DAYS OF ECLIPSE (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1988)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Aleksandr Sokurov paid tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky with Dni zatmeniya, which is loosely based on Billion Years Before the End of the World by Boris and Arkadi Strugatsky, on whose Roadside Picnic Tarkovsky had based his Stalker (1979). Like Tarkovsky’s film, its futuristic vision actually refers to Soviet totalitarianism—or, rather, its emotional legacy.
     A young Russian doctor in a remote Asian outpost, Dmitri Malianov lives disconnected from family, locals, himself. He attends to patients who may be plagued by something from outer space. Piles of papers and photographs infest his flat; unwanted intrusions and visits abound; he keeps losing friends. His off-hours research into juvenile hypertension among believers underscores his own lack of religious faith. When he tries engaging the outside world, it is likely to be with children. He breaks up a street quarrel between two small boys, who turn on him instead, in an hilarious long-shot. With another boy, who mysteriously shows up on his doorstep asking to be taken care of, he develops a close, affectionate relationship (actor Aleksei Ananishnov speaks to the child with the same tender cadences he would enlist in Sokurov’s 1997 Mother and Son); but then one day bodiless arms snatch the boy up away into the sky. This glorious hommage to the subjective balloon passage in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) suggests that the child, rather than real, is Dmitri’s own recollected child-self. Their separation is the most painful evidence of Dmitri’s alienation.
     Fear is pervasive, with people constantly admitting “I am afraid” or asking, “Are you afraid?” Yet, this masterpiece is nimble, playful, very funny. Formally, the film amazes. To its sepia-like frames and abundance of wide-angle shots Sokurov has applied a slightly stalled, hiccuping motion that distances us as correlative to Dmitri’s distance from a satisfying life.

ASHIK KERIB (Sergei Parajanov, 1988)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“In the temple of cinema, there are images, light and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple.” — Jean-Luc Godard
     Shortly after Andrei Tarkovsky’s death and shortly before his own, Sergei Parajanov made Ashug-Karibi, dedicating it to Tarkovsky, who died self-exiled from Soviet Russia. It is based on a story by nineteenth-century poet Mikhail Lermontov, from his period of exile in the Caucasus. Lermontov had had problems with his tsar; Parajanov, with the Soviet state. Imprisoned for five years for homosexuality, Parajanov spent fifteen years in exile. Ashug-Karibi is about a poor minstrel who must wander for a thousand days and nights in order to make enough money to marry Magul, a rich merchant’s daughter. Its piercing wail of poignancy derives from its spiritual biography of Lermontov and Tarkovsky and its spiritual autobiography. It is a Byronic romance of exile deepened to the quick by the dream of going home.
     Back home, Ashug-Karibi’s romantic rival offers stolen clothes as proof that Ashug-Karibi river-drowned. Magul weds herself to widow’s black; dressed in her own widow’s garb, Ashug-Karibi’s mother goes blind. (Believing her son dead, the light has gone out of her world.) Eventually, with a saintly sorcerer’s help, Ashug-Karibi travels back from “there” to “here” in one day, accompanied by the purse the sorcerer has given him, his faithful lute, and sufficient magic to restore his mother’s sight—the restoration of his own light and life.
     This richly ornamented film, with its exquisite tableaux, includes Islamic folk art: frescoes, dances, songs, garments, prayers. Parajanov finds the past exiled from the present, and he aims to bring it home. Successive shots home in on the blue bell tower, moving us from architectural form to sculpted detail. Characters speak in Azeri, but the translating voiceover brings the Georgian film home.

KORCZAK (Andrzej Wajda, 1990)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“An ancient Jewish myth . . . has it that there must live on earth at one time thirty-six righteous people. Only the existence of these righteous ones justifies humanity’s continuation in the eyes of the Lord . . . [In our own time, one of these, Jewish physician and educator] Dr. Janusz Korczak, [head of the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw,] steadfastly rejected many offers to be saved from extermination in the death camps. He refused to desert in extremis the orphaned children to whose well-being he had devoted his life. As he said to those who beseeched him to save himself . . . ‘One does not leave children in a time like this.’” — Bruno Bettelheim
     Written by Agnieszka Holland and directed by Andrzej Wajda, Korczak is sober, spare and very gray (it is a black-and-white film), and absent the bug-eyed theatrics and sentimentality of self-acknowledged admirer-in-chief Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). How does one find the courage to perish at Treblinka? One doesn’t “find” it because one isn’t looking for it. One is instead looking at other things—in this case, people: children, for whom the prospect of abandonment could only worsen the dire situation they faced. It isn’t courage that Wajda’s film has us contemplate; rather, it is decency, dedication, the love of children, humanity. How ironic; but for the monstrous historical context, Janusz Korczak might pass for an ordinary man.
     Jewish or non-Jewish, many of us put little store in ancient myths. Yet I do believe that Korczak justified our continuation—in the eyes of God, if one chooses to put it that way. The beauty of Wajda’s fictional film is that it demonstrates this justification. Inseparable from this accomplishment is the towering performance that Wojciech Pszoniak gives as Korczak—this, the same actor who brilliantly, and frighteningly, played Robbespierre in Wajda’s Danton (1982).

WE ARE GOING TO AMERICA (Efim Gribov, 1992)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Drawing inspiration from stories by Sholom Aleichem, including “Boy Motl,” and paintings by Marc Chagall, Efim Gribov’s My yedem v Ameriku is a tapestry of present and past, hardship and hope, reality and reverie, humanity and ghosts. An impoverished Jewish family, along with neighbors, commit to a rough odyssey from their nineteenth-century Russian shtetl to America. Along the way they encounter a carnival of folks, trials, adventures. This is not an immigrant saga, focused on the group’s arrival at their destination; it is all about the journey, what moves it ahead and holds it together. There are discussions. Two children address what a pogrom is. Two other characters, before breaking into song and dance, discuss when the Messiah will come. Part of this part of the journey is by train; part of it, by foot. The group is robbed twice. “All Jews are rich!” one of the assailants insists.
     Heading the family is the widow of a cantor who was killed. However, the film’s protagonist is 11-year-old Motl, her younger son, to whose heightened perception its surrealism and sense of wonder are keyed. This boy, who seems to inhabit both material and spiritual worlds, is associated with equally gentle wild birds. We watch him feed one seeds from his lips; we later watch him let the bird (or another) go. The bird’s upward translates into the boy’s onward, and the moment achieves a poignancy both light and momentous.
     The mostly sepia palette makes the film a continuous animated photograph—a richly populated memory. We bring to the film our own historical memory—of the pogroms, the Holocaust. At the odyssey’s outset, when the family begs its way onto the train, we brave the terrible irony.
     We Are Going to America honors Jewish losses, Jewish survival.

SÁTÁNTANGÓ (Béla Tarr, 1994)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The doctor in Béla Tarr’s 7¼-hour Satan’s Tango, from László Krasznahorkai’s novel, sits and observes the people in his rural Hungarian village, a prisoner of alcoholism, his fat body, the isolated community itself—and, stumbling outdoors in pursuit of another bottle, of the drenching autumn rain that, in conjunction with the mud below, fills his soul and the souls of his likewise impoverished, desperately unhappy neighbors: entrapment from the inside out. A herd of cows has slowly made its way away; but the human characters are stuck. Progress is an illusion: steps forward, steps back—like the steps of a tango.
     In that dance, a performance of which holds the black-and-white film’s imaginative center, the couple’s steps also occur simultaneously and even overlap; similarly, activities in Tarr’s film are parallel and overlapping, like its 12 “chapters.” Another such image is the dance by which spiders weave their entrapping webs. But not all animals have it better than the people here. A young girl, cheated out of money by her older brother and denied consolation from even her mother, a prostitute, murders her cat and, appalled by the loss of this one companion of hers, kills herself with the same poison.
     Expectation, betrayal; canceled trust: such events keep cropping up. The promise of financial riches for the villagers empties. Formally, long, fluid takes are betrayed by an eventual cut, brusquely signaling a new shot. Tarr’s narrative sometimes curves around, showing an event from another perspective—a compounding of subjectivity and complexity, but bereft of advancement: another illusion of progress.
     Communism has yielded to capitalism: six steps forward, six steps back, for the hope proffered has been taken back, and the film ends poised on the verge of a possible commune—a step forward into the past. Gray lives; cosmic betrayal.