Zany, strange and hectic rather than outright funny (at least today), and tedious for at least half its seemingly interminable length, Schastye, a.k.a. Styazhateli, a.k.a. Snatchers, has become legendary thanks to the efforts of French documentarian Chris Marker, who has lionized its writer-director, Aleksandr Medvedkin. The satirical silent slapstick comedy was banned by the Soviets for forty years after Stalin felt that he and his policies of collectivized farming were being made fun of. One person’s humor, you know, can seem like reactionary nastiness to someone else! One can presume that Medvedkin’s life was spared because even Stalin wasn’t sure he was right about Medvedkin. (See below my entry on Marker’s The Train Rolls On, which is in part about Medvedkin, who is interviewed.)
Stalin was not correct on this occasion. The protagonist, Khmyr, is an idle peasant who dreams of happiness. Medvedkin, many decades later: “. . . [This film] was my greatest achievement. . . . The peasant himself—and this is just not true of our country, it’s part of the social psychology of mankind in all civilized nations—dreams of ownership. He wants a prosperous life to set himself apart from his thousands and millions of neighbors; he wants to creep ahead and have his own barn, his own horses, his own grain. In short he wants to be his own boss. Of course, for every 1,000, only one will manage it; the other 999 will remain farmhands and starve, but this dream lives on among the peasants. So Happiness is a satirical picture. I made it as the nail in the coffin of this rosy dream. I ridiculed that dream because it’s unrealistic. Nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of 1,000 get nothing from a dream like that.”
Of course, one cannot say that the script of Medvedkin’s intentions did not change over time. Indeed, one must always allow for the (possibly inevitable) discrepancy between Medvedkin’s intent and the work of art that he achieved. However, it would appear that Stalin reacted too simply to a work whose slapstick humor concealed from his self-defensive eyes the sophistication of its purpose and argument. Had he better understood the film, perhaps, he would not have taken umbrage and made significant moves to defeat Medvedkin’s artistic expression and derail his career.
Did not the picaresque film’s long second title provide a clue? Here is the English translation: A Tale of a Hapless Mercenary Loser, His Wife Anna, His Well-Fed Neighbor Foka and Also of a Priest, a Nun and Other Old Relics. If nothing else, Medvedkin’s cheerfully vicious portrayal of priest and nuns should have convinced Stalin that Medvedkin wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to “the cause”—although the see-through blouses worn by nuns as they go about the Orthodox Church’s greedy business of collecting tithes in pre-Revolutionary Russia may have caused him concern on puritanical grounds.
The film opens with a larksome spirit—and a nod to Voltaire: the title reads, “What is happiness?” With Anna standing behind him, Khmyr is bent over—his ass flares up like a turkey’s bottom—peeping through a hole in the wooden fence at his neighbor. Foka is outdoors, and the food from a bottomless plate on the long table at which he is seated is, thanks to animation, effortlessly rising and sailing into his mouth; all Foka has to do is open and close his mouth like a drawbridge for each morsel. What is happiness? What Khmyr does not have and Foka does—according to Khmyr’s exaggeration, “the life of a tsar.” When the Old Man, Khmyr’s father, takes his own peek, he decides to rob Foka come dead of night. Dead, indeed; upon discovery, the Old Man drops dead inside Foka’s house, his long, white beard evidencing—this is funny—instant rigor mortis. Khmyr and Anna come rushing in as Foka computes the cost of coffin, nails, etc., and the next thing we see, in sunlight, is Khmyr digging the Old Man’s grave. Once that’s done, there is a replay of the night before’s furious display of people (now including an old priest) crossing themselves—over and over. The rapidity and repetition render the solemn activity ridiculous.
Thus far we have glimpsed the film’s method; Medvedkin has mixed natural and artificial sets, naturalism and cartoon-animation, humanity and inhumanity.
Anna sets her husband on a proper course: to roam the countryside in search of “good luck,” to wit, happiness. “Do not return empty-handed,” she warns before giving him a kiss. Thus Khmyr becomes a wayfarer, a foot traveller. A merchant returning from market, where he sold his items, accidentally lets slip from his horse-drawn wagon his proceeds-stuffed wallet. A tall woman and a shrimpy priest, who had been walking together and amiably chatting, now are beating up one another as they rush to claim the money on the ground; but Khmyr picks up the wallet and runs off, with the other two none the wiser. “This is happiness,” Khmyr concludes before heading home.
The authority in Anna’s eyes that Khmyr’s new wealth confers perhaps makes it easier for her to continue her old role as a “horse-wife”; she substitutes herself at the head of the plow when their newfangled, polka-dotted horse goes on strike, her own polka-dotted kerchief forging a visual connection between them. However, their good harvest targets Anna and Khmyr for a barrage of taxes that wipes them out. In the film’s best scene, Khmyr is taken away by soldiers, all of whom shoulder oversized heads covered with gargoylish masks—a frighteningly anonymous assemblage of political power. After 33 years of imprisonment, Khmyr, released, returns home, where thanks to the Revolution and collectivization Anna at least has found happiness. But Khmyr is out of sync with the new world in rural Russia, the new ways. Whereas once he dreamed of being the Tsar, now he dreams of being independent, free, his own boss.
This is not a good film; and, for all the cultish chatter about its brilliant originality, it draws heavily on Mack Sennett and Laurel & Hardy. Sergei Eisenstein famously said after seeing it, “Today I saw how a Bolshevik laughs.” Well, I’ll give the film that: it is funnier than any of Eisenstein’s movies.
Ha ha ha.
THE TRAIN ROLLS ON (Chris Marker, 1971)
Perhaps Chris Marker’s masterpiece, Le train en marche has three distinct parts—an unwieldy structure for a half-hour film. The film opens and closes with a silent train in motion, but this Cocteauan sandwiching only underscores the film’s split quality. This “splitness,” however, serves Marker’s overarching theme.
The first part is the most identifiably Markerian, a tone poem haunted by hypnotic voiceover: “Soon after October [the 1917 Revolution] the trains begin to roll, and through the trains surges the blood of the Revolution. . . . Through the trains the voice of Lenin was heard across the Soviet Union as far as the republics of Asia, where young Communists were bringing literacy to women in shackles.”
Archival materials also dominate the second part, which refers to the 1930s. A different voice introduces Aleksandr Medvedkin’s CineTrain, by which “cinema was to become something created out of contact with the people.”
When the film flashes forward by forty years, Medvedkin speaks directly to us, recalling the CineTrain’s traveling film studio. The object was to “film our people, show these films to our people, and thereby help them construct a new world.” Faults at a steel works, for example, were shown so that workers themselves could devise a plan to correct them.
Medvedkin now is old. (Of the CineTrain’s 32-member crew, only eight are still alive in 1971.) Not a single shot from the films remains. The Soviet Union, tarnished by Stalinism at home, Hungary and Czechoslavakia in the fifties and sixties, no longer encapsulates the world’s hope. Now, nothing does.
But, like the peasant in Medvedkin’s satirical Happiness (1934), one must persevere to come close to happiness. “The biggest mistake would be to believe,” Marker says, “that [the train of revolution, of history] had come to a halt.”
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
Dennis Grunes 