It’s an exceptional week in New York to explore the works of distinctive, uncategorizable filmmakers; the Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting an exhaustive retrospective of Andrzej Zulawski (very much looking forward to seeing his mudmen-on-the-moon epic On The Silver Globe on Saturday!) while today the Film Society of Lincoln Center kicks off its brief look at the films of Russian director Aleksei German, or Guerman (for this post I’m gonna stick with the latter spelling) in a series called “War and Remembrance.” The look is brief because there’s no other choice: over the course of an over forty-year career, Guerman has completed only six films, and the first of those was a co-directing effort, 1967’s The Seventh Companion, which he made with Grigori Aronov.
Guerman’s first solo picture was 1971’s Trial On The Road, which shows for the first time today at 6:15 p.m. Among other things, it once again proves the adage that I made up just now, which is that nobody makes a World War II film like a Russian. The movie begins with a stark depiction of Germans dousing a pit full of potatoes with kerosene, because that’ll show those pesky partisans. It then features some narration from a young boy who we won’t hear from again for the rest of the film, detailing back-in-the-day privation. And then it’s trudge, trudge, trudge through densely packed snow, each footfall beautifully recorded, and being out of cigarettes, and deserted villages and stray gunshots and sudden views of a deadly platoon of goddamn Germans coming over a snow-white horizon to kill you all. Only the Russian World War II film gets this atmosphere so palpably, and if Trial doesn’t reach the heights of pathos of Ivan’s Childhood or the height of horror of Come And See, it takes a more than honorable place in the tension-and-tactics subcategory of war movie (a favorite of mine in this line is of course Mann’s Men In War, and yeah, Trial would make a good double feature with it); from the atmosphere and anecdotes a very definite story emerges, in which a Red Army turncoat tries to make good with the partisans to whom he’s surrendered. As much as the movie condemns war in a relatively conventional what-a-waste fashion, there is a certain exploitable heroism inherent in the protagonist’s final sacrifice, and the up-and-at-’em, never-rest determination showed by the partisan’s oft-besieged leader, played by Rolan Bykov, seen in the still above with Anatoly Solonitsin, a frequent Tarkovsky player here portraying a tightly-wound subordinate) seems a quality sure to please Soviet apparatchiks. Not so much, apparently; as Anton Dolin recounts in his excellent piece on Guerman in the current issue of Film Comment (in which he wryly asks, “how many other geniuses have managed to displease the Soviet censors, the post-Soviet commercial system, and the connoisseurs of Cannes?”), the movie was “denied release and nearly destroyed,” and “finally screened in the Gorbachev era.”
Possibly the most crucial of Guerman’s films is the one he most recently completed (he’s been working on his next picture, an adaptation of a sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers, who also wrote the source material for Tarkovsky’s Stalker, for decades), 1998’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, which lives up to the oft-bruited idea of a fever-dream of a movie almost too well. A delirium of camera movement in which the lens takes in the exquisitely hoarded details of its settings with an addict’s eagerness, it takes an extremely oblique narrative approach to a scenario inspired by the “Doctor’s plot” affair in Soviet Russia directly prior to the death of Stalin, depicting in nightmarish detail the humiliation of its lead character, a rather magisterial physician. It makes no allowances for what the viewer may or may not know about the historical facts surrounding the story and of course that’s not really the point: the point is the immersion, its awfulness, the specks of extremely mordant humor to be gleaned from it, all that. “Its characters aren’t properly identified, its politics not elucidated, its geography vague,” New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden complained when the picture played at the New York Film Festival. YES, EXACTLY. Nothing against Stephen, who’s a smart fellow and a sharp writer, but relative to the ostensible institutional expectations of something such as The New York Times, yes, Khrustalyov, My Car! could be said to spit in the face of those expectations…although its resignation to its Otherness is such that spitting in the face may be too strong an action-image. It would be a perverse mistake to assert that Khrustalyov’s greatness is acheived solely by way of its aesthetic querulousness, but its querulousness is certainly a part of its greatness. You hear rather too often of movies that take you down a rabbit hole, but this REALLY is one of those pictures. Put it this way: if you go check it out on my recommendation, I think you’ll either want to hug me or break my nose upon leaving the theater. No middle ground.
Been to every Zulawski film shown so far. Only had seen POSSESSION before. THAT MOST IMPORTANT THING: LOVE especially blew me away, along with THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT and LA NOTE BLEUE. Monday and Tuesday’s showings SZAMANKA and LA FEMME PUBLIQUE I found enjoyable but not close to as great as the previous four. Looking forward to the rest though.
That’s a great description of KHRUSTALOV, which is indeed a crazy-ass nightmare of a thing. I’m pretty familiar with the history on display, but even knowing the basics of the Doctor’s Plot, it’s still pretty hard to follow, not least because Guermann breaks up what characterization there is with dopplegangers and arbitrary plot twists. It’s like a Fellini movie with the glamour replaced by rape scenes, but its filthy confusion is made truly gorgeous by the godlike omnipotence of the camera moves and the gleaming black-and-white cinematography. Possibly great, but definitely a bad time. I’d also put in a good word for MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN, which has slightly more narrative than KHRUSTALOV, but only slightly, maybe just enough to be even more confusing, and a similar immersiveness.
I saw ON THE SILVER GLOBE recently. The first hour or so is pretty astonishing–Zulawski beat Ruggero Deodato to the “harrowing found footage” thing by a couple years, and did it better. It really does play like a transmission from another planet. The remaining hour and thirty ain’t no slouch in the wacky estranging chaos department, but it’s less involving, and that’s only exacerbated by the gaps. Far from an easy sit even by AZ’s standards, but a truly vital document.
SZAMANKA’s another one that wore me out, but it’s got his wildest ending, at least of the 7 I’ve seen.
For those of us living far from the cities, postings like this (and some YouTube samples) are all we get until Guerman leaks into the NetFlix cues, as “4”, CARGO 200 and MY JOY have done recently. Thanks for putting in the time writing about anti-commercial film requires.
Enjoyed “Trial on the Road” tonight. The last half in particular was gripping. I’d throw this recommendation to Glenn and anyone else but another great Eastern European war film is “Cold Days” by Andras Kovacs (brother of Lazlo), which is about a group of soldiers on trial for a massacre. The film is styled ala “Rashomon” though, where we see it all through individual flashbacks. Great stuff; also uses the white snow well.
Another great Russian war film: The Ascent.
Recently relocated to L.A. and I’m finding it surprising how many films/retros play simultaneously (or close to it) on both coasts. Terence Davies recently made back to back appearances with his films in NY & L.A. and the Zulawski films played, I think, a week ago. (Side note – this weekend Malcolm McDowell is appearing alongside If!, O Lucky Man, and I think Clockwork Orange; not sure if there’s an NYC correspondence to this, but if not I’m glad to be on the West Coast right now…)
P.S. Now if only they’d bring that Stalker panel our way…
Larisa Shepitko’s “The Ascent” is also a great Russian WWII movie that beautifully captures the feeling of cold, snowy Russian Winter. Can’t believe it isn’t better known but thanks to Criterion it is at least available.
I’ve seen 3 of Guerman’s films (none recently). Of them I liked “Fall of Otar” the best – that was a case where not entirely understanding what was going on didn’t matter much to me because it really bought an extremely under-depicted world (middle ages Central Asia) to life very effectively.
I’ve seen “Khrustalyov” and “My Friend Ivan L” and have to say, the confusion didn’t work for me at all in those cases. I felt at the time like the films were made for Russians who grew up with or were at least deeply familiar with those eras with absolutely no ‘concessions’ made by the filmmaker to explain things to ‘outsiders’. While on one hand I found this admirable, it left ME with no way in – and ultimately I found both films to be pretty exasperating experiences.
But now you’re saying you were confused too but that was the point. Interesting. I now wonder if native Russians with knowledge of those times would have been just as confused as I was.
Joel Bocko:
I missed the fact that you made note of “The Ascent” too when I posted my comment – so a belated hat tip.
ON THE SILVER GLOBE was so awesome. And the print was amazing. Holy shit.
I missed it, but TCM actually showed Shepitko’s WINGS the other night.