1973). Blue Mountains (1983), Shenge-laya 's lastest film, departs from his earlier work, bombarding the viewerwith cutting satire and an uncompromising, driving impatience typical ofthe late stagnation period (the administrations of Brezhnev and Cher-nenko). The present paper looks at the comedies and satires of EldarShengelaya as an increasingly reflective and self-contained ouvre, lessand less concerned with the multinational Soviet State and more andmore concerned with the Georgian national self. Like Georgian cinema ingeneral, Shengelaya's films reveal a never-ending struggle for national re-vival that ranges from light comedy filled with subtle political innuendoin times of oppression to sharp, self-critical satire in times of opennessand hope for independence and self-definition.

An Unusual Exhibition: The early thawShengelaya's first feature-length comedy, An Unusual Exhibition (1968),reveals the director's debt to classic Georgian comedy of the 1930s and hisoriginal vision. Described as "a mixture of conventional realism and po-etic paradox, drama and comedy, the grotesque and the lyrical," An Un-usual Exhibition is often labeled "tragi-farce," in which "funny momentsare contrasted with unhappiness, and poetry is born at the meeting pointof farce and tragedy."1

As the film opens, Aguli Eristavi, a young sculptor, returns from thewar to his old Tbilisi home with its traditional balconies, courtyard, andnoisy children, to his father (comic and ridiculous, a vintage 1930s gen-tleman with pretensions toward aristocracy), and to his past, which cen-ters around his dream to create a world masterpiece from a piece of whitemarble inherited from his art teacher. He marries a pretty, robust youngRussian girl, has many children, and begins sculpting busts for cemetery105


monuments in order to support his family. After many comic, grotesque,and touching moments, Aguli and his wife stumble into the cemetery ontheir way home from a class reunion and find themselves surrounded bythe statues and busts that constitute his life work. In the end, he be-queathes the white marble to his son, who is also an artist.

Like all Georgian films of the post-Stalinist period, An Unusual Exhi-bition works on several levels and combines elements of the past with amodern voice. Beholden to Georgian comedies of the 1930s, such as DavidRondeli's Forgotten Paradise (1937), are the character types, family rela-tionships, daily misadventures of the hero and his father, and the toneof the film, with its blend of national or regional humor, merriment andsadness, nostalgia for a lost age, lofty sentiments, and wit. New is thesubtlety of psychological portrait, the ambiguity or noncommital tone ofthe hero (and the film director), and that particular irony toward life andart that one could call "post-Stalinist." Together with other comedies ofthe 1960s, such as Tengiz Abuladze's My Grandmother, Uiko, IJJarion andMyself (1962), An Unusual Exhibition moves into the new era by mergingnational humor with psychological and political intransigence and na-tional pathos.

The central metaphor of the film (creating art for the graveyard) unitesall levels of the film. One laughs and chuckles at the slightly ridiculous,pompous, and provincial individuals who, in national costume, pose forAguli Eristavi's "eternal memorials," but when all of those memorials sur-round the artist and his wife at the close of the film, the significance of thehuman lives (no matter how ridiculous) remembered in this one spot (nomatter how ridiculously), moves to the level of national pathos. Becauseof the deliberately ambiguous voice of the director, Aguli's "exhibit" im-plies, but does not insist on, distortion of image and method and thedeath of an entire way of life. At the same time, the graveyard, which isintroduced immediately after the nearly surreal sequence of the class re-union, in which Aguli and his classmates come face to face with the un-fulfilled dreams of their past, suggests survival and the preservation ofnational memory. In the Georgian perspective, which spans centuries andgenerations, the fact that one particular artist does not manage to createhis great work of art does not negate the hope that his son will. Tradition,memory, and humor pass from generation to generation, and the singlehuman being is often less than his intentions.

As a political statement, An Unusual Exhibition is typical of Sovietfilms of the early 1960s. Zooming in on basic human values, desires,loves, and hopes, the film evoked life beyond the dialectic and outsideof Socialist Realism, suggesting ever so subtly the very revolutionary no-tion that the greatest force in history might not be, in truth, the classstruggle, but man's (Everyman's) individual and collective struggle for

Eldar Shengelaya's subtle humor and biting satire 107

art, beauty, and immortality. While the sweet love story between a Geor-gian and a Russian in the film seemed to offer a new spirit of internation-alism based on ancient concepts of family and tradition, the revival ofnational types and local humor worked with other films of the post-Stalinist sixties to remind Georgians of their own national traditions,therein posing a subtle, but resilient challenge to the beliefs and values ofthe Communist state.

The seventies

Regional humor, parable, and the storming of Socialist RealismScrewballs (1973), Shengelaya's second feature-length comedy, marks areturn to the spirit of his diploma works at VGIK (the Ail-Union State In-stitution of Cinematography) and his initial interest in the meeting pointof fantasy and reality. A parablelike love story, called "grand and eternal/'"humorous, poetic, theatrical, phantasmagoric, and vaudeville-like,"Screwballs was initially praised for "using fantasy to portray reality in asharp and unexpected way." As critics explained, "By alienating the char-acters, events and plot, the young director included the audience in a sortof game, forcing them to look at the world in a new way."2

More important here, however, Screwballs used the film genre of theparable or phantasmagoria to political ends. Disguised as fantasy or par-able, Shengelaya's Screwballs used Georgians' well-known love for localhumor to challenge the basic philosophical and political foundation ofSocialist Realism.

In the small country of Georgia (the size of the state of Maine), indi-viduals identify with and take pride in their own even smaller regionsand receive great aesthetic pleasure in telling humorous stories and jokesabout everyone else. In the countryside, the target of the joke moves fromKakhelebi to Gurulebi, from Gurulebi to Imerelebi, from Imerelebi toRachvelebi, Migrelebi, Karlelebi, Svanebi, Khevsurebi, Mokheveibe,Tushebi, and so on, while in the city, it makes its rounds coursing throughelements of the urban population of Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Mus-lims, Jews, Greeks, Russians, and country bumpkins.

In cinema, Georgians recognize humor by region or type. Films basedon rural humor are Irakli Kvirikadze's The Wine Jug (Kvevri, 1972) NanaMchelize's First Swallow (1975), Abuladze's My Grandmother, Uiko, Illar-ion and Myself (1962), and Nana Jorjadze's recent Robinsoniada or MyEnglish Grandfather (1987). City humor, especially popular at the end ofthe nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century in litera-ture and theater, is most obvious in Rezo Esadze's Love at First Sight(1977). In classical Georgian humor and, by extension, in classic Georgian


film, regional and local anecdotes give the cognoscenti a chuckle of aes-thetic satisfaction and a sense of belonging, for everything is an insidejoke, including serious stabs at the Soviet State.

The plot of Screwballs is a mixture of fairy tale and parable. The younghero's father "passes away,. . . kicks the bucket,. . . gives up the ghost,. . .that is, dies, . . . " as a neighbor explains to the boy, leaving him with manydebts. Creditors arrive, accompanied by the village priest, who intones,"Debts pass from father to son generation to generation, shvili-shvili-shvilebi." The priest forgives the young man three candles he owesthe church, then begins his recitation of debts: a bottle of wine, two friedchickens, three songs, . . . The son divides all of his worldly possessionsamong his creditors, then accepts the gift of a jar of honey from a neighbor,which he takes to town to trade for a chicken and make his fortune. Hefalls in love, into adventure, and into the dungeon, whence he escapes ina fantastic fashion to repay his father's debts.

From the opening shot, Screwballs announces its genre as fairy tale,legend, or parable. A magic tree, a colorful folk carpet, folk music, anddance introduce the dramatic action, but the camera quickly sweeps fromthe dramatis personae (the dancing father and his son) back to the tree andfinally to the heavens as the old man dies. A wide-angle shot fades toscenes resembling folk paintings accompanied by folk music on the soundtrack. Motifs from folklore and popular wisdom, including the Georgianfolksong "Gaprindeba" ("Flying") (on which the narration is con-structed), are intertwined with lofty feelings and wondrous miracles.Margarita, the buxom beauty desired by all men, hides lovers in her fire-place and a tiny Cupid in her bosom, and is paired, in the plot, with anelevated, sublime romantic heroine named Tamuna (after the famousQueen Tamara of the Georgian Golden Age), who, separated from her truelove, cries out, before drowning herself, "Why aren't we birds, to just flyaway from this earth?"

Fairy tale and parable mix with the lyric and the romantic: Young lovejoins eternal love; youthful passion joins aged wisdom. The young hero'sdungeon mate, an old romantic gentleman determined to fly over thegrave of his beautiful Tamuna, finds in the young hero two elements miss-ing from his calculations scribbled on the walls of his dungeon: earthlypassion ("the burning lofty") and the aerodynamics of his chicken. To-gether, the two men escape their dungeon, build their flying machine, andsoar over the grave of the beloved Tamuna to the home of the beautifulMargarita, then on to the village with the song, and finally to the etherealregions of the high Caucasus.

As in An Unusual Exhibition, Shengelaya uses modest human emo-tions to support the "lofty theme" of his work: All that man does hedoes for love, for immortality, and for flying, according to the followingformula:


height (adoration)+ length (thrust or worship)+ width (unforgettable recollections)+ "the burning lofty"— the lack of knowledge ("We can't fly with such a

lack of knowledge," theold man castigates the young hero.)

= flight.

Love is the greatest value, the impetus for great feats, the ideal. Love isvertical and orbital (the camera repeats the upward motion of death andthe song), and the sound track moves from silence to comic music, fromthe ridiculous to the romantic to the nostalgic, to the folksong, from theearthly to the sublime.

Comedy or slapstick movements (Shengelaya time and again admits hisgreat admiration of Charlie Chaplin) are linked with innocent romanceand passion (pushing the lover into the fireplace, rolling him in a rug)and local humor (the villagers and their bookkeeping). But little by littlethey move on, to the comic grotesque and then to political satire. Screw-balls ridicules the soldiers guarding the dungeon, who chase and shoot atone another in an absurd fashion, and the doctor, who writes down everyword spoken by the "madmen in their mad experiment" in the preten-tious hope of extolling the motherland and showing Europe how goodGeorgians are. As the flying machine leaves these lower creatures and allearthly desires behind, including the beautiful Margarita, the challengeis bold and clear. The individual, with the quest for eternity, has spreadhis or her wings and flown from authority, and art and ancient traditionhave escaped to soar above scientific materialism and the modern SovietState. The Georgians state the intent of the film boldly: "The chief asset ofthe film is the bold juxtaposition of versatile techniques common to thegenres of real-life comedy, fairy tale, buffoonery, grotesque, and comicmelodrama. . . . The film passionately asserts man's right to great ambi-tions and his own individuality."3

Blasphemous and sacrilegious toward Soviet authority, Screwballs wasattacked in the late 1970s by a series of articles published in the Soviettheoretical film journal Cinema Art. Led by the film critic Bogomolov,Cinema Art accused the Georgian film studio of "departure from SocialistRealism, allegory, parable, and phantasmagory," in which "romanticstake their revenge by soaring above everyday, prosaic, mundane life." Inround-table discussions, Georgian cinema was labeled "elitist," where"aestheticism becomes a model for existence" and leads to "egocentrism"and "idealism."4

The Georgian response varied from nervous defensiveness to defiance.The defensive claim was that "all Georgian films [are] not 'parables' but


rather a balanced and diverse mixture of various types of realism includ-ing psychological, critical, historical, and poetic realism." Eldar Shenge-laya's response was defiant. Like his film, his comments cut at the heart ofSocialist Realism:

If you insist that only real events filmed in a realist manner can be reality or areflection of reality, art will be extraordinarily narrow. Actually, all art is a re-flection of reality, in my opinion, because an artist exists in reality and all of hissensations come out of reality, at least from himself, and he exists, and his innerworld exists, and that is already a kind of reality, isn't it? And the spiritual worldis also reality, even if it is profoundly subjective, as it so often is, thank God,. . .What we did in Screwballs in that "unreal" film, or parable, or exaggerated fairytale, or whatever the critics call it - whatever we did, we did because we wantedto do it, and since we did it, it is certainly a reflection of reality.5

Comic revival and a new national thrustShengelaya's next film, Samanishvili's Mother-in-Law (1977), presented anew version of the nineteenth-century drama classic of the same title byDavid Kldiashvili. In the story, which Shengelaya calls "the reflection ofa people," the nobleman Samanishvili suffers ridicule and personal hu-miliation in a series of comic adventures during his frenzied search for anew, barren wife for his widowed father, whose desire to remarry threat-ens new heirs to the already impoverished family estate. Performed intheaters throughout the revolutionary period, Kldiashvili's play was firstadapted for cinema in the late twenties by the masterful Georgian theaterand film director, Kote Marjanishvili. Marjanishvili's stark black andwhite version, typical of the "progressive trends of Georgian postreformtheatre and cinema," put sharp wit and biting satire into service as socialcriticism typical of the formal masterpieces of Soviet silent classics of therevolutionary period.

Shengelaya's gentler version, typical of the seventies, uses soft color, anatural background, and fluid cutting to combine touchingly humorousimages of the arrogant, impoverished small-landed gentry of the prerev-olutionary period with overlapping comic situations and episodes thatendear them to the viewer. Closer to thirties' comedy, Shengelaya's ver-sion of Kldiashvili's classic story looks back at life in prerevolutionaryGeorgia to encourage a comparison between national and spiritual valuesof the past and present. As Shengelaya explained, what interested him inKldiashvili's play was "a certain strata of nobility which had developedethic norms considered 'noble' — an elevated understanding of human in-dividuality," and "the destruction of that nobility,. . . the victory of ego-ism over a certain broadness of human character" brought about by"certain material conditions" that "forced man to lose the nobility inher-ent in him by nature."6


Like other Georgian films of the 1970s and 1980s, Shengelaya used pre-revolutionary images as models for the reconstruction of national iden-tity, which, in the poetic view, seemed "impoverished," perhaps a littleridiculous, but "noble" and, in any case, a clear alternative to scientificmaterialism. The mood conveyed by the film was one of growing desirefor national unity and self-determination.

The early eighties — the high stagnation period:Biting national satire, self-criticism, and the independent visionShengelaya's latest feature film, Blue Mountains (1983), moves from thehistorical or mythic past to contemporary Soviet Georgian reality. In itsbiting satire, the film is reminiscent of early Georgian revolutionary clas-sics such as Mikhail Chiaureli's Saba (1921) and Kharbarda (1931), andKote Mikaberidze's My Grandmother (1929, banned, revived 1976), filmsknown for their irony, subtle social characterization, fresh technique andingenuity, satirical pathos, and bold, grotesque strokes in the depiction ofantiheroes.

The film structure (a fourfold repetition of the same shots of noneventsseason by season) sets the scene and conveys the meaninglessness as wellas social, ethic, and aesthetic inertia of the stagnation period in the USSRin general and in Georgia in particular. The same musical motif, the samepanning shot, from the same apartment window opening onto the sameview, greets the viewer fall, winter, spring, and summer. Thereupon fol-lows, time and again, the same sequence of scenes at the publishinghouse, where the hero brings eight copies of his novel, "Blue Mountainsor Tien Shien": an oil painting of icebergs in Greenland that threatens tofall throughout the film, protocols, commissions, signatures, chess games,fat men looking for a certain fictitious Givi, an elevator continually stuckbetween floors, secretaries out to lunch, manuscripts lost, the same ques-tions and statements ad infinitum: "Why two titles?" "You need to bemore persistent" and "Kudi" (your cap).

Grating and annoying, BJue Mountains reveals little trace of the gentlesympathy and local humor that characterized Shengelaya's previouswork. Instead, the film challenges precisely that which had been pro-tected in the past. If Shengelaya's earlier films had implicated Soviet bu-reaucracy or the multinational Soviet State for Georgia's ills and capturedsubtly moving shots of those eternal and national historical values thatwould survive and ostensibly conquer, BJue Mountains implicates Sovietbureaucracy or the Soviet State as an accessory to the crime, but aims amerciless eye at contemporary Georgian reality. Holy Georgian symbolsand traditions, used so often in the past as witness to or hope for nationalsurvival, are exposed in their contemporary triviality. Singing, music, cel-ebration, art, culture, and social conventions - all have become petty and


empty pretense. Respect for language descends to German lessons forsmall children, conversational French for the middle-aged, and elevatedphrases of proper etiquette in the director's native Georgian. Gone is theflight into poetry and inspiration of Shengelaya's earlier films, and lovepoetry plays a satiric role, appearing out of nowhere as a volume of versespenned by the chairman of the motorcycle soccer association. Banquets,so important for Georgian cultural tradition, give administrators heart-burn, and the overflowing bounty of the Georgian table is replaced by thedirector's refrigerator cum mineral water and the single egg that anothereditor, Irodin, fusses over and hides in his otherwise empty safe.

In Blue Mountains, feigned respect and warmth for other individualhuman beings is not translated into deeds. All is show, pretense, and su-perficiality, the cosmetic surface of a cracking, crumbling foundation thatno one but the older generation notices. Only the final crash of Greenlandand the literal collapse of the building in which the nonaction takes placemove the plot along, but stability and routine are soon reestablished in anew building of modern, international design.7

While repetition of Georgian themes and motifs in Shengelaya's filmsof the 1960s and 1970s signaled national survival and revival (portrayinga world of ancient vintage in which man inherited dreams, goals, songs,traditions, stone for carving, and debts, and where life was a cycle of gen-erations), the repetition of film motif in Blue Mountains is used to illus-trate a world beyond history, where the seasons turn and nothing changes,where nothing is accomplished, where joy and hope have vanished. Un-compromising in its rhythm, Shengelaya's latest film returns to the harshsatire of the 1920s and implies a new political and revolutionary strug-gle in an age marked first by frustration, then by the faint scent of changeand impatience.

A similar movement, from light regional humor with a subtle politicalsubtext to cutting satire aimed at the national self, is typical of the oldergeneration of filmmakers, including the well-known films of Tengiz Ab-uladze: Magdana's Little Donkey (poetic documentary/national revival),My Grandmother, Iliko, IJJarion, and Myself (local humor and regionalcomedy with an eye to national survival), The Prayer (art and the artist,national poetry as an alternative to Socialist Realism, resistance to thecommune), Tree of Desire (local, regional humor and growing historicaltragedy, the allegorical destruction of the nation), and Repentance (cruelsatire, surrealism, and a stern challenge to the individual).8 Amongyoung Georgian directors, satire is largely self-critical, and cinema repe-tition is a common device, implying stagnation and inertia and callingfor change, as in Alexander Rekhviashvili's Step (1986) and Irakli Ko-tetishvili's Anemia (1987).9

Responding to his own call, Eldar Shengelaya now puts most of his en-ergy into political work and credits the younger generation at the Georgia


Film Studio with "a new naturalism, stark depiction of reality, and ex-plicitness." While he initially praised Gorbachev for "his surprisingly un-Russian desire to bring about change without spilling a single drop ofblood/' that praise was undercut by the events of April 9, 1989 in Tbilisi,and it is telling that Eldar Shengelaya's last editing job was a film docu-mentary of those events, which closes in the morgue.

As for gJasnost, Shengelaya's view has never wavered:

The film industry, or, rather, individual films and individual directors are, inmy opinion, the precursors of glasnost As early as the fifties, after the death ofStalin, individual directors in individual studios began to make films which dem-onstrated a search for artistic truth, for the integrity of the individual person,for the creative personality. Films sought to look at reality realistically. WhenGorbachev began to speak of glasnost, it meant, merely, that the goals of many So-viet directors for the past twenty-five years had been introduced as the new PartyProgram.10

Notes

1. Galina Dolmatovskaya and Irina Shilova, Who's Who in the Soviet Cinema:Seventy Different Portraits (Moscow: Progress, 1979), pp. 262-7.2. Ibid., pp. 262-5.3. Kartuli sabchota kinematografi (Georgian Soviet Cinema) (Tbilisi: Georgian

SSR State Cinema, 1979), p. 53.4. See Iurii Bogomolov, "Gruzinskoe kino: otnoshenie k deistvitel'nosti,"

Iskusstvo kino, no. 11 (1978): 39-56, and Julie Christensen, "Georgian Cinema: ASubtle Voice of Nationalism," Nimrod 28, no. 2 (Spring-Summer, 1985): 25-38.5. Eldar Shengelaya, personal interview, Tbilisi, 1984. Quoted from Christensen,

"Georgian Cinema," p. 31.6. Ibid., p. 33.7. One cannot ignore the possible influence of Blue Mountains on Yuri Mamin's

Fountain (1989).8. See Julie Christensen, "Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance and the Georgian Na-

tional Cause," Slavic Review 50, 1 (1991): 163-75.9. See Julie Christensen, "Fathers and Sons at the Georgian Film Studio," Wide

Angle 12, no. 4 (October 1990): 48-61.10. Shengelaya, Public lecture, George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., 1988.

PART THREEClose-ups: Glasnostand Soviet satire

CHAPTER XII

A forgotten fluteand remembered popular

tradition

Everyone remembers the episode in Bulgakov's Master and Margaritawhen, in the bedeviled Variety Theater, the chorus cannot stop singingthe patriotic "Lake Baikal." The chorus, by then an established institutionof official popular culture, represents the height of Stalinism with its he-roic tunes and a powerful collective voice. Constantly transmitted overthe radio through my childhood in the fifties, it gave me an allergy tochoral sound for years to come. But the female choir featured in EldarRyazanov's 1987 film, Forgotten Melody for a Flute, definitely sings a dif-ferent tune. How the choir's tune and the "forgotten melody'' ofthe solo flute represent the changing times will be the focus of my anal-ysis of the use of official and unofficial popular culture in this early filmof perestroika.1

As we can see from the title, memory is important in this film, wherethe transition from the old to the new is in its nascent stages, confusing foreveryone. The recovery of historical and cultural memory became a cen-tral concern of literature and art in the early period of glasnost, when thelong years of repression gave way to revelation. As the "forgotten melody"(nezabyvaemaia melodiia) for a flute is remembered in Ryazanov's com-edy, what does it or can it tell? While the central story of the film is thatof adultery and romance, the stock plot is a vehicle for pointing out theills plaguing Soviet society - the play of power, problems of gender andclass in a country supposedly free of both, and the depth of corruption inthe sphere of cultural politics. The private and the public sphere areshown to be fundamentally interconnected. This is played out throughthe juxtaposition of two melodies: the long "forgotten," but now remem-bered lyrical popular tune played on the flute by the main protagonist insearch of himself; and the tune performed by an all-woman choir that onewould like to forget but cannot as its banal melody insinuates itselfthrough repetition, haunting the viewer's consciousness like the return ofthe repressed.

In this first popular comedy of perestroika we see Soviet society on thebrink of fundamental changes represented through conflicting social117

Close-ups: Glasnost and Soviet satire 118

forces: (a) official popular culture, now in disarray, is shown here as itloses control over "leisure activities/* a process we will observe as wefollow the narrative of the disintegration of a choir, the traditional sym-bol of the Soviet state; (b) various forms of unofficial popular culturerepresented here - the satiric political pop songs and the romans art song(the forgotten melody itself), as well as the Izmailovsky market, the priva-tization of popular art, its independence from official censorship (the ageof bulldozers has passed, as one bureaucrat notes with regret), replaced byfree enterprise on a small scale; (c) official high culture, that is, classicalmusic and its mythology; (d) the disastrous state of social morale seen inthe hypocrisy at the Leisure Time Agency, and in the confusion and dis-honesty of private life as depicted in this cliched tale of adultery but withnew repercussions.

The hero, Leonid, works for the Leisure Time Agency (Upravlenie svo-bodnogo vremeni), a part of the Brezhnev bureaucracy that is on its wayfrom being superfluous to becoming obsolete. Leonid is a typical Brezh-nev bureaucrat, representative of the rule of his powerful namesake - cor-rupt, cowardly, privileged. Thanks to a powerful father-in-law, a majorParty boss, he holds his present position as well as the chance for pro-motion. His wife is a modern, self-assured, independent career woman,an intellectual, definitely from the new upper class.

The corruption of social fabric is displayed in the familiar cliche of thelove affair —a powerful man seduces a younger, vulnerable woman, anurse by profession, first by feigning weakness (he needs shots for hisheart condition) and then by plying her with gastronomic delicacies thatonly the privileged have access to, such as smoked fish and caviar. Thegender/class problem of Socialist society surfaces in the scene where hisco-workers arrive to visit him and find Lida, the nurse, washing dishes.To cover his embarrassment, Leonid tells them that she has agreed to dosome housekeeping for him on the side for pay. Lida is angry and refusesto see him again but then forgives him. The embarrassing situation is re-peated next time she makes a house call and the wife appears on thescene, unexpectedly. Once again, Leonid attempts to make feeble excusesfor Lida's housekeeping duties. Again, although Lida shows some inde-pendence of spirit and does fight for her dignity (when the wife sarcasti-cally proposes that she continue to do housekeeping for them, the nurseresponds that she'll hire her to do the dishes after she, the wife, finishesher Ph.D. thesis), she eventually gives in to Leonid again.

He courts her in the old-fashioned way, appearing at the door with redroses or waiting to give her a ride in his car, and she can't resist that. Theyboth attempt to struggle for some authenticity of feeling in the relation-ship but, like everything else, it is doomed in a society where power, hy-pocrisy, and privilege deny the possibility of "real" identity and emotion.

A forgotten flute and remembered popular tradition 119

There is a melodramatic moment at the end of the film when Lida, who isleaving her job after Leonid had gone back to his wife, hears sirens andruns back to the office where he is lying on the floor, unconscious, witha heart attack, being tended by the emergency medical team who cannotdo much. Lida manages to resuscitate him and when she knows he'll pullthrough, she melodramatically leaves the scene and the lover who'llnever know. Here, the woman, though she belongs to a younger genera-tion, plays her role of a sacrificing nurturer to the end - that this expres-sion of true love is taken for granted is one of the factors that render thefilm dated, as does most of what happens in the affair.

In his capacity as a culture boss of the agency, Leonid reviews perfor-mances of amateur groups that come to audition for him and his commis-sion. When the first group presents scenes from a modern version ofGogol's "Inspector General," the play's satire of the corrupt tsarist bureau-crats is extended to the present. This is not lost on Leonid and his assis-tant who pans the scene as a "mockery of the classics" in which the townpoliceman rides a "Chaika" (the standard car of Soviet officials). In anaside to Leonid, the assistant comments that, in the old days, he wouldforbid the show, but now the times are different and everything is al-lowed. This episode sets the tone for Ryazanov's own satire of the Brezh-nev legacy.

On the same afternoon, Leonid hears an audition of the Tambov wom-en's choir, which will become the central image of the satire as it appearsfour times at key points of the action and brings much needed comic reliefinto this otherwise very sentimental comedy. Let me chart the narrativeof these appearances.

First, they are invited to a dancing competition at the Leisure TimeAgency by mistake. After some arguments and hassle, they perform theirnewly composed song in street clothes as they arrived straight from thetrain station. In the song, the lover is asked to think of the beloved at allthe seasons of the year, with the refrain that likens this to a reverie on along, cool sheet: "Think of me on a spring night" (vesennei noch'iu du-mai obo mne), which rhymes with "on a long, cool sheet" (na dlinnoi iprokhladnoi prostyne), "on your back" (na spine), and "on a soft, slowwave" (miagkoi, medlennoi volne). The comical effect produced by thetext with its suggestive rhyme reminds one of a similar rhyme in a paro-died version of one of the official state songs: "Great is my land / It hasmany forests, fields, and rivers" (Shiroka strana moia rodnaia / mnogo vnei lesov, polei i rek). The unofficial version substituted its own sugges-tive rhyme, similar to the choir's: "Great is my land / it has many pillowsand sheets" (Shiroka strana moia rodnaia / mnogo v nei podushek, pros-tynei). The unofficial popular tradition from the fifties is alive and resur-faces via a text that actually comes from a poem by Evgeny Yevtushenko.


Although written in the previous thaw, the text remains a threat well intothe eighties for the bureaucrats that managed to survive it.2 But will theysurvive perestroika?

Although the agency decides to send the choir on a national tour, Le-onid thinks their song is too sexy and strongly advises them to "propa-gandize something else" (propagandirovali by chto-to drugoe) and tochange the words to "something less explicitly sexual" (koe-chto ne stol'seksuaFnoe). In typical bureaucratese, he adds that it isn't that he forbidsthe lines but only suggests the change. On the very afternoon that Leonidmakes his moral point, or censors the chorus, he notices the pretty nurseLida, who performed in the previous scene from "The Inspector General"and with whom he will begin the affair that will dominate the plot.

In the second episode, the choir is transformed into a recognizable en-tity as the women don folk dress to perform their original song (minus theexplicit lines) to a scattered gathering on the beach of a picturesqueCrimean town. The juxtaposition of the official choir and the sea with aromantic castle on a hill as a backdrop presents an incongruous image.But as soon as the obligatory formality of the performance is over, thewomen hurriedly shed the folk dress and their serious demeanor, and runto the sea in their bathing suits (a carnivalesque moment); backgroundshots of two young lovers and a lone fisherman set the mood of this real,rather than official, scene of seaside leisure.

Third, the choir moves to another seaside location, but this time theyperform for the navy on an aircraft carrier, a most convincing image ofState power. The sailors await as the female chorus appears, literally ris-ing from the belly of the State onto the deck of the carrier. This classicscene of entertainment for the troops, with folklore produced for the con-sumption of organized masses, is one instance in which the choir is per-forming its traditional role. However, the overall effect can be seen in thesexual impact of the song that is communicated even without the originalexplicit refrain (hence, censorship no longer works) as the now beguiling,smiling women perform to an obviously receptive all-male audience. Theimpact of the performance is reflected in the wistful, longing expresssionsof the men, one of whom holds up binoculars to better fix the gaze.

Fourth, the women go on to perform somewhere in the steppes of Cen-tral Asia in a nomad camp, complete with yurts and horses tended by Ori-entals who take note of the choir in a vague sort of way. This time, insteadof the pretty faces framed by folk headgear, the camera scans the girls' feet,shod in motley footwear - worn sneakers and sandals. The burlesque ef-fect (emphasis on the lower sphere of the vertical body) is pushed furtheras they whisper between phrases of the by now tired tune, how they areworn out and homesick, how they fear they'll be sent to Kamchatka, andhow one of them thinks she's pregnant. This image of the no longer ef-fective, demoralized choir in colonial territory suggests the beginnings of


\

Leonid Filimonov (Leonid Filatov) remembers a forgotten tune in Eldar Ryaza-nov's Forgotten Melody for a Flute as his wife listens.

the disintegration of the empire. There is a distant shot of an astronomerlooking through a telescope here, perhaps trying to read the future in thestars. The last we hear of the choir is at the end of the film when the newscomes to the agency that the chorus got as far as in Krasnodar and is nowselling its costumes to make money for tickets home.

The Tambov choir is a parody of the Russian chorus that for decadesdisplayed Soviet national pride and might in performances of officialfolklore. The obviously sexy refrain "think of me" (dumai obo mne) is atake-off on the line that, in Stalin's Russia, would have referred to theleader or to the land. The chorus - a microcollective - appears to be in dis-array beneath the thin guise of official folk dress. And, as we have seen,its message carries a rather down-to-earth appeal despite Leonid's earlierprotestation. However, the repeated refrain of an easy, popular melody issoon worn out and no less "tired" than the old patriotic songs that hadbecome so through mere repetition, ubiquitous presence, and dominanceof the airwaves. The new, more liberal, but almost anarchic choir appearsas a holdover from the old order that is now coming apart. The narrativeof choral appearances presents an allegory of the changes taking placein the country. It is clear that the bureaucrats, though still in power, are


losing their grip - their loss of control over official popular culture andentertainment as it was dominated by the institution of the Soviet chorusover several decades is indicative of the situation at large.3

The two other vocal musical numbers framing the film are a variationon this theme and confirm the Party's shaky position. In the film's open-ing sequence, we hear a contemporary satiric song by a young group thatclearly makes fun of authority, of Soviet bureaucrats.We don't plow, we don't sow, we don't build,we are proud of the social order,we are important paper people,as we have been and will be.My ne pashem, ne seem, ne stroimMy gordimsia obshchestvennym stroemmy bumazhnye, vazhnye liudimy i byli i byt' imi budem.But the refrain further undercuts the self-important bureaucrats whoseauthority is now on the wane:There's nothing more solid than a paper structurenor more frightening than the winds of perestroika.Net prochnee bumazhnoi postroikinet strashnee vetra perestroikiThe song is about the nomenklatura, the privileged class that has little todo with material production of goods, but everything with control andpower. They have the most to lose in the changing political climate.

Toward the end of the film, the ruling elites' anxiety of a loss of powerand privilege is realized in one of the hero's dream sequences. A col-league of Leonid, a comfortable bureaucrat who exudes well-being andconfidence, hence a perfect potential victim of perestroika, sings in a traincarriage begging for alms for the new superfluous Soviet man. As in thesong just cited, symbols of a bureaucrat's comfort and power, such as thesunny office, hallway carpet, and mahogany chair, are now the symbols ofnostalgia for the past to which the singer must bid farewell:If there's an orphan in the worldit's a citizen without an office.Kto i est'ne svete sirotaeto grazhdanin bez kabineta.He presents himself as "a casualty of acceleration" (pered vami zhertvauskoren'ia). The unofficial popular genre of satiric song with accordionaccompaniment that the bureaucrat adopts here serves to assure him of anaudience that is sympathetic to his plight.

The director, Eldar Ryazanov, made the following comment at the pre-miere: 'The film is a kind of a parable in which the flute is a symbol. Fil-


imonov used to be a musician, but he betrayed his art. The forgottenmelody, or melodies, are the forgotten feelings, the values like honesty,and respect - the things for which a person is born. But this man did notlive his own life. He lived someone else's. He climbed the bureaucraticladder. He could have lived and loved. He sold out to the highest bidder."4

This is, then, the premise of the film, but is it what we actually see onthe screen?

The director employs several possible ways to suggest authenticity incontrast to the corruption and hypocrisy that rule the life of Ryazanov'shero and his world. One way is through interjected sequences of fantasiesand dream visions that reveal the underside of the repressed hero's ac-tions or what he would really like to do but doesn't, that is, tell his wifethe truth and face up to his duplicity. Music is another, for as Leonidslowly and carefully retrieves his flute to play for Lida, he admits he hasnot played it for years. He tells her a romantic tale of an unfulfilled tal-ent - he was a conservatory student, that is, he studied the classical tra-dition and was even invited to play in an orchestra after graduation. Thetune Leonid finally plays for Lida is not at all classical but one of an old-fashioned sentimental "romance." Lida responds accordingly and dream-ily remembers all the dances she went to when she was younger as shemoves to the tune's gentle rhythm.

Although intended as a symbol of honesty and true feelings, the fluteappears ambiguous in this scene with the clearly expressed nostalgia forhigh culture that is undercut by a popular tune that Leonid actually plays.The flute is an intimate instrument that can be played solo (in contrast tothe collective choir), and it is meant to suggest an authenticity of sorts, apotential that the young Leonid supposedly once had but later exchangedfor status and privilege. He fears losing these at the same time as he at-tempts to recover his youth. His anxiety of the loss of privilege, sharedwith his colleagues, is expressed in a vision where he appears as a streetmusician. This scene looks like a hippie vision of a street musician whochose marginality instead of conformity through compromise, performingto passersby while the solicitous Lida brings him hot food. But althoughLeonid does not look unhappy, he is wearing a sign, "Give to an ex-bossof the agency." The sequence makes his actual official job of overseeingleisure activities appear even more parasitic and corrupt.

The story of Leonid's musical past fails to elicit sympathy because itborders on the banal, saddled as it is by a cluster of possible clich6dmeanings. For example, it proffers a common romantic belief in the in-tegrity of the artist, since "art" has a high status in Socialist society. Atthe same time, however, it is a story of official "high culture" that repre-sents "higher" aspirations. In his book The Velvet Prison: Artists UnderState Socialism, Miklos Haraszti points out the irony of the Party's role asthe protector of "high" culture, the role it can fulfill on the condition of


the cooperation of its workers or those who represent that culture in so-cialist society. In return for their cooperation, they occupy an ambivalentposition of privileged, though often critical, professionals.5

Galichenko writes that Eldar Ryazanov "can be considered a senior cit-izen of contemporary cinema," since his first film was made the year ofStalin's death. Perhaps this explains the particular kind of old-fashionedSoviet sentimentality that pervades this film. While it satirizes the pass-ing post-Stalinist culture, it still employs its cliches and appears boundby them much as the Soviet culture whose outmoded Socialist trappingsare satirized here. The film remains mired in ambivalence, so that some-times it is hard to tell whether the banality is intended (i.e., ironic) or un-selfconscious. When Leonid does retrieve his flute and begins to play, thepopular tune, though delicate and soulful, does not give an inkling of hisartistic talent nor of his inner being. It is hard to believe the melodramaticstory of this not very believable character, as it is hard to believe the sin-cerity of his intentions and declarations to Lida, red roses and all.

The underlying assumption of the comedy is that music and love rep-resent the traditional symbols of human authenticity. Their prominencein the film serves to reveal the hypocrisy of Soviet society that they aremeant to counteract but fail to do. Instead, at the end of the Forgotten Mel-ody for a Flute everything appears tainted and uncertain, except Lida'sunselfish old-fashioned devotion to the man who does not deserve it, butthat strikes the viewer as silly rather than moving. There is no clear signof the possibility of real change in Ryazanov's comedy as yet, but rather asense of nostalgia for real values mixed with regret and disappointment -it is too late for the established middle-aged bureaucrats, but it also seemstoo late for a bright, young, lively and very capable woman who suc-cumbs to the not so discreet charms of the Moscow bourgeoisie.

Notes1. This paper was presented at the panel on "Film and Popular Culture" at theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies convention in Mi-ami, November 1991.2. I would like to thank Kevin Moss for the reference to this song by E. Yevtush-enko, arranged and sung by Jerry Silverman. "Russian Songs," Folkways Records,no. FW 8780, c. 1967.3. In his essay on Eldar Ryazanov, N. Galichenko suggests that the theme song"Think of Me" is the cry of common people to insensitive officialdom but I don'tthink that is the case here. See his book Glasnost - Soviet Cinema Responds,ed. Robert Allington (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 116.4. Ibid.5. M. Haraszti, The Velvet Prison; Artists Under State Socialism (New York: Basic,1987). See especially chap. 7, "The Culture of Censorship."

CHAPTER XIII

Perestroika of kitsch:Sergei Soloviev's

Black Rose, Red Rose

The hero of Assa (dir. Sergei Soloviev, 1988) makes a paradoxical state-ment that can be interpreted as a comment both on the new aestheticsof the Soviet cinema and on glasnost in general: "kitschy but origi-nal" (Poshlo, no originaPno). How can "kitsch," often understood as"pseudoart" or "vicarious experience" (the Russian word "poshlost,"suggesting something that has been recycled many times and turned intoa weary cliche) coincide with originality in the context of contemporarySoviet culture? In what way does a comic reconsideration of the notionsof "vulgarity," "kitsch," and poshlost offer a serious cultural critique? (Isthere a conflict between irony and poshlost, or between the uses of kitschand the uses of absurd?) What are the limits of irony and satire in Sovietcinema? What cannot be treated ironically? Can poshlost and kitsch befunny? If so, then from whose point of view - and who gets the last laugh?

Nabokov asserted that poshlost is a moral category.1 The examinationof what in any specific culture is considered kitsch and poshlost -besides providing a valuable comic relief from the high seriousness of thescholarly enterprise - gives us a rare insight into operation of the culture.The discussion of kitsch does not allow us to separate ethics and aesthet-ics, artistic and everyday spheres, and in the Russian and Soviet contextit is located on the crossroads of art, politics and byt - the quotidian ex-istence. Sergey Soloviev proclaimed with a peculiar ironic seriousnessthat his films belong to the genre of "romantic cretinism" (marasm),which nevertheless captures the very chemistry of contemporary Sovietlife.2 This connection between cretinism and romanticism - between self-conscious Romantic irony and nostalgia for romance in the much-celebrated high spirituality of Russian culture - will be explored in myanalysis. I will focus on Black Rose, fled Rose (full title Black Rose Is theEmblem for Sadness, Red Rose Is the Emblem for Love [Chernaya roza,emblema pechali, krasnaya roza, emblema lyubvi]), which can be calledan "encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet kitsch" to paraphrase the wordsBelinsky said about Pushkin's "Evgenij Onegin" - "encyclopedia ofRussian life." Nabokov stressed that poshlost is an "unobvious sham"125


that carefully disguises itself under the mask of universal values and setsup invisible traps for the observer. Central to my essay will be the tensionbetween self-conscious and involuntary uses of kitsch in recent Sovietcinema. I will examine the difference between merely satirizing theposhlost and tackiness of Soviet life, and attempting to reconsider cul-tural hierarchies of taste and morality that could place the satirist in anuncomfortable position. Moreover, I will explore why the film refrainsfrom a direct social satire and moves more in the direction of a playfulcultural collage.3

Before I move to the analysis of the film that will serve as an encyclo-pedia of poshlost and kitsch, I will make a brief digression into the ety-mology of poshlost, and the history of discourses on poshlost and kitsch.The etymology of poshlost gives a special insight into the construction ofRussian and Soviet cultural myths and their perestroika in recent Sovietcinema. Kitsch is an international phenomenon that can be analyzed bothfrom a sociological and a historical perspective (with regard to its relationto modernization, industrialization, commercialism) and from a moraland aesthetic perspective that considers kitsch a "false aesthetic con-science," a "vicarious experience/'4 In Russian, two words are employedto designate marginalized cultural sensibility and bad, "philistine" taste -"poshlost" and "kitsch." If, in Western criticism, the critique of kitschreaches its peak in the 1920s, as an avant-garde reaction against commer-cialization of art and later against totalitarian fascist art, in the Russiancontext, kitsch is opposed to the avant-garde art, and the conceptualiza-tion of poshlost and its critique dates back to the nineteenth century. Theuse of the word kitsch in Russian is very recent and refers exclusively tothe pseudoartistic phenomenon and the products of Western mass cul-ture. The contemporary Soviet dictionary records the following usagesof poshlost:

1. Lacking in spiritual qualities, ordinary, insignificant, worthless, paltry.2. Not original, worn-off, banal.3. Indecent, obscene, tasteless, vulgar.5

Since in Russian culture the process of secularization begins much laterthan in Western Europe, the word poshJost marks not only artistic trite-ness, but also a lack of "spirituality" and sexual-moral decency. The sep-aration of sexual, spiritual, and artistic spheres, or of the ethics ofbehavior, metaphysics, religion, and aesthetics, did not manifest in Russiain the same way that it did in the West. The autonomy of art did not de-velop there to the same extent as in western Europe, nor were there a va-riety of secular discourses on love, eroticism, and sexuality. Interestingly,poshJost might refer both to sentimentality construed as tasteless (to ex-cessive expression of feeling) and to obscenity, which often refers to anyexplicit expression of sexuality. In Gogol and Dostoevsky, poshlost is

Perestroika of kitsch 127

linked to the figure of the devil, a modern Russian devil, trivial and pal-try. (Nabokov - not without a good deal of national pride - claims thatonly Russians among all European nations could have come up with sucha brilliant term because of "the cult of simplicity and good taste in oldRussia." This is one of Nabokov's most unironic sentences, which - to saythe least — is bordering on the banal.)

Poshlost comes from poshlo, meaning something that has happened. InDai's dictionary, the meaning of the word marked "old" means in fact,"old, traditional, ancient, ancestral" (davnij, starodavnij, cto isstarivedetsja, drevnij).6 One of the usages is "poshJyj kupec" - a merchantwho belongs to the community "sotnya." The connection betweenposhJost and the supposed tastes of the merchant class is crucial for un-derstanding the cultural degradation of the word. Initially, poshJost is notmorally valorized, but gradually the term of description turns into a termof discrimination. (The history of the word poshJy is similar to the historyof the French word "banaJ," which in the Middle Ages refers simply tothe property shared in the feudal jurisdiction to the shared or commonproperty. These histories reflect a crisis of the "commonplace," the crisisof conventions and cultural consensus that occurs in the epoch of Roman-ticism and early modernization.) Thus, at the core of the problem ofposhJost is the problem of triteness and of tradition, of shared experienceand cliche, or the unresolvable problem of the Russian byt (daily grind)that is both sustaining and stifling. The relationship between poshJostand what is perceived as its antidote will be central to my discussion.

Nabokov claimed that poshJost is "beautifully timeless" (parodyingkitschy claims to timeless beauty). Instead of exploring the timelessbeauty of poshlost and kitsch I would like to look at its history and at-tempt a timely revaluation of different kinds of kitsch in the Gorbachevera. I do not seek to discern the universal structure of kitsch but to traceits etymology, its rhetoric, and its elusive functioning in the society andwithin the artwork. Although there have been attempts to examine the"structure of the bad taste" (Umberto Eco), ultimately such attempts failnot only because of the parasitic relationship of kitsch with art, but alsobecause kitsch and poshJost are primarily syntactic phenomena that de-pend on usage, framing, angle of vision, and context. It is the context thatmakes certain elements of style, objects, and behavior into kitsch, and itis the context again that helps to estrange, parody, and satirize both theconventions of the old and the revolutionary anticonventionality, and toforeground some of their political and cultural implications. "Kitsch,"once defined by Adorno as a parody of catharsis can reveal those culturalmythographies mystiques, and demystifications that are in process now.

Soloviev's film is an example of the new eclecticism and the self-conscious uses of kitsch. Together with such films as Zero City (Gorodzero), Prishvin's Paper Eyes (Bumazhnye gJaza Prishvina), and others, it


forms a part of absurdist New Wave in the Soviet cinema, which can becompared in spirit with the Czech and Hungarian New Wave of the 1960s.The production and distribution of the film reflects the changing func-tioning of cultural institutions during perestroika. The film was maderight after the decentering of Mosfilm, by the studio Circle, and the direc-tor himself takes care of the film distribution. Obviously, the history ofcinema is linked to the history of kitsch and marks its high point. BlackRose, Red Rose, besides being an encyclopedia of poshlost, also presentsmany intertextual - or interfilmic - references to different periods of cin-ema. The debates around film from the 1920s to the 1980s - film as artversus film as popular entertainment, as a commercial, or as agovernment-sponsored media - which are essential to my study of the et-ymology of poshJost, are staged by Soloviev's film, its production, andits distribution.

Black Rose, Red Rose is the second part of a new trilogy, "Three Songsabout the Motherland." (Soloviev commented that his earlier films makea "trilogy of radical stagnation [krutoj stagnacii] and focus on individualsurvival. This new trilogy [the trilogy of merry perestroika - trilogijazabojnoj perestroiki] is an investigation of the spiritual and moral[dukhovno] picture of the whole society.)

The film presents an eclectic collage of narratives, images, and culturalreferences. Although there is a lot of playful use of what can be called"antiideological montage" of the intertitles, dream sequences, and funnyand impertinent addresses to the audience, the film puts major emphasison narrative coherence. This becomes clear particularly in the secondversion of the film done specially for distribution in the West. Central tothe film is a kind of love triangle: a beautiful, playful, and irresponsiblewoman-child (played by Tatyana Drubich), a daughter of an elite Party of-ficial and a ballerina who has a playful and subversive affair with a mar-ried fashion model who makes her pregnant. Alexandra is saved by anoble and pure orphan teenage boy, a descendant of the artistocratic Rus-sian Lobanov family, which included a Decembrist ancestor and a richgrandfather in Cannes who happens to die and leave the boy a few milliondollars. In the end, Mitja inherits the family money, receives a baptism,and has un uplifting vision of Alexandra with a child looking like aChristmas Virgin Mary.

The setting of the film is primarily a claustrophobic communal apart-ment that serves as a theatrical stage for the carnivalesque happenings.The only escape is the roof of the apartment with the view on a huge bill-board advertisement for Pan Am (as if borrowed from Wim Wenders'sParis, Texas, but instead of Paris, Texas, it is Moscow-New York.) Thecommunal apartment, located in a largely destroyed part of old Moscow,is cohabited by the aristocratic Mitja and the limitchik Tolik. (A "Jim-itchik" is someone who comes to Moscow from the provinces and lives


Perestroika meets kitsch in Sergei Soloviev's The Black Rose Is the Emblemfor Sadness, the Red Rose Is the Emblem for Love (1989).

on a limited ascription.) Tolik, perestroika's blessed fool, wakes up witha scene of the revolutionary cruiser Aurora and with the taped recordingof the announcement of Stalin's death and its detailed physiological de-scription. Till Tolik's death, which is perceived at first as yet another ofhis carnivalesque tricks, it is unclear whether he is "mad or just pretendsto be" - indeed, the distinction between the two being often difficult todraw in Soviet society. Tolik is a cross between Chaadaev, a "philosopherin the gown," and Gogol's madman transplanted into the Soviet commu-nal apartment. The other characters include a lonely general and hisdrinking partner, a Soviet-sponsored resistance leader of a developingcountry, both made obsolete by perestroika. The film is interspersed withanecdotes about Stalin's constipation, Tolik's dreams of changing the let-ters on Lenin's mausoleum from LENIN to TOLIK, and absurdist incidentsthat literally illustrate Russian proverbs as well as intertitles and even afew fleeting appearances by Jesus Christ.

The humor in the film is mostly verbal; it results primarily from liter-ary puns and jokes. However, occasionally there is an interesting clashbetween the image and the verbal text, such as in the final scene of the


baptism, which does not allow us to draw clear boundaries between Rus-sian spirituality and Russian kitsch in its self-conscious and unself-conscious forms. The very title of the film offers an example of self-conscious usage of kitsch. Soloviev tells a story of how everyone atMosfilm commented that it sounds like a title for an Indian film, and howhe confessed that he was not ashamed of that: "At least Indian directorsappeal to a broad audience and make people laugh and cry."7 He self-consciously employs elements of melodrama and explicitly refers to Dos-toevsky and "Dostoevskishchina," a foregounding of the already-presentelements of kitsch in Dostoevsky's writings, which resulted from a com-plex relationship between metaphysical aspirations and readings ofyellow-press novels. In Russian culture, there is a higher tolerance ofwhat in the West would be considered a sentimental excess; there is agreater threshold of cultural acceptance of the overwhelming expressionof emotions and feelings; in general elements of melodrama are muchmore present in what is considered "high culture." (We can observe thisin watching recent Soviet films that often appear excessively melodra-matic to the foreign viewer.) Soloviev proposes to use melodrama self-consciously, not masking it by false moderation of official hypocrisy, theofficial caricature on culturalism and good taste that dominated Brezh-nev's years.

Soloviev observed that one of the criticisms of his earlier film Assa isthat it is a commercial or in Russian "konjucturny" film that consciouslyplays for the taste of the masses and flirts with youth culture. The samecan be said about his new film. Indeed, BJack Rose, Red Rose has turnedout to be something of a teenage cult movie. According to Soloviev, it isimportant to reconsider the very notion of konjuctura, or art made "inconjunction with" a specific social demand — in this case, of course, notan ideological demand but a desire to appeal to the tastes of the audienceand thus disturb the old Russian intelligentsia's belief in the uncompro-mising nature of art. (Soloviev goes so far as to say that Sakharov can beseen as a konjunkturshchik when he insists that in the circumstances of1989, it is important to support Gorbachev and the policy of perestroika.)8

The director points at the necessity to reconsider cultural hierarchies -which resulted not so much in "high or spiritual and moral culture" butin culturalism and false piety. Furthermore, the very notion of "commer-cialism" is complicated in the Soviet context. Commercial culture hasbeen strictly prohibited since after the revolution. The surviving elementsof "popular" urban culture and vernacular culture - beyond the officialSoviet folk (as one of the characters in the film observes, the music is folk,the words by MVD) — were denounced as "petit bourgeois kitsch." Thus,at the very beginning of Gorbachev's time, "commercial" culture was per-ceived as subversive. Now there is more discussion about commercializa-tion of culture and a need to draw boundaries between a purely imitative


commercial culture and a self-conscious attempt to use elements of newvernacular culture of the Homo sovieticus. The former follows in thesteps of the official Soviet popular culture of Brezhnev's time spicedwith a few porno scenes, a few obligatory drug addicts, and a few Stalinjokes, while the latter presents an attempt to upset and shift cultural pre-conception and disturb the hypocritical reverance of the official cul-ture. But how are we to distinguish between good and bad repetition,between "good" bad taste and "bad" bad taste, satiric and involuntaryuses of kitsch?

Black Rose, Red Rose is densely packed with various references to"popular" and "high" culture, literary quotations, and cultural clichesthat are interwoven throughout the fragmentary and explosive structureof the film. The history of what was considered kitsch and poshlost inRussian and Soviet culture is perfectly cinematically illustrated in thefilm. Soviet history appears in the film as a montage of kitsch signs - cul-tural signposts that have to be marked in order to accomplish demystifi-cation. The title song, a leitmotif of the young heroine, is an example ofwhat has been conceived as "petit bourgeois poshJost." It is an urban ro-mance {gorodskoj romans) that reminds one of gypsy imitations and oldgramophone records of the turn of the century. It is a part of the senti-mental "feminine culture" that here is treated with a mixture of parodyand endearment. (Interestingly, Alexandra's lover, Vladimir, echoes hersong with his ironic performance of the Soviet singer-superstar and queenof popular culture Alia Pugacheva: "a million, million, million redroses . . . " Thus, the red roses seem to bridge fin de si&cle "feminine cul-tures") The song is performed playfully and somewhat exaggeratedly bythe young heroine of the film. Symptomatically, she plays it right after afunny sex scene between her and her fasion-model lover (who resists herand keeps repeating, "We are like children, we are just like children").The title song uses two meanings of the word poshlost — the way it refersto sentimentality as well as to bad taste and sexuality is played out withironic self-consciousness. Alexandra's black laces and military attributesas well as her S&M relationship with her father (which is aestheticized inthe film almost a la David Lynch) make Sovloviev a pioneer of the "camp"attitude in the Soviet cinema. (She comments that he is a dictator, and herhome is like Chile — parodying Soviet newspaper jargon.)

The film offers many examples of the totaliatarian kitsch of the Stalinperiod - the cruiser Aurora and Stalin's images. There is also an exampleof Western kitsch in the ad for Pan Am, which in the context of the filmsignifies not only commercialism, but also a new openness - or a new se-duction by the West - and an element of Western postmodern culture.Gorbachev kitsch is represented by the programmatic new glasnost"speech" from the magazine Ogonek, and gJasnost T-shirts bought in theWest. The direct social criticism and social satire offered by Tolik in his


moment of political inspiration is treated by the other characters in thefilm as a glasnost cliche, a programmatic kitschy glasnost-speech: "Youmust have read too much Ogonek," says Vladimir, referring to the formerconservative magazine of the Brezhnev times turned into a loudspeaker ofperestroika. Tolik is ironically called "dissident." Thus, the discourse ofsatire itself is perceived as ideological kitsch, a sign of the times whenglasnost is promoted officially from above, as silence, indirection, andAesopian language was promoted in Brezhnev's times.

Thus, Soloviev's film illuminates the specificity of the Russian etymol-ogy of poshlost. What differentiates it from the history of kitsch in theWest are first the synthetic nineteenth-century definitions of poshlost thatjoin together the issues of spirituality, morality, sexual and aesthetic be-havior, an insistence on a certain spiritual aristocratism and asceticismthat was inherited from the Rusian intelligentsia by the Russian avant-garde. Also, it is marked by a different institutional history of popular orcommercial culture. Jeffrey Brooks convincingly analyzes particularlyhostile attitudes toward "popular literature" on the part of the State, thechurch, and the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century - attitudes thatare later carried on by the Bolsheviks.9 This led to a postrevolutionaryabolition of non-State-sponsored commercial culture in Russia. The 1920switnessed a revolutionary struggle against "counterrevolutionary dailygrind," petit bourgeois characterization of "Marx in a little crimsonframe," canaries, and love boats parodied and eternalized by Mayakovsky.In fact, everything private or domestic is constructed as "petit bourgeoisposhlost" and dismissed together with the art of the belle epoque and aes-theticism; in the 1930s, commercial culture is prohibited, and the eclecticposhlost of the belle epoque and NEP is replaced by official Stalinist aca-demism, which however remained impure and could not completelyeradicate the sentimentality and folkloric structures of good old poshlost.In the 1960s, the intelligentsia of the "thaw generation" rebelled againstthe "bad taste of the 1950s" that smacked of Stalinism and philistinism,and rediscovered in a somewhat distorted form the heritage of the revo-lutionary modernism. During the Brezhnev period, artistic stagnationand cynicism were accompanied by a growing awareness of Western cul-ture, as well as by the development of an acute historical and stylisticconscience at least among the new post-Stalinist generation of the Sovietintelligentsia. These often subdued cultural mutations that occurred dur-ing the 1970s prepared the ground for a new subversive eclecticism ofperestroika. In the age of Gorbachev, "totalitarian kitsch" of the "highStalinism" of the 1930s and the old poshlost of the time of NEP, 1950smiddlebrow art, and neomodernist euphoria of the 1960s all appear asdifferent aesthetic and political styles, occasions for nostalgia and explo-sive laughter.


Hence, Soloviev's film does not merely use kitsch satirically or ironi-cally. Poshlost is not automatically placed under the sign of evil; rather,the film makes us reconsider poshJost and its uses as an umbrella term foreverything "ideologically incorrect" in a given period.

The title song reenacts both seriously and ironically the main melodra-matic conflict of the film — "The black rose is the emblem of sadness; thered rose is the emblem of love, the demons strummed to us about theblack rose, the nightingales sang us about the red." Thus, in its ownkitschy way the song's refrain is about the duel opposition between goodand evil, between demons and nightingales, sadness and love. The song isin the same genre as the film itself - "the genre of tragic and comic cre-tinism." It is a cliche, but a cliche that here is both parodied and reestab-lished. Kitsch and poshlost - or rather the stylistic elements that, if takenout of the context, would be regarded as kitsch and poshlost — are not en-tirely on the side of the demons. The division between demons and night-ingales does not coincide with the division between good taste, as it isaccepted by the Soviet intelligentsia, and bad taste. Where then does itpass? Is it that true spiritedness can be hidden behind tacky exteriors?Can the director escape the trap of poshJost, its double bind of traditionand triteness - a wisdom of the past (often constructed as an ideal, uni-versal wisdom) and a worn-down banality?

The director self-consciously attempts to give us antidotes for poshlostwithin the film, both on the level of the characters who embody "the wan-dering of the ideal in the real" and in the comic or carnavalesque and sub-versive elements of the film's structure. The two main "anti-poshJost"characters are young Lobanov and Alexandra, a teenage couple. (Thegrown-ups seem to have lost the capacity to resist poshlost.) The filmwould be a perfect example of the crisis of parenthood and conventionalfamily, which can hardly be represented other than satirically. We knowthat the search for a positive hero is one of the most tragically frustratedand yet never abandoned aspirations of Russian and Soviet literature -from Gogol's good landlord in the burnt second volume of The DeadSouJs, to Chenyshevsky's good raznochinets - revolutionaries to SocialistRealist heroes. The easy way out was always to represent an ideal self-sacrificial female character, a model of "terrible perfection" who is a liv-ing reproach to frustrated males who are forever searching for an ideal.Alexandra falls to some extent into this trap. For the director, she embod-ies "the wandering of the ideal in the real." (Every Soviet intellectual hasto be an amateur metaphysician - this is one feature that has not yet beensufficiently satirized.10) At the beginning, she is presented as playful andunpredictable in her mischief (although she reminds one too much of atypical idealized femme-en/ant). Throughout the film, Alexandra's char-acter develops further and further toward the cliche. Pregnant Alexandra


in glasses is a cross between a pregnant Lolita (who changes her playfulheart glasses for the more mature and heavy black ones in Kubrik's film)and Tolstoj's Natasha Rostova in a perestroika T-shirt. At the end she isfurther idealized and trivialized, transformed into a Virgin Mary.

The treatment of religion is one of the most ambiguous and revealingparts of the film. How are we to take the slide projection scene that illus-trates the New Testament before Lobanov's baptism? The gospel story ispresented through a series of images that appear like turn-of-the-centurypopular postcards painted in a very realistic manner, but which also pos-sess a pinkish tint, that rose colored glasses of kitsch, not the color of spir-itualism but of a kitschy idealization. In the sequence of the Gospel slideshow, we are dealing with a complex case of cinematic irony. Potentialirony resides in the very quality of the image that undermines the solem-nity of the priest's voice. The scene of baptism is not deprived of someelements of humor: The baby winks, the provincial girlfriend of Mitja'suncle from Ljubertsy gets undressed showing her black-market black lin-gerie-but this is neither black humor nor satire but rather a good-humored attitude that does not undermine but softens the romanticintensity of the scene. Religious kitsch is widely recognized and has beenoften satirically depicted in the West, for instance, in Fellini's films,which are cinematic gospel for most of the directors of Soloviev's gener-ation. In fact, the religious industry can be said to have pioneered kitschin the Soviet Union, due not so much however to the so-called traditionalrole of religion. It is due to the history of its suppression after the revo-lution and the much celebrated "spirituality of Russian culture" that it isstill impossible to self-consciously depict religious kitsch, or point to thefact that the discussion of spirituality can converge with poshlost. (In fact,religious kitsch is one of the oldest kinds of kitsch. The issue of repre-sentation is at the very core of many Christian theological debates - start-ing from iconoclasts and iconophiles to the quarrels between Catholicsand Protestants, and between more aristocratic and more popular formsof religion.)

Thus, even in Soloviev's eclectic and carnivalesque universe it is stilla mauvais ton — to use a French expression popular in nineteenth-centuryRussia - meaning to laugh at certain spiritual practices and at certain oldRussian aristocratic values. This would be bad bad taste. The ending ofthe film is a limit point of Soloviev's satire and irony: The last sequenceis a montage of the baptism scene shot from Mitja's lyrical perspective fol-lowed by a dream episode in which Mitja becomes a noble and patrioticsailor on a legendary ship - a cross between the cruiser Aurora and theromantic dream ship of the civic-minded Russian aristocrats. In the rev-erie of young Lobanov, the aristocratic White Russian images mix withSocialist realist paintings of the Stalinist epoque and with the images ofNakhimov naval academy of the Brezhnev period. The paradox of


poshJost is in its omnipotence and contagious powers that upset thedirectorial intentions and reveal many unintentional ironies, which be-come even more visible when we transpose the film into a different cul-tural context.

To my mind, the film's powerful antidote to Soviet poshlost occurs notwhen the film attempts to present romanticized traditional Russian im-ages of a noble young man and woman, but in the elements of absurdity.In this respect, Tolik's dreams are much more interesting than those ofMitja. One of them presents a cinematic transposition of a nonsensicalchildren's saying: "Ty kto? — kon' v pal'to?" (Who are you? A fish in theshoe?) In Tolik's dream, this mysterious stranger - the horse in the coat ora fish in the shoe - turns into a full-fleshed "ten grader," a mythical imagein Soviet folklore. Tolik's dream not only plays with the official hypocrisyand moralism of Soviet society, but above all it undermines the very at-tempt to "overread," that is, to read everything through cultural refer-ences and imbue everything with inevitable political and ideologicalsignificance. The laughter in the audience is provoked here not by a directsatire but by a subversive embarrassment of cultural forms by nonsense.However, in the version of the film made for foreign distribution, manyabsurd interpolated episodes, including the episode of Stalin's constipa-tion, have been cut in order to preserve a more coherent narrative. This isunfortunate because the film, which, despite the futile cuts, still does notfit into the conventions of Hollywood narrative, and would hardly makea box-office hit in the United States, loses some of its charm. The child-hood playfulness that does not "unmask" but embarrasses the moralistichigh seriousness of official Soviet culture does not have to be presented inthe teenage heroes Lobanov and Alexandra; it is embodied much better inthe childish pranks of the film itself. The film suggests that the languageof direct social satire or of a publicistic discourse that dominated the firstyears of perestroika is in itself to be playfully subverted.

If in Clement Greenberg's definition "kitsch" imitates the effects of art,here we see art meditating on history and effects of kitsch. Interestingly,in a recent interview while discussing his latest film, Soloviev in factmentions David Lynch as one of his inspirations. The framing of kitsch inthis film can be compared to pop art appropriation of Americana, butwith one significant difference: In the Soviet art, kitsch elements do notcome from the commercial culture, but rather from political slogansand old high school manuals. The common Soviet cultural text is muchless televisual than the American cultural text. Besides, there are pro-found differences in the the very understanding of commercialism andauthorial narrative. The ironic references within David Lynch films con-tain multiple allusions to TV shows and all-American movie classics thatembody American mythology. (Lynch's irony is not a vertiginous chal-lenge to representation that is characteristic for the European avant-garde


tradition; rather, his cinematic irony is a "safe" irony that never interfereswith profits.)

In his last film, The House Under the Starry Sky (Dom pod otkrytymnebom), the third part of the trilogy that comprises Assa and Black Rose,Red Rose, Soloviev moves away from exclusively Soviet references; heplaces some Felliniesque characters on the New York subway and on thewhole attempts to create a kind of post-perestroika Road Warrior. (Theoriginal one, if I remember correctly was postnuclear holocaust.) TheHouse Under the Starry Sky is a reduction to absurdity not only of theSoviet history that turns into a sheer enumeration of names, but even ofthe history of kitsch. Yet in spite of the references to Lynch and Green-away made by the director, the film hardly resembles its Western coun-terparts. It participates in many cinematic genres and cliches but lacksthat recognizable archetypal genre structure characteristic of DavidLynch —that of a "boy-next-door, coming-of-age" adventure in BJue Vel-vet and the classical road movie in Wild at Heart. Recent Soviet cinemaflirts with the Hollywood cinematic genre system, but the results of thatappear to be much less interesting than the native Soviet hybrids.

Stylistically, Soloviev's films possess many elements of postmodern-ism - the superimposition of cliches, mixing genres, and cultures, culti-vating something of a "campy" sensibility. However, I would like tosuspend the tautology of "postmodernism is postmodernism is postmod-ernism . . . "o r "kitsch is kitsch is kitsch is kitsch. . . . " and foregroundsome uncommon features of commonplaces in different cultures. Solov-iev's film offers us an eclectic Russian bouquet with some withered aris-tocratic flowers, some subversive "flowers of evil," and many sharpthorns of black humor on the red rose of poshlost.

Notes1. Vladimir Nabokov, "Philistines and Philistinism," in Lectures on Russian Lit-

erature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 309-21.2. From Sergei Soloviev's introduction to his film during its Boston premiere at

Coolidge Corner Theater, 1989.3. For the purpose of this essay, I will provisionally distinguish between "satire,"

"irony" and "absurd." Satire is a passionate genre of an engaged writer or artist thatridicules or exposes the ridiculous in art and life without necessarily exposing thesatirist himself or herself. On the contrary, it asserts the satirist's distance andmastery over the satirized object. Irony, specifically the unstable or so-called Ro-mantic irony, engages both the speaking subject and the subject matter, the ironistand the material used for irony as a whirlpool of vertiginous dislocations. Humorand comedy are very broad categories that could incorporate "satire," irony andblack humor. To examine it, however, would recquire a history of definitions ofcomedy that cannot be undertaken here. Black humor and absurd imply not sim-ply the movement of irony and self-irony, but a movement toward nonsense,


where cultural and linguistic codes can no longer be preserved. It is often difficultto draw the boundaries between "stable" and unstable irony, as well as betweensatire and irony. Both can border on or fight against the absurd. The gray areasbetween black humor, satire, and irony, and their potential power of political sub-version will be explored in this paper.4. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," On Art and Culture (Boston:

Beacon Press), 1965, p. 10. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans, by C. Len-harardt (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 340. Her-mann Broch, "Notes on the Problem of Kitsch" in Kitsch: The Anthology of BadTaste, ed. by Gillo Dorfles (London: Studio Vista, 1969), pp. 49-67. For a com-prehensive bibliography on the problem of kitsch see Matei Calinescu, Five Facesof Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 225-65.5. Akademicheskii Slovar' Russkogo lazyka (Moscow: 1957), p. 476.6. Vladimir Dal, Tolkovyi Slovar' Zhivago Velikorusskogo iazyka (St. Petersburg:

Volf Editorial), 1982, pp. 10-12, 374.7. See interview with Sergei Soloviev in Sovetskiy Ekran, no. 17 (1989): pp. 8 -

12.8. Ibid., p. 11.9. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, Princeton University

Press, 1985).10. See Kitsch: The Anthology of Bad Taste. In Iskusstvo Kino 6 (1990): pp. 69-70,there is an open debate on "elite and mass culture" in which Tatyana Tolstaya infact talks about the [kitshification of] religion turned into kitsch, and the directorAndrey Konchalovsky says that the most popular hero of mass culture is JesusChrist.

CHAPTER XIV

Carnivals bright, dark,and grotesque in the

glasnost satires of Mamin,Must a f aye v, andShakhnazarov

I wish to focus on three filmmakers who represent something of the spec-trum of film satire in the former Soviet Union under gJasnost. And fromthe bright satire of Yuri Mamin's Neptune's Feast (Prazdnik Neptuna,1986) to his darker film Fountain (Fontan, 1988) and on to Azerbaidjandirector Vaghif Mustafayev's bright and bleak film The Villain (Merzavets,1989) and finally to Karen Shakhnazarov's darkly grotesque Zero City(Gorod zero, 1989), I wish to conduct this critical journey through theframework of carnival laughter, be it bright, dark, or grotesque.

Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us of the power of carnival laughter in hisdiscussion of the formation of the novel at the expense of the epic: "It is(popular) laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hi-erarchical (distancing and valorized) distance" (The Dialogic Imagina-tion, p. 23). Satire is, like an unstable electron particle, always in dangerof breaking down, becoming something else. In this brief discussion ofthree directors, therefore, I wish to suggest the transitional phase that wehave witnessed in what was the Soviet Union in the period between 1986and 1989, from a liberating joyful carnivalesque form of satire to a darklytroubling formula in which both the carnivalesque and satiric laughtercompletely break down.

Feast and Mamin: Carnivals bright and darkYuri Mamin has emerged as one of the most important satirists in theformer Soviet Union during the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Clearly, helearned much from Eldar Ryazanov, his professor and mentor, and fromthe Soviet and Russian tradition of satire in general. In describing hisaward-winning film Fountain, he classified the genre as a combination ofall genres, "so that one flows into another: It begins as a comedy of situ-ations and ends as grotesque" ("Interview," p. 16). But this younger di-rector who graduated from the Higher Courses for Screenwriters andDirectors in 1982 has emerged with his own comic satiric vision and

138

Carnivals bright, dark, and grotesque 139

voice. His early glasnost short film, Neptune's Feast, is a near perfect,warm-hearted satire of bureaucracy and village mentality today.

The action revolves around a frozen northern Russian village that triesto stage a spectacular outdoor winter show, "Neptune's Feast," to impressa delegation of visiting Swedes. The problem is, however, that no one inthe village is actually a "walrus," that legendary breed of tough Russianswho plunge into winter waters wearing only bathing suits. Rather thanEisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Mamin's film refers to the whole "Po-temkin Villages" deception.

With what seem like definite influences from films such as Milos For-man's Firemen's Ball as well as an upbeat version of Gogol's InspectorGeneral, Neptune's Feast manages to engage its audience with its array offoolish villagers incompetently struggling to impress "the foreigners"while simultaneously distancing us with the absurdity of the situationcaused by the "system" which is, ultimately, the source of the incompe-tence and confusion. In this sixty-minute romp, Mamin avoids Ryazanov'strap in Forgotten Melody for a Flute of trying to overload the film withtoo many agendas at once. Rather, Mamin never loses an almost giddylight-hearted sense of comedy and satire perfectly blended as in For man'searly work.

In this village named Little Heels (Malye Piatki), we are treated to adistrict Party office where no one is allowed to drink vodka (as in An-dropov's and the post Brezhnev antialcohol campaign as well as Gor-bachev's more strenuous yet unsuccessful similar campaign) and whereno one wishes to take on the responsibility of mounting the Neptuneshow. The planned festivity is itself absurd, for they decide to carry outthe whole show outdoors at thirty below zero and to do so as a "watershow" with the one hundred "actors" swimming in icy water to show theSwedes that the Russians are still tough, superhuman "walruses."

No one, of course, wants to strip down and swim in such frigid waters.Thus, another level of absurdity is added: The Party members decide torun hoses of warm water into the stage area to heat the water, an absurdgesture doomed to failure.

Mamin, working with coscreenwriter Vladimir Vardunas, casts the filmwith a wonderful group of peasant faces that the camera captures in comicdetail. And Mamin orchestrates and paces this minor masterpiece with asure sense of timing. Detail after detail delights and feeds into the esca-lating buildup for this bizarre presentation. A farmer is chosen as Nep-tune and, protesting that "we do everything for foreigners and nothing forourselves," attempts to commit suicide. Preparations are finally more orless complete, including a hot house nearby for participants to keep warmbefore plunging into the freezing water. The climax of the film, the arrivalof the Swedes and the show itself, is set to the score Prokofiev wrote for


Eisenstein's "The Battle of the Ice" scene in Alexander Nevsky, anotherlevel of playfulness that was not lost on Soviet audiences.

At film's end the Swedes have left before the show reaches its grandmoments. But nobody seems to care. The scene is much like the dancesequence in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life in which everyone at thedance who sees Jimmy Stewart and date fall into the swimming pool un-der the dance floor decides to jump in themselves. Similarly, Mamin'sinitially reluctant villagers finally charge into the water for the hell of it,having the time of their lives. "Stop!" shouts an official. "The Swedeshave left." It doesn't matter. Ultimately, they are enjoying themselves.Once again, what is pure farce in Capra's film becomes gentle satire in itsSoviet variation: Mamin laughs both at the Party officials and the notori-ous Russian "bottomless spirit," which, when provoked, can never stop.

There is no question but that Mamin deserves the awards this film hasgained, including the Grand Prix at the Comedy Film Festival in Bulgaria,1987. The triumphant "what the hell" celebration by the villagers whofinally have fun for themselves rather than for the Party or the foreignersmakes Neptune's Feast perhaps the single most "carnivalesque" satiriccomedy yet under glasnost.

As Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, in such a "feast of becoming," the peopletriumph over all obstacles . . . for that moment, that instant of pure car-nival. Yet even under early glasnost, this seemingly generalized satirehad great difficulty passing the watchful eye of cinema officials and onlyhad a limited theatrical release, a form of censorship familiar to the Hol-lywood system.

Fountain, Mamin's first feature, builds on the talents seen in Neptune'sFeast to create a finely controlled extended satire that was completely intune with the times when shot in 1988. Working again with scriptwriterVladimir Vardunas, Mamin has grounded his narrative in the closely ob-served reality of apartment building life in Leningrad. But this reality be-comes a center from which absurdity multiplies and surrealism develops.

A "story in seven parts," as an early title announces, Fountain isframed in metaphor. The opening shot is of a figure we will come to knowas the composer: He stands atop the apartment building in a Leonardo DaVinci-like "winged man" outfit, playing a violin. We then cut from thisimage of Soviet man as poised ready to "fly" against a grim backgroundwhile playing classical music to a desert as a title card announces the firstsegment of the film, "The Source." We view a fountain in the rocks that isjust a trickle of water. An old Kazakh herdsman patiently holds a smallcontainer to the trickle. Suddenly a Russian military truck drives up andsoldiers jump out to fill up large water canteens. Discouraged with theslow speed of the fountain, they run dynamite to the fountain and pushthe plunger. The rocks explode and water gushes up into the air only todie out completely as a soldier attempts without success to fill his can-


teen. When the soldiers see that there is now no water where once therehad been a fountain, they jump into the truck and drive off. The old Ka-zakh herdsman looks at the dry rocks, and in what becomes the credit se-quence, we watch him gather up his family and animals and head into thedistance, in search of another source of water. Like much of Chaplin'swork, the scene evokes laughter tinged with emotion. As the herdsman,again like Chaplin in the closing shots of his films, walks off into the dis-tance having failed at what he wanted to accomplish, we are left withsomething of a knowing sadness to the satire that has gone before.

The rest of the film takes place in a Leningrad apartment building thatis the center of the narrative, but this metaphoric opening forces the au-dience to see in Aesopian style that in the dialectic of tradition andchange, custom and "progress" both are often the losers.

The old herdsman, we swiftly learn, is the grandfather of Maya, thewife of our main protagonist, Peter. The old Kazakh becomes something ofa super plumber for the apartment building when he arrives to stay withthe family. The "frame" of the film is completed in the end when the el-evator in the building suddenly goes haywire and ejects the grandfatherthrough the roof, out over the city, into space, and, yes, ultimately backhome in his beloved steppe where he and we began. As in Neptune'sFeast, such an ending places the simple character back in his environ-ment, transcending the "system." In Fountain, there is also a carni-valesque celebration and triumph. After all of the disasters that havehappened to the apartment house, the inhabitants carry out their own"carnival" of dancing and drinking. And there is finally a ceremony ofwarming the frozen pipes of the building with candles. Again we sense agroup spirit that bonds diverse individuals together in a common causebeyond the realm of the Party and bureaucracy that are portrayed as hav-ing failed the people. Yet the joy of Neptune's Feast's conclusion ends inFountain in a wry awareness that we are back where we began, in a placewhere the "source" has been destroyed.

As in Forgotten Melody for a Flute, Mamin's film does evoke a numberof genres. But Mamin succeeds with far more clarity of purpose in focus-ing his film and painting a canvas with an array of characters who are, asin his early work, well orchestrated to create a "group" protagonist. Inthis sense, Mamin follows the approach of Blue Mountains (see JulieChristensen, Chapter XI, this volume) in making all of the inhabitants ofthe apartment house the main protagonist. But in Mamin's hands, the sat-ire and comedy are pushed to further extremes than the pre-glasnostGeorgian film.

There is the couple who have turned their apartment into an illegalgreenhouse where they play music to soothe the flowers and where theyprepare their daughter's costume to be a "snow maiden" in a local pag-eant. There is the World War II vet, the father of the greenhouse operator,


who has no interest in the present other than to plan a reunion of vets. Inanother apartment, an old widow of a poet listens to ethnographic recordsof tribal chants, while the composer seen in the opening shot, Shesta-palov, lives in the attic apartment surrounded by various instruments, hishandmade wings, and his synthesizer-piano: From time to time we seehim "fly" off the top of the building on a wire, across the winter land-scape, crashing to the ground each time.

And at the center of all is the family of Peter, a Russian in charge ofmaintenance, and his Kazakh wife, Maya, whom the grandfather from thesteppes visits. Within this household, many of the scenes deal with cul-tural confusion and the clash of traditions as the grandfather insists onfacing East to pray to Mecca before eating, while the couple's son feelsthe old man is praying to the fridge. The old man is upset with much hesees, including aerobics shown on television, and in part as a reactionagainst such intrusions ("Women should not be dressed in such scantyclothing") he pulls out his old one-stringed instrument and begins tochant tribal songs.

Against such a backdrop, the story involves the collapse of the build-ing. (Again, we sense echoes of an influence from Blue Mountains.) UsingGerald Mast's comic plot classifications, we could label such a plot re-ducto ad absurdum, as the whole point is simply to watch everything es-calate to one huge disaster (Mast, p. 6), while in this case, satirizing the"system" that has made such incompetence possible. The residents of thebuilding literally cannot stop the building from collapsing around them.All of their efforts to get bureaucratic support, Party support, officialhelp, fail. In one scene as the roof is caving in, for instance, men agree tohold the roof on their own shoulders propped up in part by old Commu-nist signs bearing Party slogans in yet another visual satiric metaphor.(Their payoff is to be "fed" vodka each hour for their efforts.)

Nothing works, however. And with the excellent increasing pace of thisorchestrated chaos, as seen in Neptune's Feast, Mamin drives his situa-tional comedy toward the absurd and ultimately, as he stated, the gro-tesque. Mamin has, like the Czech directors, an eye for the small details ofabsurdity that make up life under socialism: people sorting onions, thuscrying, while singing a Communist song entitled "Our Native Land"; aplaque to the dead poet being dedicated only to fall off later; televisionnews crews trying to capture the event and suddenly becoming a mediumfor theatrics as one of the women in the building who wishes to be anactress breaks into tears causing others to do likewise. At no point, how-ever, does this final absurdist-grotesque satire fall into the confusingpretentiousness of the ending of Forgotten Melody for a Flute. Mamin'sworld is the one of everyday life simply pushed and nudged further untilit becomes what the Yugoslav director Srdjan Karanovic calls "documen-tary fairytale."


About his brand of satire, Mamin says:

Some people might be shocked by the raw mixture of images. A lot of people stillthink that a truly aesthetic picture is one that has leisurely and elegant land-scapes. But why should it always be so? After all, there is such a thing as the aes-thetics of the ugly. Life is not all about beauty. Vulgarity, chaos, and paradox areall part of our social life, and they prompt the visual solution. ("Interview," p. 17)

But Mamin only partially describes the focus and effect of his films bydiscussing "the aesthetics of the ugly/* There is the carnivalesque per-spective also, as noted. Furthermore, we clearly see the seriousness ofpurpose behind the satire that, once again, matches Eisenstein's call forcomedy to be a weapon in the hands of the revolution. In this sense,Fountain, like many films made under glasnost, is a tool in the hands ofthose who see the aesthetics of the ugly caused by the Party and the rev-olution that did not deliver. The framing sequences in the steppes aloneforce the audience to participate in a game of reading the narrative as aparable without a verbally stated punchline (though the visuals are ob-vious), an Aesopian fable about the Party. As Kevin Moss has pointed outin his study of the popular pre-gJasnost satiric television film The VerySame Munchausen [Tot samyj Myuhgauzen), such Soviet allegories withmissing "moral lessons," " . . . make the reader name, at least to himself,the Soviet reality to which the text does not overtly refer*' (Kevin Moss,Chapter II, this volume). The pleasure, therefore, for Soviet audiences is tofill in the blanks, read between the lines, enjoy the boldness with whichcontemporary "ugliness" is depicted. Munchausen is an example of sucha work, especially because it appeared during the stagnation period.

Fountain, coming under glasnost, is much more open and thus less"between the lines," a fact that is not necessarily completely positive foraudiences used to enjoying the subversive pleasure of figuring out allu-sions and cleverly worked-out references. But Mamin is not totally direct.He describes his own work as presenting the everyday "situation" ratherthan a frontal attack on the system. But in a nation where the populationis finely attuned to subtle nuance and to getting the point that could not,in the past, be stated directly, most understand that it is the system thathas created the situation.

Be that as it may, Fountain, for all of its awards, including winner of the1988 Grand Prize at the first Festival of Genre Films held in Odessa, failedto find a large popular audience. With 4 million viewers in its first year,Mamin's work must thus be seen as on a par with Woody Allen's comicart: much admired by the critics and by a devoted educated audience, butrelatively ignored by the general public when compared to the hugeaudiences found for other comedies and satires such as Ghostbusters IIand Batman. Soviets interviewed on this point about Mamin's film sug-gested to us that perhaps the film is too close to real life, that Mamin has


succeeded too well in capturing the hardships of daily life. Therefore his"aesthetics of the ugly" is something they receive enough of in the pa-pers, in conversation, in the effort to get through each day. Again, for au-diences used to Aesopian satire, Mamin's film may appear far too real. Asanthropologist Rene Girard has written, the fundamental purpose of car-nival is "to set the stage for a sacrificial act that marks at once the climaxand the termination of the festivities" (p. 119). But when a society loses itssense of ritual and sanctioned times of release-as is the case in theformer Soviet Union with the collapse of the Communist/Socialist sys-tem—ritualized violence becomes "carnival gone wrong" and spreadsrandomly throughout the culture. Laughter breaks down at this point asdoes carnival itself, and satire becomes impossible.

Mamin's apartment inhabitants singing around a fire in the snowsuggests the attempt of the people to survive, but the sense of laughter,which, as Bakhtin reminds us, "demolishes fear and piety" (p. 23),is gone.

Carnival gone wrong in AzerbaidjanThe sense of carnival gone wrong as previously discussed is even moresharply apparent in the Azerbaidjani satire from Vaghif Mustafayev, TheVillain (1989). Starring the engaging Georgian actor Mamuka Kika-leishvili as Khattam, a simple good man who becomes corrupted by thetimes, The Villain is a finely worked out comic social satire that clearlyblames the system for the transformation of a good man into a villain.Through humor gentle at times and razor sharp at others, Mustafayev'sfilm holds up the fun house mirror of satire to the theme of the new ma-fias and underground economies that have sprung up around the nationduring recent years. Even more so than Fountain, The Villain is a satirewhose mere existence is possible only under perestroika. The very admis-sion that mafias exist before the development of Gorbachev's glasnostwould have been rare if not impossible. But the times allow for such anopen examination of reality. As director Mustafayev notes, "It's not diffi-cult to become a villain. It's enough to make only one step" [The Villain,Sovexport Film Catalogue 1989, p. 101).

Khattam works in a lemonade factory testing the quality of the product,a job that is humorously made to appear totally superfluous. Yet Khattamloses his job and finally turns to crime when he is set up by others to testthe limits of perestroika. Substituting urine for lemonade, the usuallymundane tests suddenly come out as "dangerous." As Khattam alerts hisboss that the plant must shut down and investigate, thus causing great ex-pense and loss of time, the Boss is forced to say publicly to Khattam thathe is something of a hero "of the times" for so openly (gJasnost) express-ing the need for change (perestroika). But in a sharply etched moment, we


Vaghif Mustafayev's Azerbaidjani satire, The Villain (1989), featuring a sympa-thetic lemonade factory inspector (Mamuka Kikaleishvili), who, under glas-nost, becomes a dictator before finally dying on a subway.

see the Boss's true adaptation to the times. As soon as Khattam leaves theoffice feeling proud of himself, the Boss calls the local Party office to haveKhattam fired behind his back.

A minor character who underlines the major theme of this Azerbaidjanfilm is an old timer who is a kind of aged Chapaev, a grandfather wan-dering around in his civil war uniform asking, "Where is your revolution-ary spirit?" He is both absurd and touching. What would a Chapaev do inGorbachev's dissolving Soviet disunion?

It is the times that are absurd from his perspective. Nevertheless, thetimes are the people's reality, and such an "aesthetics of the ugly" is whatKhattam must negotiate as a naive good soul or Soviet Candide. Musta-fayev has packed the film with telling details, sharper and harder than themore universal satire of Mamin's film. We see a factory foreman whosteals equipment from his own factory by night. Why? Because he hasnine children and must feed them. In a marketplace where a fight breaksout between police and others, someone suddenly reaches over and puts


a hat over the camera lens! Censorship under glasnost. Ant, the lemonadeBoss, finally shouts, "I swear, I'm fed up with this democracy!" Apart-ment houses remain unfinished and grim; kids deal in black-marketMarlboros; and the Mafia boss bears a clearly intentional resemblanceto Gorbachev.

Before Khattam becomes a Mafia boss himself, he encounters the oldcivil war vet once more. The aged man asks again, "Where is your revo-lutionary spirit?" Khattam pauses. "I have no revolutionary spirit," he re-sponds. It is an electrifying moment. Khattam is in effect not only a goodsoul but a wise fool. His honest admission of his condition brings into theopen the secret admission of millions. And in Mustafayev's hands, satiregoes open with no need for the Aesopian tradition of secrecy and cat-and-mouse expectations of it viewers. The satire, as in Hollywood's BeingThere, for instance, is direct.

From the moment Khattam descends into being a villain, however, thefilm veers toward the grotesque and the surreal, as dreams interspersewith reality and ultimately transform into a Kafkaesque trial and night-mare. Once again, Mustafayev's razor laughter cuts much deeper thanMamin's Swiftian pin pricks. Humor itself finally breaks down as we wit-ness the complete degradation of our protagonist and as his love forNatasha, the woman of his dreams, turns into an ugly rape. As he attemptsto hang himself, disgusted with the Party and Mafia boss he has become,he suddenly sees himself on television speaking about perestroika. Hiswords ring hollow, unconvincing, and so he hangs himself. What followsis a dream trial as the grandfather figure as judge accuses him of crimesagainst the revolution.

We learn, however, that his hanging is unsuccessful as a neighbor burstsinto his apartment stating, "Voice of America announced that you hangedyourself!" In the final shot we see Khattam on the subway apparentlysleeping. But it becomes clear he is dead of a heart attack.

Many glasnost films such as Zero City begin in satire and humor andbranch into the allegorical grotesque. But it is worth observing that TheVillain had almost no theatrical audience. The reading of such a fact isstill inconclusive, however. On the one hand, there is the control at thenational level of how many prints of a film are struck and which filmswill be pushed for foreign festivals. This power alone accounts for muchof the success or failure of a film, even under perestroika, at the box of-fice. On the other hand, many interviewed were honest about stating thatthe film was doomed to limited distribution despite its quality because itis shot in the Azerbaidjan language, not Russian, and therefore wouldhave less appeal than, for instance, Rashid Nugmanov's Kazakh film TheNeedle, which is, nevertheless, shot in Russian. Finally, some inter-viewed went as far as to say that, for Russians in particular, "there wouldbe no interest in seeing an Azerbaidjan film, no matter how fine it was."


As mentioned elsewhere, we once more run into another paradox of per-estroika: There is freedom to speak openly on film, but the mechanisms ofprejudice works against the distribution and popularity of such a work.

Laughter absurd and grotesque: Zero CityThe ending of The Villain pushes satire into a much darker realm wheretragedy and the grotesque meet. Such a mixture of genres is prefigured inForgotten Melody for a Flute. But it is a sign of the times that an increas-ing number of "director's films," as opposed to more purely genre moviessuch as Kings of Crime and Intergirl, have opted for satire that turns se-rious, allegorical, ominous.

In films such as Karen Shakhnazarov's Zero City (1989), SergeiOvcharov's It (Ono, 1989), and Valery Ogorodnikov's Prishvin's PaperEyes (Bumazhnye glaza Prishvina, 1989), the alleged bright hope of glas-nost is such an open Pandora's box of death, destruction, confusion, be-trayal, failure, futility. We should take note of Shakhnazarov's uses of darksatire in Zero City, especially since the film stars Leonid Filatov, the pro-tagonist of Forgotten Melody for a Flute.

Shakhnazarov proved in his earlier efforts such as Jazzman (1983) andThe Messenger Boy (1987) that he could tell a simple tale directly, eco-nomically, and with dry as well as broad humor. Zero City, in contrast,once again coscripted with Alexander Borodyansky, belongs much moreclosely to the mixed and packed absurd/grotesque/satiric melodramaticworks of Bulgakov up through Ryazanov's Forgotten Melody for a Flute. Infact, one senses a jarring conjunction in Shakhnazarov's glasnost film ofBunuel, Kafka, Gogol, and, yes, Elvis.

Zero City picks up where Forgotten Melody for a Flute leaves off. IfRyazanov's film follows a bureaucrat through bizarre events in a familiarMoscow, Shakhnazarov sends Varakin (Leonid Filatov) into a provincialtown that appears simultaneously ordinary and a grotesque, surrealisticworld. Varakin is a middle-management bureaucrat on assignment tocheck on a factory in an undesignated town. All seems mundanely nor-mal until he realizes that the factory manager's secretary is completelynaked yet, otherwise, a typical secretary, seemingly unaware of the inap-propriateness of her appearance.

Varakin falls into a wonderland that, in exaggerated form, mirrors thecontradictions of Soviet life in the 1980s, though no specific time is iden-tified. (We can assume it is in that now popular "Brezhnevian period.")Plot is not the point in this inventive dark allegory without a punchline.It is enough to know that Varakin is both the hero and victim of variousnarrative strands as he is served, in one scene, a tart shaped like his ownhead, and in the major scene of the film, he is led through a bizarre mu-seum of living "waxworks" that depict all of Soviet history up through


and including Brezhnev's period of stagnation. Such a scene strongly sug-gests that Russian/Soviet history is indeed a "carnival gone wrong," amishmash of images, statues, heroes real and fabricated or both withseemingly no connection between them. In this Zero City, what we expe-rience is not the liberating laughter characteristic of carnival, but a dis-tanced amusement, smirk, and awareness of the absurd and the grotesque.

Bakhtin states that "as a distanced image a subject cannot be comical;to be made comical, it must be brought close" (p. 23). Shakhnazarov doesnot draw us close to his Zero City. Thus the sense of the absurd and thegrotesque. Zero does finally, however, become One and thus a suggestionof a way out of the maze. Varakin leaves the museum and the city behind,and standing alone in a rowboat adrift on a misty lake at dawn, he floatstoward the horizon. His future is uncertain. But in the calming peace ofnature, we sense he has at least left the absurd and the grotesque behind,at least temporarily. We are ironically reminded here of the Mark Twain'sending for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Huck takes off alone,in the end lighting out for the "wilderness." Huck and Varakin will noteventually wind up living alone. But the wilderness and the early morn-ing lake at least provide a buffer zone between a carnival gone wrong andthe possibility in the future of a carnival that again finds its roots and itsliberating laughter, both joyful and satiric.

BibliographyThis essay grew out of my discussion of comedy and satire in my bookwritten with Michael Brashinsky, The Zero Hour: Glasnost and SovietCinema in Transition, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Em-erson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Girard, Rene*. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1977.

Horton, Andrew, ed. Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Universityof California Press, 1991.

Mamin, Yuri. "Interview: 39 Degrees C," Soviet Film, no. 11 (1990): 14-17.Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2d. ed. Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1979.Sovexport Film Catalogue: 1989. Moscow, 1989.

CHAPTER XV

Quick takes onYuri Mamin's Fountain

from the perspectiveof a Romanian

Romanian reality was a clone of Soviet reality for four decades. We livedin the same apartment building, spoke the same artificial pseudolan-guages, and were seized by the same profound sense of the absurd. We alllived in Mamin's building, and are all going down in it and with it. In thatsense, Mamin's metaphor of a communal apartment house in Moscow isbig enough to accommodate all of us now grubbing in the ruins of the"Grand Experiment." Fountain is a communal metaphor about commu-nity in several of its guises: precommunity (the nomad tribe), faux com-munity (several of these, corresponding to Soviet leaders), and finally,postcommunity (which resembles Marx's "primitive Communism," fromwhence a supposedly rational Communism was going to arise — and did:into faux community.) Of all of these, only the nomad community makesany sense because its life is based on ecological necessity, that is, water.

There was a pure spring tended by an Orthodox monk at a hermitage inthe mountain woods of Transylvania when I went there in July 1990. Themonk looked a thousand years old, and he'd written in old-fashionedscript on a yellowing piece of cardboard tacked over the spring: God's wa-ter. Drink and Be Blessed. The one who took me there was an old highschool buddy of mine who was secretly paying to have the fountain re-stored - secretly, because he was the regional Communist Party secretary.His secret was his way of saving his soul. In his official capacity, he wouldhave had to order the fountain shut. In Yuri Mamin's film, the stupidtruck drivers who destroy the entire ecology of the desert community byblowing up its water are not ideologues. They are just in a hurry and theyare greedy. By the time they show up (in the waning hours of bolshevism),the ideological source of their greed and carelessness has been completelyobscured. They have no souls, let alone a plan for saving them. Nobodyorders them to do anything. Each is the perfect embodiment of the "newSoviet man," a creature without tribal memory, without respect, shortsighted, and shallow.

All trouble begins with shutting down the fountain of one's beginnings.The ecology of survival is based on the wise management of memory and149


necessity. Without the fountain, the old man loses his raison d'etre. Hestill has his values, however, and when he inserts them into the commu-nal apartment building of the big city where he gets control of the com-munity's water, he acts accordingly. In the end, he does recreate a tribethrough his management of water, but it's a sad and ridiculous tribe of ur-ban dwellers who know very little about tribal living. In the end also,Yuri Mamin's parable seems to sadly conclude that only a strong, author-itarian stupidity taken to its most extreme logical denouement can makea community out of people decommunized by Communists.

All the right-wingers have whiskers. These are Stalin's whiskers, andthere is an essay somewhere on the hair of communism. (Now, I'm toldthere is a film.) From Stalin's downward-pointing yet somehow oddlycomforting mustache to the sideburns and mops of early Bolsheviks toGorbachev's smooth bald surfaces, there is a gradual loss of hair. As com-munism begins to wane, the heroic hair of the early years is replaced bybaldness (boldness by baldness) until we arrive in the defoliated presentof glasnost — Gorbachev is the cleanest shaven man in Russian history.He's like the earth around industrial sites where all the grass is gone,burnt out by five-year plan after five-year plan.

This wasteland teems with bankrupt word slingers, from the smallParty fry with their shopworn slogans to the poets waxing grandly underthe toxic moon. (Mamin does to poets in Fountain what Milan Kunderadoes to them in his novel Life is Elsewhere — holds them responsible forromanticizing terror while ridiculing them.) Shouting in mutually incom-prehensible tongues at each other, these people have had even the mostbasic communal tool removed: verbal communication. I remember look-ing at the front page of Scinteia — the Romanian Pravda-and fallingasleep. It was pure narcolepsy. All those recurring meaningless wordsheld us hypnotized for years. But in the mid-1960s, we believed that thewords of the poets might wake us. No such palliative exists in Mamin'sworld. The Party official who complains about the lack of a wall gazetteand fresh slogans seems quaintly old fashioned, a throwback to the Brezh-nev Utopia: Communism is correct slogans! Quaint too is the veteran whogoes to turn his family in all decked out in medals. No one is listening anylonger. The old man praying to Mecca in front of the refrigerator (becauseit toward the East) makes as much sense as the theater director spoutingforth on how "the theatre is a fascist place." All the buzz words, "Mecca,""fascism," and so on, have lost meaning. In their stead arises a kind ofbuzz, an ur-paste (white noise) of language.

One of the film's major metaphors, translation, is exquisitely layered.From the woman translating to the old man and to her family, to the Hem-ingway on the wall as the elder wails away on his banjo, to the mutuallyincomprehensible yet perfectly comprehensible and ultimately incom-prehensible speeches and slogans, we are witnessing a spectacular failure

Yuri Mamin's Fountain from the perspective of a Romanian 151

of communication, a Babel beyond Babel. As the roof, the attic, and thebasement are collapsing, the humans within are mirroring the collapse inlanguage. The last reality seems to be unreality. "You'll never see yourselfon TV because you're such an idiot," is one of the film's grand lines, andit epitomizes and probably prophesies the future in that the last place ofcertainty left is television, the screen of pure illusion. Yuri Mamin paysan ironic and back-handed self-conscious homage to his own mediumhere. Neither is there is salvation in this parable and fairy tale, he tells us.Enivrez-vous. The voting scene shuts the last door left, the possibility thatpeople used to mind-numbing conformism can learn how to be free. Nota chance. I remember endless Pioneer and Komsomol meetings where wevoted just like that.

Mamin's vision is unsparing. The sad Icarus with his violin is a figureof ridicule and pathos, not redeemed even by talent. He is an urban angel,the attempt of a discredited, romantic, sentimental imagination to escapewith cardboard wings from the nightmare without end of the communalapartment house. I lived in one of those when I was a kid. One day mymother and I came back to our one-room apartment with private kitchenand bathroom and found a large family of twelve peasants in our kitchen.Their clothes hung drying from clotheslines strung all over our stove, andour tiny icebox was stuffed with indescribable lumps of lard. They hadbroken down the door with an axe and moved in armed with a paper fromthe local secretariat. I was attacked by one of their kids, and I startedswearing at him in my best city-kid slick manner. His father took out hisbelt and tried to whip me. My mother screamed. When the old man inThe Fountain whips the city kid, he does so in all innocence. Our peasantwas shocked that my mother objected to his whipping: He thought thatshe should be grateful. In fact, the old man and his values are not ideal-ized by Mamin: His tribal customs are seen with the same unsentimental,unsparing eye as the rest of the sorry crew. The feeble attempts made toconform to his whims - which call for men and women to eat in separaterooms, for instance — are met with well-deserved derision.

The black water in the tub is almost too painful opposite the cleanspring of the beginning, but here I see something of Mamin's fluency withthe language of fairy-tale metaphor and, perhaps, some of his facility.Nonetheless, the gritty reality of that black water is so familiar that it tran-scends metaphor. We too had a bathtub in which the water was alwaysblood red when it wasn't brown. No amount of complaining or fiddlingwith the pipes ever pointed out the reason. For fifteen years or so, mymother and I washed in bloody mud. We got used to it.

The apartment house is, of course, a microcosm of the glasnost SovietUnion, and it is very thorough. The worshippers of the ancient poet gath-ered about the dried-flower shrine of his verses are familiar to me as well.The nostalgic keepers of the Russian Orthodox flame have an equivalent


in my hometown's nationalist poetry society, whose meetings I occasion-ally attended. They were worshipping Octavian Goga, a fiery and facileTransylvanian who was a minister of state under two right-wing regimes.They read his poetry in a cold-water flat, were driven to rapture recitinghis verses, and ended up singing nationalist songs fueled by tzuica - ourvodka - until they passed out. I used to steal books from the apartmentbecause they were not available elsewhere. Today the Romanian nationalsentimentalists are having a huge revival just like Pamyat in the USSR. InFountain, the irony of the poet worshippers defending the rotten wallpa-per where the poet once scribbled is accurate: These remnants of the oldare worshippers of wallpaper; only the forms have remained. There isnothing here but the general rot of the apartment and society's walls un-der the poetic paper. (At the same time, one should never underestimatethe force of sentiment: Fascism is stupid and mostly sentimental!)

The new capitalists aren't spared by Yuri Mamin either. The flower-growing squatter is trying to create a market economy all by himself, buthe is dependent on the water controlled by the insane old man. What'smore, he's trying to grow flowers, the most pathetically tender productimaginable; dependent on vagaries of so many kinds, it is a doomed en-terprise no matter how much luck he has. Again, the metaphor is flawless.You can no more grow flowers in a waterless cold apartment buildingthan you can fly off the building into sublimely bad music. All of thesepeople are cursed by what they have collectively made, and they cannotpull away individually from the shithouse. Either they all go down to-gether or they go down together. There is no exit - and this movie is prob-ably late communism's master existentialist critique. Interestinglyenough, Mamin thinks like a social determinist; he is clearly educated byMarxism. The collectivity communism sought to create is a collectivity,but it is hell. Utopia turns out to be hell and it is a collective hell. In thatsense, there is a kind of endearing familiarity, affection almost, for thisworld that is the only one Mamin says these people will ever know. Wehave made our bed and now we lie in it.

Careful viewers of this film will find themselves in a garden of inter-pretive delights. The language of the film is fluent, metaphorically rich,and relentless. I am only noting here things that echo for me personally.Romania, a similarly mad apartment building, was not as decayed in 1965when I left the country. Mr. Mamin brings me up to date on how deeplythe shabby edifice has rotted since then.

The new tribalism of glasnost society is the very opposite of material-ism. All materials have disappeared. The material world has thinned outcompletely; resources have been squandered; any semblance of ecologicalbalance between people and environment is gone. In the end, even theguys holding up the roof cannot be fooled into helping what's obviouslydoomed. They are bribed with alcohol to do so, and in terms of currency

Yuri Mamin's Fountain from the perspective of a Romanian 153

vodka has replaced slogans. The slogans themselves, in one of the mosttouching motifs in the movie, have been retired and aren't even good forpatching holes. In fact, every hopeful illusion-or even hopeful lan-guage - in Mamin's world is utterly false. We are in the presence of a newand intensified radical doubt.

CHAPTER XVI

'One should begin withero": A discussion with

satiric filmmakerYuri Mamin

The following is an edited version of the conference discussion (moder-ated by Andrew Horton) with Yuri Mamin of his work.

Horton: Yuri, you are a satirist, but as Whiskers suggests, your films arebecoming darker. Is there a danger that you will wind up with no audi-ence, especially given Valentin Tolstykh's remarks that the Soviet peopleare fed up with chernukha films?

Mamin: It would be a failure, of course, if people don't go to see my filmssince they were made for audiences. But the problem is what kind oflaughter is needed now. When I see angry people in the audience ready totear each other apart for their ideological beliefs, I become frightened. Ithus made Whiskers on a different level than my previous work. This filmwas made under the influence of my own anger. I want my audience tolaugh and think and come out of the cinema, not fighting, but rather pat-ting each other on the back. I want to promote through laughter the vir-tues of tolerance and kindness.

Horton: We have just looked at the closing scene from Zero City as themain character floats alone in a boat on a lake after his many strange en-counters with . . . Zero City. What is your reaction to this dark satire?Mamin: I wouldn't consider Zero City as a satire. It's an ironic film,and irony is itself a genre with its own traditions in our country. Howmuch can such films influence life today in the Soviet Union? Rightnow our situation is very complex and unclear. It is very hard to makeany kind of prediction except, as in Zero City, a pessimistic one. Whatthemes should a filmmaker choose today? One should begin with zero,but which zero?

Sergei Lavrentiev: We should add to this that our Soviet life cannot behandled in the style of, let's say, Fellini's satirical viewpoint. Soviet life isquite different.

154

A discussion with satiric filmmaker Yuri Mamin 155

Horton: Are several of the speakers correct-the Soviet audiences donot really want satire, but rather straight entertainment to forget theirproblems?

Lavrentiev: Soviet audiences don't want to see Soviet life on the screen.They want to see another life, another time, another place, another feeling.It's a very hard time for our filmmakers. The audiences want comedies,not satire.

Valentin Tolstykh: But they also need films with a sense of values.

Mamin: Yes. Satire must have a moral basis. In the past month we havehad a rough time of it. Nobody knows the right way to go. I am taking anew look at my plans, scripts, projects. One possibility is to turn to hu-man values themselves. My next film will be about the problem of stayingor leaving the Soviet Union. I feel that leaving it because of the currenttroubles is a tragedy.

Peter Shepotinnik: Satire is close to the spirit of the divine, to that of agod. We see only the ruins now, thus we have a tragic viewpoint. We haveno faith, no beliefs. For the everyday common person, there is only faithin the soul. We can not generalize from Mamin's perspective alone. Eachperson is different.

Vlada Petric: I think we have quite unrealistic hopes for satire in the aes-thetic sense, which is the only sense that I concern myself with. If wehave one true satire in a decade, that is enough. Who do we look to inAmerican cinema after Chaplin and Keaton? Maybe Woody Allen. Butthere are few great satirists anywhere, any time. Great satire happensrarely by definition.

Horton: Yuri, I wish to focus more specifically on your own satiricalspirit. I sense a strong sense of the carnivalesque in your work. What isyour feeling about/for carnival?

Mamin: Fellini was mentioned earlier and his films definitely have car-nival in them and I admire them. And like Fellini, I wish my sense ofcarnival to be shown in all of its richness, with its own Soviet historyand spirit.

Horton: Satire is a difficult art as has been pointed out, and few peoplewould actually call themselves "satirists" or "satiric filmmakers." Do youmind being called a "satiric filmmaker"?

Mamin: I didn't choose the path of comedy and satire. There are simplythose who see things differently than the majority. That's the way I am:


Material that might give some people heart attacks, might be very funnyto me.Horton: You have said previously that you wish to show the Russian char-acter that can, finally, put up with anything. Certainly this is true ofFountain. Would you call Fountain a kind of dark carnival?

Mamin: It is a kind of sadomasochist film that is also a kind of carnival.Daily life becomes more like a dark carnival. Every day as I walk around,I'm amazed by the diversity of our life. Garbage piled up and orchestrasplaying . . . all mixed together. It is my duty to show people this rich di-versity, to show people how things are.

Rental/purchase informationAlas, it is still very difficult to obtain copies of Soviet cinema either onfilm or on video, especially with subtitles. At the moment, for most recentfilms and even for other titles of the 1940s through the present, oneshould still contact:

Sovexport FilmKalashny pereulok 14Moscow 103869 RussiaPhone 290 5009 (Telex 411143 SEF SU)

The following films mentioned in this collection are available on videotape with subtitles from Facets Multimedia, Inc., 1517 West FullertonAve, Chicago, IL 60614 (312/281-9075, also 800/331-6197): The CigaretteGirl from MosseJprom, The Girl with the Hatbox, Happiness, The Kiss ofMary Pickford, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land ofthe Bolsheviks, Little Vera.

It is helpful also to contact the International Film Exchange at 201 West52nd St., New York, NY 10019 (phone 212/582-4318) for a list of its Sovietfilm holdings on video tape and film.

Note that the University of Wisconsin has a collection of Soviet "stag-nation" films of the 1970s on 35mm film without subtitles. For informa-tion, contact Dr. Vance Kepley Jr., Department of Communication Arts,6112 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave., Madison, WI 53706.

Finally, Loyola University in New Orleans has a Soviet and East Euro-pean video collection that I have established, focusing particularly ongJasnost cinema. Most of these tapes do not have subtitles and are not forreproduction but can be used at Loyola for research purposes. In terms ofsatire, the collection includes Zero City, The Promised Sky, Fountain,Whiskers, Neptune's Holiday, Blue Mountains, and others. Contact Sister

157

Filmography 158

Anne M. Ramagos, Director, Media Center, Loyola University, New Or-leans, LA 70118 (504/865-2541).

Local video stores/chains such as Blockbuster carry Repentance, LittleVera, and Forgotten Melody for a Flute,

The following is a listing of the major films discussed in this volume (aswell as a few that are not) together with a brief description of their nar-ratives. Denise Youngblood's comments are taken from her book, SovietCinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935, Austin: University of Texas Press,1991. Julie Christensen's comments on Georgian films are identified withher name.

The Adventures of a Dentist (Phozhdeniya Zubnogo Vracha, 1965), dir. ElemKlimov

Light satiric comedy about a dentist with magical powers who becomes famousbut gives it all up to be "normal."

Andrei Roublev (Andrei RubJyov, 1966, released in 1971), dir. Andrei TarkovskyTarkovsky's vivid black and white film about the famed Russian icon portraitistis more a meditation on the role of the artist within a repressive culture than abiographical film.

Anemia (1987), dir. Irakli KotetishviliA young Georgian teacher is sent from Tbilisi to teach in a boarding school ina secluded mountain village where he hopes to discover solid, traditional val-ues. What he discovers instead is a "Stalinist" closed society, suffering frommoral anemia.

Assa (1988), dir. Sergei SolovievSoloviev brought Soviet rock culture, rock music, and rock stars (especially Ser-gei Bugayev) to the screen in this "collage" film that mixes a loose satiric nar-rative involving a Mafia figure and a young couple in Yalta during Brezhnev'stime intercut with scenes from the downfall of Tsar Paul in 1801. One detectsinfluences here of Chaplin, Jean Luc Godard, Fellini, Bunuel, and Fassbinder aswell as the Russian tradition of satire in film and literature.

Autumn Marathon (Osenny maraphon, 1980), dir. Georgy DaneliaA sympathetic satire made before gJasnost about a Leningrad professor ofEnglish in the "autumn" of his life, trying to juggle his career, marriage,and mistress.

Balthazar's Feast (Pir Balfazam, 1990), dir. Yuri KaraAdapted from part of the novel Sandro of Chegem by famed author Fazil Is-kander. The narrative concerns a party at Stalin's headquarters.

Black Rose Is the Emblem for Sadness, Red Rose Is the Emblem for Love [Cher-nay a roza, emblema pechaJi, krasnaya roza, emblema Jyubvi, 1989), dir. SergeiSoloviev

Soloviev goes even further than in Assa to create a "nonnarrative" collage film,part coming-of-age story of a young teenage boy, Mita, part deconstruction ofStalin and the whole Communist ethos, and all dark-humored satire, parody,absurdity, kitsch.

Filmography 159

Blue Mountains {Tsisperi mtebi anu daudzherebeli ambavi; Golubye gory, Hineobyknovennaya istoriya, 1983), dir. Eldar Shengelaya

An eve of glasnost Georgian satire about a publishing house that seems not topublish and that, as a young man tries to get his manuscript read, finallycollapses.

The Case of the Three Million (Protsess o trekh miJlionakh, 1926), dir. IakovProtazanov

A popular comedy based on the Italian writer Notali's story, "The ThreeThieves": One is a a common thief, the second a gentleman, and the thirda banker.

Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaia goriachka, 1925), dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin"A charming short comedy. Chess Fever cleverly incorporated actual footage ofan international chess tournament making it appear as though the grand masterwere part of the movie." Denise Youngblood

The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom [Papirosnitsa \z Mosselproma, 1924), dir.Iurii Zheliabuzhskii

"A genuinely funny film which satirizes NEP life and the making of movies.The cigarette girl is 'discovered' by a film crew; the plot revolves around thecompetition of her various admirers for her attention." Denise Youngblood

Circus [Tsirkf 1936), dir. Grigori AlexandrovAlexandrov's upbeat musical about an American circus entertainer who seeksand finds happiness in the Moscow circus when she leaves America because ofthe hatred toward her for having a half-black child.

Commander Ivanov (Kombrig Ivanov, 1922), dir. Aleksandr Razumnyi"The tale of how a Bolshevik commissar manages to overcome the petty-bourgeois resistance of a priests's daughter to 'living in sin.'" DeniseYoungblood

Commissar (1967), dir. Alexander AskoldovThis most famous of the "shelved" films (released in 1987) is far from beinglabeled a satire. Nevertheless, on a deep structural level, the humor and satiricwit of Yefim (played by the versitle Rolan Bykov), the poor Jewish tinker, whosefamily accepts the shamed pregnant "Commissar" while she has her child, islife affirming and helps to "humanize" this overindoctrinated Communistwoman.

Cossacks of the Kuban (Cubanskiya kazaki, 1950), dir. Ivan AlexandrovichPyriev

Stalinist musical comedy.Don Diego and Pelageia (Don Diego i Pelageia, 1928), dir. Iakov Protazanov

"A marvelous satire on Soviet bureaucratism. 'Don Diego' is a village stationmaster, a silly fop who dreams of himself as the hero of a romantic Spanishnovel." Denise Youngblood

The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks [Neo-bychainyie prikliucheniia mistera Vesta v strane boJ'shevikov, 1924), dir. LevKuleshov

Kuleshov's freewheeling satirical comedy in the mode of American silent com-edy with a huge influence of Harold Lloyd apparent.

Filmography 160

First Swallow [Pirveli mertskhali; Pervaia lastochka, 1975), dir. Nana Mchelize"The great soccer match between a local Georgian team and British sailors an-chored off the shore of Poti on the Black Sea." Julie Christensen

Forgotten Melody for a Flute [Zabytaya melodiya diya fleity, 1987), dir. EldarRyazanov

One of the first and still one of the most important films of the glasnost pe-riod. Ryazanov's sentimental romantic/satiric/comic drama about a bureau-crat trying to rise in rank during the end of the Brezhnev era and carry out anaffair at the same time. A carnivalesque collage film working satirically on anumber of levels but which is both ambitious and at times pretentious andunfocused.

Fountain (Fontan, 1988), dir. Yuri MaminPrime satire from the gJasnost period as an apartment building and its inhab-itants becomes a microcosm for all Soviet life in the 1980s as the building, likethe sociopolitical order, literally crumbles.

Garage (Garaj 1980), dir. Eldar RyazanovVintage Ryazanov. The building of illegal garages (a true-to-life situation as allSoviets know) becomes the center for this finely etched satire of late 1970s So-viet culture.

The Girl with the Hat Box [Devushka s korobkoi, 1927), dir. Boris Barnet"A slight but charming comedy of the annoyances of NEP life. After a series ofsilly adventures, The Girl ends happily with the young couple in love and thewinners of 25,000 rubles to insure that love will last." Denise Youngblood

Happiness (Schastye, 1935), dir. Alexander MedvedkinA truly surrealistic comicsatiric spoof of farm life in both the tsarist and Sovietperiods. Camera tricks and inventive slapstick blend in a liberating "fresh" takethat comes close to being joyful rather than lashing satire.

Happy Guys [Veselye rebyata, 1934), dir. Grigori AlexandrovAnother Alexandrov musical comedy, this time concerning a shepherd (LeonidVtesov) who falls in love with beautiful Liubov Orlova and finally becomes afamous musician.

Ivan's Childhood (Ivanogo detstvof 1962), dir. Andrei TarkovskyTarkovsky's poetic film about the loss of innocence of a boy growing up duringWorld War II.

It (Ono, 1989), dir. Sergei OvcharovA satiric adaptation of the nineteenth-century satire, The Story of a Town, by M.Saltykov-Schedrin. "It" is life and Russian/Soviet history itself which flows inever increasing surrealistic and dark strands through one town clearly meant torepresent the whole nation. One of the most innovative films of glasnost.

Kharbarda (1931), dir. Mikhail Chiaureli"An executive committee of the Komsomol decides to rebuild an old quarter ofthe ancienct Georgian capital, Tiflis. The satire here falls on the conservativeintelligentsia, including the Mensheviks." Julie Christensen

The Kiss of Mary Pickford (Postselui Meri Pikford, 1927), dir. Sergei KomarovThe film is about the epidemic of movie madness that struck the USSR in themidtwenties. Documentary footage of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks's

Filmography 161

visit to Moscow are intercut with a Soviet romance. As Denise Youngbloodnotes, the film "is another demonstration of the powers of editing."

Kvevri {The Wine Jug; Kuvshin, 1972), dir. Irakli Kvirikadze"Based on a revision of a Pirandello work by the famous Georgian script writer,Rezo Gabriadze. A wine grower from Kakheti buys a large wine jug which isaccidently broken. He hires a master to fix it. The master is caught inside thejug. The owner refuses to break the jug, offering him bribes, calling the localmilitia, doing everything he can to get the man out." Julie Christensen

Little Vera (MaJenkaya Vera, 1988), dir. Vasily PichulWhile not usually thought of as a satire, Little Vera is marked by its overallironic/satiric/mocking tone and full of darkly satiric thrusts as it depicts the de-pressing "no-win" situation of a young woman in a small industrial city in a"neorealistic" approach to filmmaking.

Love at First Sight (Erti nakhvit shekhvareba; Liubov's pervogo vzgljada, 1977),dir. Rezo Esadze

"A slice of life in a noisy, colorful courtyard in the multinational city of Tbilisi.Banned for several years." Julie Christensen

Magdana's Little Donkey (Revaz Chkeidze; Magdanas lurja, 1956), dir. TengizAbuladze

"Often called the first film of the 'thaw' at the Georgian Film Studio, this mod-est film follows the life of a simple village woman who takes yogurt to the cityto sell. Combining documentary with poetry, this film owes much to Georgiansilent film and Italian Neorealism." Julie Christensen

The Man from Capuchins Boulevard [Chelovek s buJVara Kaputsinov, 1987),dir. Alia Surikova

A hilarious spoof on American Westerns that moves as far away from lashinglaughter as Soviet films have managed to move. Inventive and purely funnywith only a minor effort to create a "message." Definitely carnivalesque.

Man with a Movie Camera (CheJovek s kinoapparatom, 1929), dir. Dziga VertovVertov's kino eye was in large part a satiric/ironic one, as evidenced by the play-ful approach to "reality" presented here where his montages and camera tricksoften create ironic/satiric effects in the viewers' minds.

The Miracle Worker [Chudotvorets, 1922), dir. Aleksandr PanteleevLenin's favorite movie. An antireligious vulgar comedy about a phony miracle."The peasants play jokes on their cruel mistress." Denise Youngblood

The Mirror (Zerkalo, 1974), dir. Andrei TarkovskyTarkovsky's highly poetic-autobiographical film.

Mr. Lloyd's Voyage [Reis mistera Lloida, 1927), dir. Mikhail Verner"The plot concerns a voyage to Russia and the triangle among the master ofthe vessel, Mr. Lloyd, Ivan Kozyr, a White Guardist secretly returning home,and Tatiana a maid who had been living abroad with her employers." DeniseYoungblood

My Grandmother (Chemi bebia; Moia babushka, 1929), dir. K. Mikaberidze"A harsh satire on beaucracy in which everyone needs a 'granny' in order tofind a job or get ahead. Stylistically innovative using impressionism, futurism,cubism. Banned until 1976." Julie Christensen

Filmography 162

My Grandmother, Iliko, Marion and Myself (Me, Bebia, iliko da ilarioni; la,babushka, Iliko i Marion, 1962), dir. Tengiz Abuladze

"From a novella by the famous Georgian writer Nodar Dumadze. The story of acountry boy's life with his granny and two old men of his village during the War,when all the able-bodied men were off at the front." Julie Christensen

Neptune's Feast (Prazdnik Neptuna, 1986), dir. Yuri MaminIn every sense, a carnivalesque work that turns a false "carnival" into a truecelebration of the people, by the people, for the people.

Nostalgia (Nostalghia, 1983), dir. Andrei TarkovskyTarkovsky's film set in Italy and dealing with nostalgia on all levels: for Russia,for the past, for a life that never was.

Paradise Lost (Dakarguli samotkhe; Poteriannyj rai, 1937), dir. Davit Rondeli"One of the best Georgian comedies. Two impoverished brothers try first tomarry a wealthy neighbor, then scheme with the local priest to feign death (andsainthood) in a sure bid for neighborly donations." Julie Christensen

The Prayer (Vedreba; Mol'ba, 1968), dir. Tengiz Abuladze"A stark black and white allegorical film treating the theme of the individualverses the tribe based on poems by the famous Georgian mountain poet VazhaPshavela." Julie Christensen

Prishvin's Paper Eyes (Bumazhnye glaza Prishvina, 1989), dir. ValeryOgorodnikov

One of the most "difficult" glasnost-period films that ambitiously takes on theStalinist period through the dark humor of the first years of Soviet television(thus the title: the fake eyes that allowed commentators to read on TV).

The Promised Sky [Nebesa obetovannye, 1991), dir. Eldar RyazanovA sympathetic satire that both lashes out against the confusion of the times asrepresented through the homeless and, in the tradition of Italian neo realism,paints humanistic portraits of a suffering culture. Magic realism blends with acarnivalesque sense of ensemble acting/performance.

Repentance (Monanieba; Pokayaniya, 1984), dir. Tengiz AbuladzeThe film that should stand at the beginning of any discussion of glasnost cinemaeven though it was made just before. Abuladze creates a darkly humorous satireof all totalitarian systems (Hitler, Stalin, etc.) in this transhistorical allegory ofVarlam, a dead dictator whose body refuses to stay buried.

Robinsoniada or My English Grandfather [Robinzonada anu cemi ingliselipapa; RobinzoniJada Hi moj anglisjsklij dedushka, 1987), dir. Nana Jorjadze

"An Englishman in Georgia is laying telegraph lines from London to Dehli whenthe Revolution strikes. He stakes out the private property of King George (3meters around each telegraph pole), where he sets up house with the sister ofthe chairman of the local commune. Both are killed by the same assassin. AGeorgia favorite." Julie Christensen

Saba (1921), dir. Mikhail Chiaureli"Georgian. This beautifully filmed story of an alcoholic child abuser became adrama of the disintegration of a family and the degradation of a man." DeniseYoungblood

Filmography 163

SamanishviWs Stepmother {Samanishvilis dedinatsvali; Machekha Saman-ishvili, 1927), dir. Kote Marjanishvili

"Directed by Marjanishvili, the Stanislavsky of Georgian theater. A lightcomedy based on the original play by David Kldiashvili (1897) about an im-poverished nobleman and his race to find a barren wife for his widowed fatherbefore another heir to the family estate destroys him economically. Marjan-ishvili uses grotesque and harsh satire to expose social evil in a class sense."Julie Christensen

Screwballs [Sherikileba; Chudaki, 1973), dir. Eldar ShengelayaSt. Jorgen's Feast Day (Prazdnik sviatogo Iorgena, 1930), dir. Iakov Protazanov

"Two escaped convicts in an unnamed Western country disguise themselves asnuns and make their way to a place of pilgrimage." Denise Youngblood

Step (Sapekhuri; Stupen'; 1986); dir. Alexander RekhviashviliA young biologist seeking work gets his own flat in Tbilisi where his friends andacquaintances go about their daily lives and prosperous personal affairs. Aloner, the young hero leaves the beautiful life of the city for a village where hisold mentor lived and worked." Julie Christensen

The Tailor from Torzhok [Zakroishchik iz Torzhka, 1925), dir. Iakov Protazanov"An unsophisticated but popular comedy about the state lottery starring the So-viet favorite, Igor Ilinskii, a rather limited comedian of the slapstick school." De-nise Youngblood

Tree of Desire [Natvris khe; Drevo zhelaniia, 1975), dir. Tengiz Abuladze"The film presents life in the countryside at the turn of the century, with col-orful national types, dreamers, lovers, eccentrics, anarchists, lecherous priests,and the tragic story of the town beauty. Based on a volume of memoirs in poeticprose by the Georgian poet Georgi Leonidze." Julie Christensen

Two Friends, a Model and a Girlfriend [Dva druga, model i podruga, 1928), dir.Aleksei Popov

"Two boys invent a box-making machine which they, along with the 'girlfriend'take to town to patent. The youths build a makeshift boat to carry them downthe river to town where after several adventures, a la Huckleberry Finn, they ofcourse meet with success." Denise Youngblood

An Unusual Exhibition (Neobyknovennaya vystavka, 1968), dir. Eldar ShengelayaThe Very Same Munchausen (Tot samyj Mjunxgauzen, 1978-80), Television se-ries. Dir. and script Grigorij Gorin

See Kevin Moss's essay (Chapter II, this volume) about this extremely popular"Aesopian" retelling of the Munchausen legend.

The Villain (Merzavets, 1989), dir. Vaghif MustafayevA gJasnost satire from Azerbaidjan that follows a sympathetic lemonade factoryworker who becomes a new tyrant under glasnost, thus losing his soul and his"revolutionary spirit."

Volga, Volga (1938), dir. Grigori AlexandrovSee Maya Turovskaya's essay (Chapter VII, this volume) about this most extremeof all Stalinist musicals in which well-fed happy peasants sing, dance, andshare praises for the good life that they have found under socialism.

Filmography 164

Welcome [Dobro pozhalovat', 1966), dir. Elem KlimovSharp social satire set in a children's summer camp run by an autocratic (read:dictatorial) camp director.

Whiskers {Bakenbardy, 1990), dir. Yuri MaminA brave satire of right-wing nationalist groups throughout the Soviet Unionthat, even as Mamin himself admits, is so strident in its antifascist attitude thatit lashes out much more than it uses satire to evoke laughter. The film was neverwidely distributed in the Soviet Union for this reason.

Zero City [Gorod zero, 1989), dir. Karen ShakhnazarovAn absurdist satire that takes a spoof of the times to abstract and allegorical lev-els including an inventive living waxwork museum of Russian/Soviet history. Adark carnivalesque vision that finally loses its humor.

Svetlana Boym is a critic, playwright, and filmmaker teaching compara-tive literature at Harvard University. Her works include Death in Quota-tion Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poets (Harvard UniversityPress, 1991), the play The Woman Who Shot Lenin, and the short film(screenwriter and codirector) Flirting with Liberty.

Michael Brashinsky is a Soviet film critic currently living in New Yorkand teaching at Brooklyn College. He is coauthor of The Zero Hour: Glas-nost and Soviet Cinema in Transition (Princeton University Press, 1992)with Andrew Horton.

Julie Christensen is Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages at GeorgeMason University. She has written, lectured, and advised frequently onGeorgian film.

Peter Christensen teaches English at Marquette University. He has pub-lished articles on Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and Abuladze.

Andrei Codrescu is Professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State Uni-versity, a regular satiric commentator on American culture for NationalPublic Radio, and the poet/author/editor of numerous books, includinghis moving account of his return to his native Romania, The Hole in theFlag (New York: Avon, 1991).

Andrew Horton is Professor of Film and Literature at Loyola University,New Orleans, and the author/editor of numerous books including Com-edy/Cinema/Theory (University of California Press, 1991) and The ZeroHour: GJasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition (Princeton UniversityPress, 1992), cowritten with Michael Brashinsky.

Vida T. Johnson is Associate Professor of Russian Literature, Languageand Film at Tufts University. Among her various publications, she has re-165

Contributors 166

cently co-written with Graham Petrie A Visual Fugue: The Films of An-drei Tarkovsky (forthcoming).

Kevin Moss teaches Russian literature and language at MiddleburyCollege.

Vlada Petric teaches film at Harvard University's Carpenter Center for theVisual Arts, where he is Curator of the Film Archive. He has written andspoken widely on early American and Soviet silent cinema, especially onVertov and Griffith.

Moira Ratchford is head of Cultural Programs for the American Commit-tee on US—Soviet Relations, Washington D.C. Her efforts have made itpossible for numerous Soviet filmmakers and their films to visit theUnited States.

Olga Reizen is an American cinema expert at the Film Arts Institutein Moscow. She has just completed a book on postmodernism and So-viet cinema.

Greta N. Slobin is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the Uni-versity of California, Santa Cruz. Her publications include essays in theSlavic and East European Journal, Canadian Slavonic Journal, and oth-ers and in several books including Remizov's Fictions: 1920—1921 (De-Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991).

Valentin Tolstykh is an internationally respected philosopher who haspublished and lectured widely on cinema and popular culture and whohas organized numerous important conferences on cinema while servingas Secretary of Cultural Activities at the Union of Soviet Filmmakers.

Maya Turovskaya is one of Russia's most respected film scholars cur-rently working at the Film Arts Institute. She has written and lecturedwidely on Soviet cinema and American drama.

Denise J. Youngblood, a historian at the University of Vermont, is the au-thor of Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918—1935 (University of TexasPress, 1991) and Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet So-ciety in the 1920s (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

absurd, the, 58-62, 94Abuladze, Tengiz, 24, 48, 95, 106-7, 112Addison, Richard, 5Adorno, Theodor, 127Adventures of a Dentist, The, 96Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 148AeJita, 53, 70Aesopian language, 9, 18, 20-35, 72,

103,141Alexander Nevsky, 60Alexandrov, Grigori, 5, 9, 43, 75-93American film comedy, 9, 38, 41American musical halls, 73American silent comedy, 10, 66, 70Anemia, 112Andrei Roublev, 99-101Apocalyptic optimism, 62Aristophanes, 11Arnoldi, Edgar, 40Aseyev, Nikolai, 73Assa, 8, 125, 130August, Burger Gottfried, 20August Coup of 1991, viiAutumn Marathon, 99

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7, 9-10, 101, 138,140, 148

Balthazar's Feast, 100Barnet, Boris, 38-9, 66Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His

Marvellous Travels and Campaigns inRussia, 20

Batman, 142Battleship Potemkin, 139Bauer, Evgeni, 65Bechterev, Vladimir Mikhailovich, 52Beckett, Samuel, 59Being There, 146167

Bellamy, Edward, 72Bezhin Meadow, 67Beriya, Lavrenty, 96Berson, Henri, 50, 55-6Bible, 24Black Rose Stands for Sorrow, Red Rose

Stands for Love, 18, 103, 125-37BJue Mountains, 94, 105, 111-12, 141Blue Velvet, 136Bogomolov, Yuri, 109Bolshevik, 69-71Brashinsky, Michael, 102Brecht, Bertolt, 68Brezhnev, Leonid, 6, 19, 33, 60, 119, 132,

134,147Bridges, Jeff, 4Brik, Osip, 36, 41Bulgakov, 22, 25, 29, 75, 99, 117Bunuel, Luis, 6Bykov, Anatoli, 42Byvalov, 79

Camus, Albert, 58-9, 62Capra, Frank, 140caricatures, 88carnival gone wrong, 144carnivalesque, the, 4, 7, 134, 138-48,

155-6Case of the Three Million, The, 34, 43Chapaev, 145Chaplin, Charlie, 9-10, 109, 141Chekhov, Antonin, 5, 58-9, 99Chenyshevsky, 133Chernukha films, 19Chess Fever, 48Chiaureli, Mikhail, 111Christ, Jesus, 129Chytilova, Vera, 60

Index 168

Cigarette Girl from MosseJprom, The,40-1, 53

Cinema Art, 109Cinema for the Millions, A, 5Circus, 9, 43, 83-93Clark, Katerina, 84, 89Comedy/Cinema/Theory, 2, 58commedia dell'arte, 5Commissar, 3Cossacks of the Kuban, 75-6Crimson Island, The, 50cultural revolution, 43Czech new wave, 59

Danelia, Georgy, 96, 99, 104Darvetsky, Zahak, 78Davies, Robertson, 12Days of the Turbins, The, 75Dead SouJs, 133Defoe, Daniel, 12Delsarte, Alexander, 67Derrida, Jacques, 6De Sica, Vitorio, 1, 3Doctor Zhivago, 28Don Diego and PeJageia, 42Dosetsky, Zahar, 81Dostoevsky, Feodor, 8-9, 94, 96, 126, 129Dovzhenko, Alexander, 65Dribich, Tatyana, 128Dumaevsky, J., 80

Eco, Umberto, 127Eisenstein, Sergei, 10, 22, 60, 65-7,

84,139Erdman, A., 49, 77-80Ermler, Friedrich Markovich, 65Esadze, Rezo, 107E.T., 1Even a Wise Man Stumbles, 10Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in

the Land of the Bolsheviks, The, 9, 39,48, 65-74

Factory of the Eccentric Actor The(FEKS), 67

Fairbanks, Douglas, 40, 48-57FamiJiar Face, A, 42Fellini, Federico, 60, 155Fianc6 from the Other World, A, 96Filatov, Leonid, 121, 147Fireman's Ball, 139Fleetwood, Susan, 98Fogel, Vladimir, 66

Forgotten Melody for a Flute, 2, 6, 11,117-24, 139, 141, 147

Forgotten Paradise, 106Forman, Milos, 60, 139Fouchault, Michel, 6Fountain, 58, 61, 103, 117-8, 141, 149-53Freud, Sigmund, 56Frolov, Ivan, 87

Gaidai, Leonid, 96Galadzhev, Peter, 66Galichenko, N., 124Garage, 18, 60General Principles of Human Reflex-

ology, 53Georgian film comedy and satire, 5, 105-13Georgian humor, 107German expressionism, 66Ghostbusters II, 99, 142Girard, Rene, 144Girl with the Hatbox, The, 39-40Glavpolitprosvet, 34Gogol, Nikolai, 5, 9, 25, 53, 94, 96, 99, 126,

129, 133,139Goldberg, Whoopi, 17-8Gorbachev, Mikhail, 1, 33, 130-2, 139, 144Gordon, Flash, 88Gorin, Grigori, 20, 23-4, 33Gosteleradio, 33Govorukhin, Stanislov, 8Goya, 96, 152GPU (Stalinist secret police), 69-70, 79Greece, 11Greenberg, Clement, 135Grey Is the Color of Hope, 40Griffith, D. W., 66, 73grotesque, the, 138Gurowitch, Martin, 50

Happiness, 10Happy Guys, 5, 10, 43, 77-8, 83-4, 88Haraszti, Miklos, 123Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17-8Hitler, Adolf, 91Hollywood, 38, 49, 135Homo sovieticus, 95Horton, Andrew, 17, 98House Under the Starry Sky, The, 136

I was a Teenage Werewolf, 71Imperialism, the Highest Stage of

Capitalism, 61Ilinskii, Igor, 39, 42, 53-4, 76

Index 169

Inspector General, The, 19, 25, 53, 60,120, 139

Ionesco, 59Iskander, Fazil, 100It, 147It's a Wonderful Life, 40Ivan's Childhood, 100Ivan the Terrible, 22

Jonson, Ben, 5Jorjadze, Nana, 107Josephson, Erland, 102

Kafkaesque, 146Kagamovitch, L., 77Kara, Yuri, 100Karanovic, Srdjan, 142Keaton, Buster, 9, 51Kharbarda, 111Khokhlova, Alexandra, 66-70Kikaleishvili, Mamuka, 145kinoks, 65Kinopravda, 66Kirshov, Vladimir, 40Kiss of Mary Pickford, The, 40-1, 48-57kitsch, 125-37Kldiashvili, David, 110Klimov, Elem, 18, 100Komarov, Sergei, 40, 48, 53, 66Konjvoturny film, 130Kostylev, 22Kotetishvili, Irakli, 112Kott, Jan, 58Ktorov, Anatolii, 42Ku Klux Klan, 91Kuleshov, Lev, 9, 39, 48, 64-8, 72Kundera, Milan, 150Kuzinsev, 65Kvirikadze, Irakli, 107

Lavrentiev, Sergei, 154Lebedev-Kumach, 85Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 22-3, 103, 129Levaco, Ronald, 38Levin, Harry, 11-12Levn, Jurij, 21-2Life and Extraordinary Aventures of Pri-

vate Ivan Chonkin, The, 116Life Is Elsewhere, 150List of Benefits, The, 49Little Vera, 2Lloyd, Harold, 9Looking Backward, 72

Loseff, Lev, 21-2, 25Love at First Sight, 107Loyola University (New Orleans), vii, 4Lubochnaya literaturea, 94Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 33, 48-51, 56Lynch, David, 131, 135-6

MacNicol, Peter, 9Magdana's Little Donkey, 112Mamet, David, 58Mamin, Yuri, 4, 7,18,60-1,138-44,149-56Man with a movie camera, 10Mandate, The, 49, 77Mandebschtam, N., 79Maretskaia, Vera, 39Marjanishvili, Kote, 110Mark of Zorro, The, 51, 55Markharadze, Avtandil, 95Marx, Karl, 149Mast, Gerald, 142Master and Margarita, The, 22, 25, 117Medvedkin, Alexander, 10, 49melodrama, 38Menzel, Jiri, 60Messenger Boy, The, 147Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 10, 54, 67-8, 77Mezhrabpom studio, 33, 48Mikaberidze, K., 42Mintz, K., 79Minonova, M. V, 81Miracle in Milan, 1Miracle Worker, The, 39Mirror, The, 100Moliere, 5Moss, Kevin, 124, 143Mother, 48Mr. Lloyd's Vogage, 39Mustafayev, Vaghif, 17, 138, 144My English Grand/other, 107My Grandmother, 42, 111Myth of Sisyphus, The, 158My Grandmother, Iliko, Illarion, and

Myself, 112

Nabakov, Vladimir, 28, 125, 127Narkompros, 33Nedobrovo, Vladimir, 41Needle, The, 8NEP film comedy, 43, 48, 50Neptune's Feast, 60, 103, 139New Testament, The, 134Nilsen, V, 76-8, 81Nugmanov, Rashid, 8

Index 170

Oedipus Rex, 24Ogonek, 131-2Ogorodnikov, Valery, 8Olesha, Yuri, 49Olympiad, 79, 80Orchestra Rehearsal, 60Orlova, Lyubov, 77, 88Ostrovsky, Alexander, 5, 11"Overcoat, The," 9

Palkin, Goya, 40Pan Am, 128Panteleev, Aleksandr, 39Paris, Texas, 75Parody, 31Passport, The, 104Pasternak, Boris, 28Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 55

Radiant Road, The, 83Ratushinskaya, Irina, 6Razumnyi, Aleksandr, 39Reagan, Ronald, 9Rekhviashuili, Alexander, 112Repentance, 24, 48, 95-6, 112Riefenstahl, Leni, 71Robinsoniada, 107Romania, 149-53Rondeli, David, 106Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 53Russian cabaret, 73Ryazanov, Eldar, 2-4, 11, 18, 60, 99, 104,

117-24, 138

Saba, 111Sacrifice, The, 98-100Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 94, 96, 99Samanishuli's Mother-in-Law, 110Sandro of Chegem, 100Scinteia, 150Screwballs, 105, 107-8Shaftsbury, Earl of, 18Shakespeare, William, 5Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 81Shakhnazarov, Karen, 60, 147Shaw, George Bernard, 49Shengelaya, Eldar, 5, 94, 104-13Shepotinnik, Peter, 155Sherlock, Jr., 51Shershenevich, Vadim, 53Shpikovskii, Nikolai, 42Shumyatsky, Boris, 5, 10, 83-4skomorokhi (minstrel), 94

Smekhov, V, 78Socialist Realism, 59-60, 84, 106Sokolov, Ippolit, 40Solntseva, Iuliia, 40Soloviev, Sergei, 8, 103, 125-36Sophocles, 24Soviet circus, The, 90Soviet Writers' Union, The, 28Sovkino, 33Spielberg, Steven, 1, 3St. Jorgen's Feast Day, 43-3Stalin, Joseph, 4, 5, 23, 59, 75, 81, 83, 84,

88, 96, 129, 131-2, 150Stalker, 94, 100Stanislavsky, Constantin, 68Stenka Razin, 81Strike, 10, 67Sudakevich, A., 40Suicide, The, 50, 77Swift, Jonathan, 1, 49Sypher, Wylie, 56

Taganka theater, 33, 78Tailor from Torzhok, The, 39, 40Tamerlane, 97Tarkovsky, Andrei, 4, 28, 48, 98-104Taylor, Richard, 48, 53television (Soviet), 33Terence, 5Three Million Case, The, 53Three Sisters, 58-9Timasheff, Nicholas, 86Tolstoi, Leo, 134Tolstykh, Valentin, 155tragedy, 17Trauberg, Leonid, 65T>ee of Desire, 112Triumph of Will, 91Tsereteli, Nikolai, 40Tsibulsky, M., 40Turenev, Rostislov, 17Two Friends, a Model and a Girlfriend, 42typage (as developed by Eisenstein), 10,

67, 70

Unusual Exhibition, An, 105-6, 108Utesov, Leonid, 88

vaudeville, 9Velvet Prison, The: Artists Under State

Socialism, 123Verner, Mikhail, 39Vertov, Dziga, 10, 65-6, 84

Index 171

Very Same Munchausen, The, 20, 35Villain, The, 17-8, 138, 144VGIK (The All Union Soviet Film Acad-

emy), 67, 107Virgin Mary, 134Volga, Volga, 5, 43, 17-83Volpin, M., 76Voltaire, 4

We Cannot Live Like This, 8WeJcome, 18, 100Wenders, Wim, 128Whiskers, 19, 103, 155White Guardists, 39White, Hayden, 6Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 8

Williams, Robin, 4Wild at Heart, 85Wine Jug, The, 107Wiseman, 111

Yerofeyev, Viktor, 1Yevtushenko, Evgeny, 119Youngblood, Denise J., 51

Zadig, 4Zaharovitch, Vladimir, 81Zero Hour, The: Glasnost and Soviet Cin-

ema in Transition, 60, 95, 103, 127,146-7

Zheliabuzhskii, Iurii, 40Zoshchenko, M. M., 94

INSIDE SOVIET FILM SATIRE.Laughter with a Lash / ed. Andrew Horton

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