Films for somebody else
I have never watched Indian movies. Not my format, you know. I haven’t watched Russian films in the past few years. Not my world, you know. But, after switching off the Kremlin’s footage, I can still hear the sound of film directors’ revelations from the red walls. Instead of practicing what is known as the most important art, they keep bringing us digital and analog apples of discord. Mr. Stanislav Govorukhin (People’s Artiste of the Ukrainian SSR) begins to recall the horrors of the occupation of the Odesa Film Studios by “Bandera followers” in 1968. Mr. Sergei Ursuliak shows these horrors in his serialized fantasy. Mr. Nikita Mikhalkov tells about the same in a video epistolary genre. As if they were in collusion. Some of the old-school colleagues tried to disagree with them. But, dear friends, please don’t waste time “answering Chamberlain” or appealing to logic and common sense. For in the never-never land of Mosfilm and other similar studios, good and evil have long swapped places. What is good to a Russian filmmaker is death to his foreign colleagues. If Robert Redford were awarded a CIA prize for best original screenplay, he would have burned out of shame even in his young years when he played cloak-and-dagger guys. But in Russia, Ursuliak has been given a special FSB (Federal Security Service) prize in earnest – it only remains unclear whether for best screenplay, direction, or just to be with it, because he is “one of us.” Now we can see the color of the epaulets on the shoulders of the muse who called them to Odesa.
The artistic fate in Soviet-Russian cinema is like a nuptial bed – the one who calls, inspires, and awards in it is always the government alias the party. Therefore, whenever you watch their film, even a bucketful of popcorn will not hide the ears of a party-inspired political concept that is thrusting on you from the screen. When you are reading Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba, you can see the tragedy of a war-torn Ukrainian family, a terrible death of the hero being burned at the stake, which the author interprets as retribution for a mortal sin – the murder of his son. But in a film directed by People’s Artiste of the Ukrainian SSR (now Russian citizen) Vladimir Bortko, all the Gogolian passions give way to one only – a thirst to give and take life for “Holy Rus’.” Probably, in the circles where Russian filmmakers mingle, family-related sentiments are not valued as highly as patriotic ones and the paths of the fathers are very far from those of the sons. To be more exact, the sons are totally indifferent to the feelings of their fathers. Could Serhii Bondarchuk, who was born and raised in a Ukrainian village and showed love for his homeland in the film Taras Shevchenko, have imagined that his son and the grandson of a Zaporozhian Cossack descendant would sign a petition in support of Putin’s war against Ukraine? This truly Gogolian conflict in present-day Russian settings has been settled in Bortko’s style – Fyodor Bondarchuk is in the role of Pavlik Morozov, for whom there is no higher value than Putin’s cause.
If it is the behavior of the filmmakers who maintain professional and blood ties with our country, then what can you expect from the masters who do not know their roots? The army of mediocre directors has been shelling “fraternal Ukraine” with the salvos of their serials for more than one year. They always picture Ukrainians as villains, the sinister plot lines reach out to the Dnipro, and dark clouds gather over Russian heads at the will of our compatriots. I understand that it is opportunism, that everybody wants to receive a FSB prize or governmental funding, but where is such an obligatory condition for creative work as diversity? Why are the past and primitive ideas prevailing over the rational and unconventional ones that fill international, including even Indian, cinema?
Apparently, the poetry of the madman will eclipse that of the sane man, as philosopher Plato said many centuries before the invention of cinema. The metamorphoses of conscience and consciousness in art cannot exist secretly like spies. They always come out and surface. Propaganda as product placement of Russian cinema has made the latter provincial and isolated from the world – Juche cinema of sorts. Lavish governmental subsidies do not improve the quality of films. The people who make movies without state support receive at least some international recognition – by contrast with the maestros showered with money from governmental pockets. Here are the budgets of the films made in one year: The Citadel directed by Nikita Mikhalkov – $45 million, and Elena directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev – $3 million. And here are their box-office returns: $1.5 million for The Citadel and $4 million for Elena. In other words, Mikhalkov received more than 40 million dollars for propaganda and loyalty to the top bosses. For this reason, he cannot or does not want to (no difference in this case) speak out as an artist, turning into a highly-paid lord-faced clown who always stands behind his master’s throne. For him, the meanness of serfdom is wisdom and military threats are just shocking behavior. Who knows, maybe, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu will be making a movie while Mikhalkov is commanding a parade?
Moral degradation also ruins the creative essence of a personality. This is why Govorukhin and Mikhalkov have left the shooting areas to deal with purely political matters in their field of activity. Also for this reason, Gennady Khazanov is ready to kiss anybody “below the shoulder” to get money for his Theater of Satire in Moscow. And we can judge about the ethical level of histrionics and the sting of satire by the clown’s cap into which Oleg Soskovets and Vladimir Putin throw coins out of pity for an obsequious person. This may come in handy to while away a sad hour. It is no mere coincidence that satirists are settled near the powers that be – it’s easier to summon them.
Cinema is just cinema, and its masters and hacks are not worth being paid too much attention – in theory. But, in reality, matinee idols hold the world in their sway, and Angelina Jolie Voight’s slim down recipe interests people far more than Pres. Obama’s medical care reform.
In 1938 the London radio aired a production based on Herbert Wells’ War of the Worlds. It was a tense prewar period, and the people who did not hear the beginning of the program considered it as a report on Nazi invasion. This caused panic. It is a copy-book example of an artwork mistaken for a plan of seizure. Conversely, we confuse seizure plans with artworks, allowing FSB prize winners to be shown on our silver screens.
