the cinema of kira muratova

The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

The Cinema of Kira MuratovaAuthor(s): Jane A. TaubmanSource: Russian Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 367-381Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/130736 .Accessed: 12/04/2014 07:06

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The Cinema of Kira Muratova JANE A. TAUBMAN

ira Muratova is one of a small but immensely talented group of Soviet women directors who began their careers in the 1960s and early 1970s.1 Like most Russian women filmmakers and writers of her generation, Muratova is uncomfortable with the terms "feminism" and "women's film." Nevertheless, part of Muratova's unique- ness as an artist lies in qualities attributable to her woman's eye and ear, and to her knowledge of women's lives. Muratova's films are distinguished by their particularly penetrating, often merciless gaze at her female characters, and by her keen ear for the "heteroglossia" of Russian, including various forms of female language often heard on the street, the workplace, or in the home, but, until recently, seldom in Soviet film or literature.

Muratova's first three films investigated characters who represented a large pro- portion of the Soviet female population: the "responsible official," the middle-aged divorced mother and the unmarried working-class woman. They and their lives were slighted or ignored by mainstream Soviet culture, for they resisted both glamori- zation and politicization. The best-known Soviet "women's film," Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit) tried to combine all three stories in the life of a single heroine, Katia, with results kitschy enough to earn the film box-office success in the Soviet Union and an Oscar in Hollywood. Muratova dignifies her characters by treating them seriously, and that includes clear-eyed criticism for actions unworthy of themselves. Her criticism comes from a position of sympathy rather than antipathy.

Muratova's career has not been easy. Her films were released for a general Soviet audience only in 1987, and her work is still little known in North America. The present essay is the first comprehensive survey and discussion of her work in English.2

Research for this article was made possible with a grant from the Amherst College Faculty Research Grant program, to which the author expresses her gratitude.

1 The others are the late Larissa Shepitko and Dinara Asanova, both of whom died untimely deaths, and Lana Gogoberidze, who is fortunately still with us.

2 She is better known in France, where her films are commercially distributed.

The Russian Review, vol. 52, July 1993, pp. 367-381 Copyright 1993 The Ohio State University Press


368 The Russian Review

Since her graduation in 1965 from the All-union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), Muratova has made only seven feature-length films.3 Her first three, Brief Encounters (Korotkie vstrechi, 1967), The Long Goodbye (Dolgie provody, 1971- 87), and Getting to Know the World (Poznavaia belyi svet, 1978), were either shelved or given extremely limited release. Her fourth film, Among the Grey Stones (Sredi serykh kamnei, 1983), was so mercilessly distorted before release that she asked to have her name removed from the titles. Her difficult 1987 film, A Change of Fate (Peremena uchasti), received mixed reviews and no box-office success; even as late as 1989 the censors held up her critically acclaimed Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskii sindrom) because of scenes of frontal nudity and a stream of "unprintable words" in a scene near the end. Her latest film, The Sentimental Cop (Chuvstvitel'nyi mi- litsioner), a joint venture of "Primodessa-film" (Ukraine) and the French production company "Paris-Media," was released in the fall of 1992, but its wide distribution in the chaotic conditions of the post-Soviet film industry is not likely.

At VGIK, Muratova studied under director Sergei Gerasimov, to whom she has often acknowledged her indebtedness. This at first seems surprising, if we think of Gerasimov in terms of his best-known films, Komsomolsk (1938), The Young Guard (1948), and the epic And Quiet Flows the Don (1958), films which, though distinguished by professional mastery and relative honesty during Soviet cinema's most difficult period, seem to have little or nothing in common with Muratova's work. More telling is the fact that Gerasimov began his film career in the 1920s as an actor with the experimental group FEKS (the "Factory of the Eccentric Actor"), which cultivated a stylized, grotesque and pointedly antirealistic approach to acting. Ge- rasimov appeared in all the early films of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, including the lead as the villainous Medoks in S. VD. and the menacing bureaucrat in The Overcoat. Some of Muratova's more striking devices-her stylization and ab- straction of speech and gesture through repetition, for example-are clearly de- scended from the FEKS experiments. She also, somewhat paradoxically, shares with Gerasimov the director an interest in Leo Tolstoy (in his eighties, Gerasimov por- trayed the great writer in his own last film), in a Tolstoyan moral absolutism and realistic psychology of character, particularly of young people.

Muratova had the misfortune to begin her career just as the Brezhnev stagnation was setting in. Colleagues recognized her unusual talent and did all they could during the worst years of the 1970s and early 1980s to give her at least some opportunity to work. Early in the Gorbachev era, her three shelved films were released and she suddenly received long-denied recognition. Muratova, characteristically clear-eyed and sardonic, recalled her "change of fate":

Yesterday they had said to me, "Idiot, cross-eyed fool, get out of here!" Suddenly they said, "You're a genius! Everything that you've done is wonderful!" Black became white, and it was "Come on, film, as quickly as possible, whatever you want." . .. They started to make use of me for their

3 I do not include, and have not seen, her 1965 diploma film, "Our Honest Bread" (Nash chestnyi khleb), which she made with her then husband Alexander Muratov.


Jane A. Taubman 369

own profit: "Look how bad it was for Muratova, and how good it's become for her. So anyone who thinks things are still bad can just shut up."4

Her new films, particularly Asthenic Syndrome, expressed deep despair at the social and moral disintegration of Soviet personal and public life. Those who could not, or would not, see the prophetic, Tolstoyan moral vision in the film tarred it with the epithet "chernukha," a new slang word for "an excessively black depiction of reality."5

Though Muratova's films seem quite disparate at first glance, there are common threads which trace the development of her art. Thematically, the first six can be arranged according to the dichotomy proposed by that great theorist of Russian culture, Woody Allen: the first three are about love, the second three about death. The earlier films are close psychological studies of human relationships, each structured around a love triangle (in one case the triangle is mother/son/father); in the universe of the second three films, death has eclipsed what little love is left. In her latest film, Muratova returns, in a different key, to the themes of conjugal and parental love with which she began. Here the love triangle is an odd one indeed: a young policemen and his wife contest in court with a middle-aged woman doctor for the right to adopt the baby girl he found in a cabbage patch. (Yes, a cabbage patch!)

In terms of aesthetic, however, it makes sense to divide the films chronologically, as Muratova does herself, into two doublet pairs and the three post-1987 films. Mu- ratova once called the minimalist, black-and white Brief Encounters and The Long Goodbye "provincial melodramas." Her first two color films, Getting to Know the World and Among the Grey Stones, mark a period of fascination with what she terms "ornamentalism" (dekorativnost'), the visual world in which her characters live. There are hints in these second two films of the surreal, absurd and grotesque which characterize the last three films, A Change of Fate, Asthenic Syndrome and The Sen- timental Cop.

Brief Encounters has a magical cast of three: poet-bard-actor Vladimir Vysotsky, the future star Nina Ruslanova in her film debut (she was then a second-year acting student at the Vakhtangov Institute) and Muratova herself, who took over the lead role when the original actress did not work out. The plot is simple: Nadia (Rusla- nova), a village girl working as a waitress in a roadside cafe, falls in love with a guitar- playing geologist, Maksim (Vysotsky), and tracks down his address in the city. It turns out to be the apartment of Valentina Ivanovna (Muratova), who works at the city Soviet in charge of the essential, though thoroughly unglamorous, areas of water supply and sewage. Valentina assumes the village girl at her door has been sent to work as a live-in housekeeper; Nadia, without revealing her acquaintance with Maksim, accepts the job.

In Maksim's absence, Nadia studies Valentina, trying to understand her relationship with Maksim. We see Valentina through Nadia's eyes, and through flash-

4 Author's interview with Muratova, April 1991, Moscow. Unless otherwise attributed, all direct quotations from Muratova are from this interview.

5 The term has been applied as well to the plays and stories of Liudmila Petrushevskaia, with whose work Muratova's vision and aesthetic have much in common. This paper is part of a larger project studying those commonalities.



backs of her "brief encounters" with Maksim between expeditions. Their relationship is not without strain: Muratova was intrigued by the conflict between Valentina's "settled, domestic" personality and Maksim, the eternal wanderer and free spirit. Valentina nearly drives away her vagabond geologist with her possessive, bossy be- havior and impatience with his wanderlust. They are indeed an "odd couple." Yet Valentina is no ogre; Muratova plays her without idealization, but sympathetically, as a believable, though repressed and conventional, human being. On the eve of Maksim's return, Nadia silently acknowledges Valentina's priority in his life by setting the table for their reunion dinner and slipping quietly out the door to return to her village.

Film critic Vladimir Gul'chenko observed that this is less a love triangle than two parallel story lines that meet somewhere beyond the frame of the film.6 This reflects, in fact, the genesis of the scenario. According to Muratova, the germ of the idea came from Odessa's water-supply problems, and she wanted a central character who dealt with the issue: "The woman bureaucrat appeared, and then the romantic plot: she was so official and pedantic, and he was a free, gypsy-like character; she wanted to take him and form him, and he wouldn't give in." The Nadia/geologist plot line came from a short story by Leonid Zhukhovitskii which caught Muratova's attention; she asked Zhukhovitskii to collaborate with her. In the finished film, the most interesting and fully developed relationship is that between the two women, rather than between either of them and Maksim.

Muratova told her tale in a complicated series of flashbacks, which simultaneously demonstrated her talent and displeased conservative film bureaucrats. The felicitously named critic N. Kovarskii (in Russian it means "insidious, perfidious"), in what was probably the only contemporary review of the film, commented: "When you look at the picture, you get the impression that the director, sitting at the editing table, simply rearranged individual pieces of film, without, essentially, justifying this rearrangement."7 Kovarskii didn't like Vysotsky's acting, either, or the "rootless" character he plays. He was most troubled, however, by the absence of "a general line of the character" and by Muratova's failure to treat the only acceptable theme for a Soviet film: "man and the historical process, man and his epoch."8 The bureaucrats knew right from the opening scene that something was seriously amiss. Valentina is deciding whether to wash the dishes or to keep trying to write a speech on agriculture, about which she knows nothing. Muratova counterpoints Valentina's own playful natural language with the stilted Soviet rhetoric in which she is trying, without success, to write her speech.9 She gets no further than the oft-repeated, "Dear Com- rades." According to Muratova, Goskino voiced "moral" objections to Valentina's romance with Maksim:

6 "Mezhdu 'ottepeliami,"' Iskusstvo kino, 1991, no. 6:61. 7 "Chelovek i vremia," ibid., 1968, no. 10:56. Film critic, scenarist and director Leonid Gurevich

(private conversation, Amherst, MA, February 1991) claims that he wrote a positive review which the journal was going to print along with Kovarskii's negative one, but his did not appear.

8 Ibid., 50. 9 "To wash or not to wash?" (Myt' iii ne myt'?) she asks herself, paraphrasing the Russian version

of Hamlet's "To be or not to be?" (Byt' ili ne byt'?)


Jane A. Taubman 371

Why a love triangle with an important person and her responsible job at the center? Why this immorality in a government official, why does she have a lover, where is her husband, why doesn't she get married, who's this geologist, some sort of suspicious character, why does he have some kind of girl? They tried to figure out the place in the scenario where he reaches out his hand to take back his jacket from Nadia: [here the film cuts to another scene-JT] Was he just taking his jacket, or did they embrace and go off into the bushes? "If that's the case," they said, "we won't pass it."

Made in Odessa, as were most of Muratova's films, Brief Encounters made imag- inative use of limited resources. Muratova's most valuable resource has always been her actors, and she learned from Gerasimov how to use them with consummate skill. One of her trademarks is her use of nonprofessionals. She likes to mix them with professionals "because this livens things up, like a kind of cocktail, it shakes up the stagnant dogmatic situation. When there are two actors, they play up to each other, they easily fall back into their own rut, they know how to make it comfortable for each other." When she finds people whose story she likes, she interpolates them into her films, like found objects in a collage, sometimes with a bit of strain, but often with considerable success. "Often the basic dramatic core is enriched, develops multiple layers, complexities and ramifications, because of people I incorporate into the shooting and who come with their own characters, eccentricities, and with their own texts." In Brief Encounters her discovery was L. Bazal'skaia-Strizheniuk, who played the role of Nadia's gabby village girlfriend in a heavy Ukrainian accent.

Brief Encounters was shown largely in film clubs, with Muratova present to in- troduce it and answer questions. Such appearances were then her major means of support. Her next project was a scenario "Watch Out for Your Dreams!" ("Vni- matel'no smotrite sny"), which she wrote together with Vladimir Zuev, about a woman artist who, freed in a fairy-tale manner from the restraints of home and family that have forced her to earn her living with hack work, discovers she can no longer create. She returns home to find her child has vanished. It is a nightmare that has haunted all who try to combine creativity and motherhood, and we can only regret Muratova never made the film.10

She turned instead to a scenario by her long-time friend Natalia Riazantseva, entitled "To Be a Man" ("Byt' muzhchinoi"), which became her second film, The Long Goodbye.11 Muratova recalls: "I liked [the scenario], but it was totally different, almost classical in its structure. Essentially, I took a completed scenario and began to ruin it as I needed."12 The change of title is emblematic. Riazantseva's scenario told the traditional story of a young man's coming-of-age. By cutting out a few scenes dealing with Sasha's school, Muratova managed to shift the focus to his mother, usually the forgotten figure, if not simply the villain, in the coming-of-age drama. The family situation could be a sequel, twenty years later, to the romance of Valentina and Maksim in Brief Encounters. At sixteen, Sasha (Oleg Vladimirskii, a

10 Viktor Bozhovich, Kira Muratova: tvorcheskii portret (Moscow, 1988), 8. 11 The scenario was published as "Dolgie provody," with an introduction by Riazantseva, in Ki-

nostsenarii: literaturno-khudozhestvennyi al'manakh (1988): 136-54. 12 Bozhovich, Kira Muratova, 8.



nonprofessional) wants to leave his mother and go to live with his father, an archae- ologist from whom she was divorced long ago. The father's unfettered life in No- vosibirsk and on expeditions in the Crimea beckons the boy, who has grown up in one room with his firmly rooted mother. Evgenia Vasil'ievna (brilliantly acted by Zinaida Sharko) has spent the sixteen years since his birth at the same desk, working as a technical translator from English. She is equally stuck in the rut of her mothering role; she refuses to acknowledge that he has grown up, just as in many ways she refuses to grow up herself. She cannot let go of Sasha, even to begin a relationship with a sympathetic man who is interested in her. Her "rootedness," one might even say immobility, is underscored by the opening scene; one of the film's earliest images is of roots, which Sasha dreamily contemplates as Evgenia Vasil'evna buys a plant to place on the grave of her beloved father.

Even more than in her first film, Muratova subjects her heroine to a steely-eyed, penetrating gaze that reveals her worst faults. But, like Valentina Ivanovna, Evgenia Vasil'evna is no caricature. Muratova allows the viewer to see enough of her strengths that we cringe in embarrassment when she publicly nags Sasha to clean his nails, or bribes a postal worker to let her read his letters from his father, or creates a scene over seats at the office celebration. In that final scene, their roles are reversed. Ev- genia Vasil'evna is reduced to childish hysteria by the prospect of Sasha's "deser- tion." Sasha, with a new-found maturity, takes charge, drags her away from the embarrassing scene, and leads her out to the garden, where he asks her to take off the stylish, ill-fitting wig she is wearing. The wig, borrowed for the evening, makes her look too young for her years-Sasha urges her to come to terms with who she really is, and to take pride in herself. "I love you, Mama," he repeats, over and over, "I won't leave." The camera in this scene is merciless in its harsh close-ups of Shar- ko's aging, yet still attractive face. Earlier in the film, it had been equally ruthless in watching her make up, putting on the false face she shows to the world, behind which she has lost sight of her own identity.

Muratova's close attention to the sound-track is another trademark of her art. The sound-track often counterpoints, rather than simply underlines, the action on the screen. Her favorite sound-track materials are classical music, total silence, or "choral speaking," which she has compared to operatic quartets or quintets where each character sings simultaneously about something different, "a kind of harmony of chaos." In The Long Goodbye much of the sound-track is a solo classical piano, whose agitation mirrors or counterpoints that of the characters. The background to the final scene is the voice of a young girl singing an amateur rendition of Lermontov's endlessly anthologized poem "The Sail": "And he, restless one, seeks the storm, as if in the storm he will find peace." The poem becomes an ironic parody of Evgenia Vasil'evna's view of her son, while the on-camera action demonstrates how mistaken she is.

The Long Goodbye, even had it been released in its own time, would probably never have achieved box-office success.13 As Bozhovich writes, "for the viewer ac-

13 I first saw the film in the spring of 1988 in a nearly empty second-run Moscow movie theater. The middle-aged couple seated behind me clearly had no idea of what they had come to see. After the husband grumbled his incomprehension through half the film, they got up and left.


Jane A. Taubman 373

customed to a traditional plot construction, it is difficult to comprehend Muratova's films, and fifteen or twenty years ago it was even harder. Accustomed to receiving a finished product from the screen, we internally resist when we have to become co- creators, to be included in the process of comprehending life."14 If it was hard for audiences to understand Muratova's films, it was even harder for the film bureaucrats, who demanded a clear ideological line. The openness of Muratova's plots, like that of life itself, seems, to the authoritarian mind, fraught with danger. For instance, we are not sure at the end of the film how long Sasha's decision to stay with his mother will last; life continues beyond the final frame. The film was grudgingly accepted by Goskino, with the help of some lobbying by Gerasimov, but ten days later, without explanation, the acceptance was withdrawn. A scandal followed, with Party meetings at the Odessa studio to find out how such a film could have been made. S. D. Bez- klubenko, then the minister of culture of the Ukraine, wrote an internal memoran- dum: "K. Muratova ... has filmed this story in such a way that the film turned out very dark. The selection of actors, their typing, the depiction of their surroundings, the special sound and lighting effects, and also the music are used by the director to create an atmosphere of disorder in the life of the 'little man,' of his 'loneliness,' his 'drama.' This is unsocialist, bourgeois realism.""'

Muratova was never able to find out exactly why the film was forbidden. She recalls: "There were lots of rumors: it was the obkom, it was the wives of some important people, it had been screened at someone's dacha." Her own guess is that "the aesthetic of the film was so unsuitable for them, so unusual and alien, that they saw something else behind it, they began to smell a rat. Those who have seen it since are amazed to find nothing political there at all, and can't imagine what all the fuss was about." Muratova was "disqualified," stripped of her degree from VGIK and deprived of the right to direct films. She worked for a time in the museum of the Odessa film studio and tried to write scenarios.16 The few existing copies of The Long Goodbye were marked with white chalk on the canisters: "Not to be given out." But it managed to circulate among a very limited circle of filmmakers, where it made a profound impression and influenced others without ever being released. When An- drei Plakhov's conflicts commission on shelved films began its work in 1986, recalls Muratova, The Long Goodbye and Askoldov's Commissar were among the first to be reconsidered. Commissar had to wait a while because of the sensitivity of the Jewish theme, but Brief Encounters and The Long Goodbye were released with great fanfare as rediscovered masterpieces. Brief Encounters was especially popular because of Vysotsky. In 1987 The Long Goodbye won the prize of the international federation of film critics at the international festival in Locarno.

To get back into directing after the scandal surrounding The Long Goodbye,

14 Bozhovich, Kira Muratova, 11. 15 Ibid., 12. 16 Nowadays, Muratova can look back and appreciate the humor in the situation. She recalled: "The

party organizer of the temporary party cell in our filming group turned out to be the make-up woman. She was called in and asked: 'How could you have taken part in such a decadent film? How did you allow this to happen?' She defended herself: 'I didn't know what they were filming, I was just doing the makeup, I didn't have any idea what sort of ideological diversion they had cooked up.'"



Muratova was advised to try filming something from the classics, farther away from the dangerous territory of contemporary life. She decided to try "Princess Mary" from Lermontov's Hero of Our Time because "I hadn't studied it in school, and so it wasn't shopworn in my consciousness.17 She began doing screen trials, and the lead actress, Natalia Leble, did a considerable amount of rehearsing, but the bureaucrats began to sniff out "contemporary allusions" even there and forbade further work on the project.

Then, in 1978, Frizhetta Gukasian invited Muratova to work at Lenfilm, offering her the choice of several scenarios. Muratova chose an innocuous scenario by Grigori Baklanov about a romantic triangle at the construction site of a huge new tractor factory. The situation recalled Gerasimov's Komsomolsk: young volunteers building from scratch a new factory town, where they will then settle and raise families. Mu- ratova often has called Getting to Know the World her favorite film; she is fond both of its romanticism and the "aesthetic of the building-site":

A building site is chaos-a sphere where culture has not yet been created, where there's no concept of "beautiful/not beautiful," where there's no aesthetic (it remains to be created). Chaos may seem terrible, but to me it is wonderful, because there are as yet no postulates at all.18

Asthenic Syndrome also used an aesthetic that Muratova finds intriguing: "the aesthetic of garbage, trash, eclectic combinations of rubbish, but the construction site expresses laconically what I have in mind."19 Critic Andrei Plakhov has described the look of this film as

contemporary kitsch, picturesque sots-art [growing out of] the atmosphere of our towns and hamlets, and their continual construction sites: building, unfinished-building, re- building, migration of masses of humanity, the in- terface between village and city, the traditional neglect of public culture and the poetic cult of the romance of the road. ... A kind of socialist "Red Desert."20

Yet the film opens with the image of a potter, forming that very clay of the muddy roads into something beautiful and useful.

A comparison of the finished film with Baklanov's original scenario, incongruously titled "The Birch Trees Whisper in the Breeze" ("Shelestiat na vetru be- rezy"), provides further insights into the nature of Muratova's originality.21 The scenario largely conforms to the canons of late Socialist realism-little regret is voiced at the destruction of the village which is "living out its last days" at the edge of the construction site. The mud and disorder of the site are treated in a matter-of- fact way, as if the march of "progress" were unquestioned. The romantic hero proves his "worthiness" not to the heroine herself but to society, in a display of selfless courage in which he saves a truckload of workers, a new mother and her baby. Mu-

17 Bozhovich, Kira Muratova, 13. 18 Ibid., 15. 19 Author's interview, April 1991, Moscow. 20 Andrei Plakhov, "Peremena dekoratsii," Iskusstvo kino, 1988, no. 7:40. 21 Iskusstvo kino, 1977, no. 5:167-91.


Jane A. Taubman 375

ratova cut that scene entirely. As in much main-line Soviet fiction, the character of the romantic heroine, the construction worker Liuba Nesmachnova, remains less de- fined than that of the two truck drivers who contend for her affection: the arrogant, insensitive Nikolai and the shy, milk-drinking newcomer, Mikhail. Liuba and the audience gradually realize that Mikhail has been injured in an accident, and wears a prosthesis below his knee. Nevertheless, Liuba eventually chooses the gentle Mikhail.

In Muratova's film, Liuba occupies center stage. If she is still a bit undefined it is because she, like the life of the new factory-city, is also in the process of formation. Early in both the film and scenario, Liuba gives the official toast on behalf of "the social collective" at a Komsomol mass wedding. In Baklanov's scenario, "someone with experience" gives her instructions: "Look, Liuba, it's like this. First you wish them happiness, as they say, and success in their work, and, so to speak, happiness in their personal life. Let them know that they are being congratulated not by just anyone, but by an outstanding worker, whose photograph. .. ."22 Liuba is constantly interrupted by the loudmouth Nikolai, and manages only to utter a few banalities: "In general, we wish you all that you could wish for yourselves.... Here there are no grandmothers or grandfathers. You will have whatever life you build for yourselves."23 Muratova entirely transformed this crucial episode, filming a kind of romantic grotesque, with multiple pairs of newlyweds kissing each other shyly, passionately, and at length, the girls dressed in tacky Soviet finery. As an anonymous announcer broadcasts orders in the worst of Soviet rhetorical kitsch ("Comrade brides, comrade grooms! Wrap it up! The Komsomol wedding is finished!"), the late- arriving Liuba stands radiant on the back of a truck, microphone in hand, and tries to be heard over the din with her much-practiced speech, a kind of working-class folk poetry: "This is a great happiness! We are building such a big city, such a big factory! Houses can be big or they can be little, but that's not the most important thing, but more than anything else on earth it's important that the happiness be real! They don't manufacture it in factories, even on the best production lines."24 The newlyweds may not be listening, but Mikhail is. Later in the film, he repeats Liuba's words back to her, using them shyly to declare his love in the cab of his truck.

Baklanov's scenario contains a rather ordinary sequence in which the headlights of Mikhail's passing truck fall on Nikolai and Liuba at a moment when he is trying to force his attentions on her outside her trailer dormitory. Muratova took the basic idea-the headlights of Mikhail's truck as the extension of his gaze and that of the viewer-and made of it something uniquely her own. Liuba alone is caught in the glare of the lights, which begin to flirt with her, turning on and off. She intuits that it must be Mikhail, and records her pleasure with a little giggle. As the light remains glaringly upon her, she first tries shyly to defend herself, then, in a sequence repeated in five different versions, she walks toward the source of the light, taking on this intimate interrogation, engaging with it, growing ever more serious.

22 Ibid., 169. 23 Ibid., 170. 24 Ibid., 170.



Getting to Know the World featured three of Muratova's favorite actors. Nina Ruslanova returned from Brief Encounters. Natalia Leble, star of the aborted "Prin- cess Mary," plays a small role as one of Liuba's fellow-workers and roommates; she would later star in A Change of Fate. Sergei Popov, who plays Mikhail, would play the important role of Valentin in Among the Grey Stones, and is both the central hero and coscenarist of Asthenic Syndrome. There is even a cameo appearance by Soviet superstar Liudmila Gurchenko in a scene with no prototype in the scenario. With her love for improvisation, Muratova replaced Baklanov's young, naive co- worker, aptly named Vera (Faith), with a pair of nonprofessional twins. In one hi- lariously memorable scene, one of the twins reads the ritual speech at the dedication of a factory building, while the other, at her side, prompts her when she forgets her lines. Even this film, which Muratova thought "so rosy," evoked criticism from the bureaucrats, she recalled:

The characters were "distortions of Soviet people." "Why did the heroine wear such garish red lipstick?" . . . "They're not the right faces, the gaze is not right, you're seeing the wrong thing." Again they approved it, made a tiny number of copies and in fact, didn't show it at all.

In her next two films, Among the Grey Stones and A Change of Fate, as in the aborted "Princess Mary," Muratova temporarily turned away from contemporary Soviet reality to the seemingly safer project of producing film versions of literary classics. She wrote the scenario for Among the Grey Stones in the years when she was not allowed to direct. Its source was Korolenko's 1883 sentimental tale "In Bad Company" ("V durnom obshchestve"): a well-to-do boy, whose father, a judge, is consumed with grief at the death of his young wife, seeks the companionship of a group of homeless drifters and outcasts who have taken shelter in the ruins of a castle and the crypts of a nearby cemetery. Muratova's film emphasized the grotesque and fantastic elements of this strange company, instead of turning it into a Gorky studio- style tearjerker for the young. The boy's best friends are female children-his sister and the little girl whose death he can do nothing to prevent. Since no one else had been able to film the scenario, the Odessa studio bought it and set Muratova to work. But the film was so badly disfigured by others after Muratova's final cuts that, in protest, she took her name off it altogether. Even the original title, Children of the Underground (Deti podzemel'ia), was changed to the nebulous Among the Grey Stones. When, in the late 1980s, there were proposals to restore the film, it was impossible-the negatives had been destroyed. Muratova's marked shift toward the grotesque and antirealistic is evident in Among the Grey Stones. But without knowing exactly what remains of Muratova's original vision, a detailed analysis of the film as a stage in her development is problematic.

As Viktor Gul'chenko points out, the title of Muratova's first Gorbachev-era film, A Change of Fate, probably refers as much to Muratova herself as to her heroine.25 Her scenario is adapted from Somerset Maugham's short story "The Letter." Maria, the wife of a British planter in Singapore, murders her lover; her cover story

25 Ibid., 1991, no. 6:61.


Jane A. Taubman 377

of self-defense against attempted rape is compromised by a frenzied note of invitation she had sent him. The note is in the possession of his native concubine. Maria's love- besotted husband and his lawyer purchase the letter, at the price of the husband's entire fortune, and succeed in getting her acquitted. The paradoxical character of a seemingly meek and upstanding British wife who turns out to be a femme fatale has produced several adaptations of the story, including Maugham's own stage version and a popular 1940 American film starring Bette Davis. Muratova claims that she knew neither of these, and was simply basing herself on the story, which she had proposed several times before:

I was fond of the situation with the note.... I wanted a kind of eclecticism-some undefined Eastern country, a colony, a colonial, without any particular national identity-just natives and colonials, as a sign.26

She changed the setting from British colonial Sumatra to an otherwise undefined central Asian country where the heroine and her husband speak Russian but are not recognizably Soviet.

Muratova's version differs in many other ways from Maugham's original, which often seems merely a "pre-text" for the film. Passages of dialogue borrowed from the original story are recited rapidly, almost in a monotone. Her earlier films all had a tendency to isolate and foreground passages of dialogue, so that they become not part of the dialogue at all, but in fact quoted texts. The text is not the speaker's own, but an artificial mask, like the wigs worn by Evgenia Vasil'evna and Liuba. To mark it off from the "real" dialogue, the text is repeated, or "rehearsed," several times, as were Valentina's agriculture address in Brief Encounters and Liuba's wedding speech in Getting to Know the World. When asked about this, Muratova replied: "Repetition-that's my mania-haven't you noticed? Those endless repetitions are from a desire to rhyme, a desire for a kind of refrain." In A Change of Fate this device occupies center stage, for the story is about lying, about the heroine's false version of the murder which will eventually be "played" in court. In the film's opening se- quences, Maria is rehearsing, or imagining, the version of the murder she will declare to the world. It is not immediately clear whether these are accurately recalled flashbacks or products of Maria's imagination: the viewer is in the same quandary as are Maria's lawyer and, eventually, the jury. The film's narrative thread is as tangled as the yarn in the lace Maria is always working on.

A Change of Fate continued the tendency to ornamentalism in Muratova's work. Visually, it is a very busy film, the details of which are often left for the viewer to decode, just as a prosecutor (who, by the way, is totally absent from the film) looks everywhere for clues. The primitivist paintings, for instance, which hang both in Maria's house and the home of Alexander's mistress: Are they his work? How are we to read the two dumb-scenes of sexual innuendo and exploitation by the jail guards, which Maria seems to tolerate by ignoring? What of the grotesque Gogolian jail commandants, who recite identical racist texts about how a "white woman" like Maria differs from the "natives"? How, except as a theatrical grotesque, are we to

26 Author's interview, April 1991, Moscow.



understand the circus-style performance Maria's jailers arranged for her entertain- ment? Three prisoners, one who makes faces, one who eats glass, and one who wears a burning hat, are brought into her rather spacious cell. Stylistically, they seem to belong back in the world of Among the Grey Stones, and, in fact, Muratova con- fessed, that is exactly where they are from. She was so fond of the sequence, which was cut out of the earlier film, that she salvaged it and used it here. She also invented the role of Maria's deaf-mute dwarf ward for Oksana Shlapak, whom she had filmed in Among the Grey Stones. Shlapak's character adds nothing to the story, it only enhances the film's surrealism. Many details make no sense even after multiple view- ings of the film. While there is much of interest in A Change of Fate, it does have flaws. Perhaps the sudden freedom offered Muratova was too heady, and she lost the focus that earlier restrictions had imposed on her.

She regained that control in her most important film, Asthenic Syndrome, made in 1989 and released in early 1990. Two-and-one-half hours long and extremely com- plex stylistically and thematically, it merits a far more detailed analysis than this general overview allows. The medical syndrome from which the film takes its title is a condition of absolute physical and psychological exhaustion, a metaphor for Soviet society in its final years. The hero, Nikolai, a secondary school teacher (Sergei Po- pov), keeps falling asleep at inappropriate moments, such as a parent-teacher meeting. But his narcolepsy is a psychological defense against a world whose moral degradation has become unbearable. Though the horrors with which Muratova assaults her viewer were those of contemporary Soviet society, her message of despair and alarm is broader and more universal than that of her fellow-Odessite Stanislav Govoriukhin's We Can't Live Like This (Tak zhit' nel'zia). Yes, this is the modern Soviet grotesque in which she rubs our noses, but there is little of which contemporary Western civilization as a whole is not guilty as well.

Asthenic Syndrome may one day be seen along with Tengiz Abuladze's Repen- tance as a major cinematic milestone of the 1980s. But while Repentance allowed its audience to blame "Stalinists" and, if they chose, pass over the question of how the people allowed them to gain such power, Asthenic Syndrome places the blame di- rectly, and uncomfortably, on the audience itself. In its images, its language, its message, and even its length the film aggressively assaults the audience in a desperate attempt to rouse them from moral torpor. Early on, it shows a cat being tormented; near the end, there is a long, painful shot of abandoned dogs about to be put to sleep. In between, a mentally retarded man is tormented by two young girls. Watching these scenes is not a pleasant experience, as Muratova emphasizes in a black-and-white intertitle after the shot of the dogs:

People don't like to look at this. People don't like to hear about this. This shouldn't have any relation To conversations about good and evil.

The tone is Tolstoyan, and the viewer suddenly understands why the film had begun with three old women reciting, not quite in unison, "In my childhood, in my early youth, I thought that people had only to read Leo Tolstoy carefully and everyone


Jane A. Taubman 379

would understand everything and everybody would become kind and intelligent." Muratova is a modern disciple of that archetypal Russian moralist, but to reach a late-twentieth-century audience she chooses surrealism rather than realism.

The first third of Asthenic Syndrome was filmed in black and white from a scenario Sergei Popov had written years before. The camera follows Natasha (Olga An- tonova), a woman doctor who has just lost her husband and is hysterical with grief. The coarseness of the Soviet crowd sets her to fighting, and in a mood of total nihilism she invites to her bed a drunken young man who propositions her on the street. His frontal nudity is intended to shock the viewer. As in Aleksandr Sokurov's 1989 Save and Protect (Spasi i sokhrani), the nudity is vehemently anti-erotic rather than ex- ploitative. Suddenly, Asthenic Syndrome shifts to color, and the black-and-white seg- ment is revealed to have been a film, which we were watching simultaneously with an unresponsive and uncomprehending Soviet audience collected for a "meeting with the star." The actress who played Natasha appears on stage incongruously dressed in tight pants and a flirtatious straw boater; as the master of ceremonies27 tries val- iantly to evoke a response from the audience, they file stonily out of the theater. The film suddenly becomes self-referential as Muratova challenges her viewer: "Serious cinema merits discussion . . . (German, Sokurov, Muratova) .. ." the M.C. cries frantically, as the audience heads relentlessly for the subway.

Subway scenes bracket the second, longer part of the film, in which Popov plays the role of Nikolai, the teacher. We first see him as an immobile body on the floor of a subway station, ignored by the thousands who rush past or step over him. "Is he drunk?" asks the policeman called to the scene. "No, he's just asleep," replies the ambulance doctor, and they leave him lying there. In the film's final scene, Nikolai will again fall asleep in a subway car, falling to the floor in the pose of an inverted crucifix as the empty train lumbers off into a black tunnel. Between these two sym- metrical scenes, Muratova subjects the viewer to a series of loosely connected vig- nettes of a world so unbearable that Sergei's only escape from it is his narcoleptic slumber, mimicking, and in the final scene perhaps transforming itself into, death.

In Muratova's last three films, the animal world provides a moral counterpoint to the depraved human universe. Bozhovich noted the important symbolic role played by animals in A Change of Fate: the murder of Maria's lover and the suicide of her husband are both followed by long, Tarkovsky-esque shots in which riderless horses run free, off into the stark beauty of the Central Asian desert. Maria imagines a tiger in her jail cell, which blends with the tiger from one of the paintings on the wall of the native mistress's hut. In the film's final scene, the camera lingers on two kittens playfully batting strings in a barn, slowly panning upward to identify them as the shoelaces of Maria's husband, whose lifeless body hangs from a rafter. Muratova's use of animals is far more polemical in Asthenic Syndrome. We have already noted the tormented cats and doomed dogs. There are also the fish dissected by Nikolai's high school students, the caged bird tormented by a pampered cat, and the ravenous

27 The character is played by Boris Vladimirsky, a well-known Odessa intellectual who emigrated shortly thereafter.



cats kept by the fat school director. Pets and zoo animals are symbolically important in The Sentimental Cop as well.

In Asthenic Syndrome, with its crowd scenes, Muratova made more use than ever of nonprofessionals. The most memorable is the heavy-set blonde (A. Sven- skaia), who plays the director of the school where Nikolai teaches. In real life, she worked as the elevator operator in a building across from the Odessa film studio. Muratova found her so interesting that she combined two roles (the mother of an adolescent and the school director) into one. Svenskaia's unique "text" was her talent as an amateur trumpet player, which Muratova incorporated into the film. In just the opposite fashion, not being able to decide between two candidates for the role of Sergei's seductive female pupil, she simply doubled the character. It is tempting to apply the fashionable term "post-modernism" to Muratova's love for eclecticism and improvisation. "I'm interested in incompleteness, which I can make complete. Then I enter into active contact with my subject. It gives me the opportunity to argue with it, to exist along with it."

In the fall of 1991, as the Soviet Union was dissolving, Muratova shot her seventh film, The Sentimental Cop, in Belgorod-Dnestrovskii, south of Odessa. The plot could not be more different from that of Asthenic Syndrome: a young policeman finds an abandoned baby, and by the time he has carried her to the police station and then to the children's home, he has become attached to her. He returns with his wife to adopt the baby, but she has already been promised to a widowed middle-aged pediatrician. The scenario had been around for a long time but was held up by bureaucrats who feared that the element of the foundling child would reveal social ills better left unmentioned. Muratova admitted that the film was "the polar opposite of Asthenic Syndrome in all respects. I'm always drawn from the sweet to the sour. This is a small, closed, chamber tale and very sentimental. Perhaps there are echoes of Getting to Know the World."

The film does try, tentatively, to reassert some hope against the background of a grotesque society little better than that of Asthenic Syndrome.28 The young policeman Kiriliuk and his wife Klara, the kindly Dr. Zakharova, and the adorable, un- believably calm baby Natasha belong, stylistically as well as morally, to an entirely different universe from the hostility and indifference that surround them. The FEKS heritage is particularly clear in the film's long opening scene as the hero performs a strange, dance-like movement around the cabbage patch searching for the unseen child. His exaggerated, geometric movements recall those of Andrei Kostrichkin as Akakii Akakievich in Kozintsev and Trauberg's The Overcoat (1926). Like Akakii, Officer Kiriliuk is an ordinary "little man" in a grotesque world where people constantly scream at each other, dogs and cats are tormented, and human interaction in public spaces and institutions (the street, the police station, the orphanage, the court- room) consists of "framed" phrases repeated until they become meaningless. In con-

28 E. M. Vasil'eva, a long-time friend of Muratova's who acted as a nonprofessional in the film, described conditions of demoralization and irresponsibility on the set all too typical in the post-Soviet film industry and post-Soviet society as a whole. Muratova's assistants were more interested in flirting and drinking with the Frenchmen than with doing their jobs, and she was left to do the bulk of the work by herself (private conversation with Vasil'eva, Amherst, MA, September 1991).


Jane A. Taubman 381

trast, Kiriliuk is unexpectedly moved by his encounter with Natasha. "I covered her with my shirt, and she stopped crying," he repeats, vainly expecting everyone to understand the cosmic significance of this simple human event. Waxing philosophical, he muses on the miracle of love: "Why? Where does it come from?" he asks his wife, herself an orphan. His quixotic attempts to visit Natasha, "imprisoned" in the impenetrable fortress of the orphanage, are comic, yet he is never absurd. Indeed, Kiriliuk and Klara, in their bare new apartment amidst a rubbish-strewn landscape, are perhaps the progenitors of a new and better human race. They rise from bed and, totally unashamed in their nudity, like Adam and Eve, go about the routine business of making breakfast. Klara's full-breasted, large-hipped figure seems to promise fecundity. They eventually lose custody of Natasha to the pediatrician, but the film ends with a beginning as Klara whispers in Kiriliuk's ear, "I'm pregnant."

Muratova clearly intends The Sentimental Cop as a companion-piece to the apoc- alyptic Asthenic Syndrome, an assertion that life and love will and must go on even after the death of Russia. Particularly at the beginning, the film is full of quotations from Asthenic Syndrome. Kiriliuk is first seen trying to repair a broken doll; a forgotten, broken doll was the first shot of Asthenic Syndrome. A small boy blowing bubbles was the second; The Sentimental Cop moves from the doll to a shot of Na- tasha. Asthenic Syndrome counterpointed its visual horrors with magnificent classical music; the opening soundtrack of The Sentimental Cop is a Tchaikovsky waltz for piano broken at last by silence and the baby's cry. Animals once again serve as moral touchstones for human society: as Kiriliuk carries Natasha to the police station, he passes a loud neighborhood quarrel centering around leashed, contentious and bark- ing dogs. "They keep dogs when children don't have anything to eat," the onlookers repeat in one of Muratova's "operatic" set-pieces. After gently examining the baby Natasha, Dr. Zakharova returns home to her lonely apartment in which an un- watched television set frames a film of dogs and cats being rounded up and carted off to the pound. Kiriliuk's wife is also a nurturer; she works as an attendant in the zoo, and seems exhausted by the restless pacing of a caged bear.

In The Sentimental Cop, Muratova continues to move forward while remaining true to herself. The film continues her investigation into the dynamics of intimate human relationships and the relation of speech to reality. In her pre-Gorbachev films, Muratova was unwilling to compromise her artistic vision to suit the canons of Soviet film-making. In this, her first post-Soviet film, she shows equally little willingness to pander to the box-office demands of either Russia or the West. Though the central- ized Soviet film industry was far from supportive of talented art film directors like Muratova, Sokurov, German and Tarkovsky, there were cracks in the system which allowed them, occasionally, to make innovative, if non-box-office, films. Will the post-Soviet film industry provide even this marginal support for Muratova and others? The jury, not at Cannes, but in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa, Tbilisi, and elsewhere, is still out.


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Issue Table of ContentsRussian Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. i-vi+299-450Front Matter [pp. i - iv]From the Editor: Is a Social History of Stalinist Russia Possible? [pp. v - vi]How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces [pp. 299 - 320]Justice from Underground: The History of the Underground Advokatura [pp. 321 - 340]Nationalism, Assimilation and Identity in Late Imperial Russia: The St. Petersburg Germans, 1906-1914 [pp. 341 - 353]White Administration and White Terror (The Denikin Period) [pp. 354 - 366]The Cinema of Kira Muratova [pp. 367 - 381]Suspicion toward Narrative: The Nose and the Problem of Autonomy in Gogol's "Nos" [pp. 382 - 396]Correspondence of Literary Text and Musical Phraseology in Shostakovich's Opera the Nose and Gogol's Fantastic Tale [pp. 397 - 414]Book ReviewsLiterature and Fine Artsuntitled [p. 415]untitled [pp. 415 - 416]untitled [pp. 416 - 417]untitled [pp. 417 - 418]untitled [pp. 418 - 419]untitled [pp. 419 - 420]untitled [pp. 420 - 421]untitled [pp. 421 - 423]untitled [pp. 423 - 424]untitled [pp. 424 - 425]

Historyuntitled [pp. 425 - 426]untitled [pp. 426 - 427]untitled [pp. 427 - 428]untitled [pp. 428 - 429]untitled [pp. 429 - 430]untitled [p. 430]untitled [pp. 431 - 432]untitled [pp. 432 - 433]untitled [pp. 433 - 434]untitled [pp. 434 - 435]

Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and Otheruntitled [pp. 435 - 436]untitled [pp. 436 - 437]untitled [pp. 437 - 438]untitled [pp. 438 - 439]untitled [pp. 439 - 441]untitled [p. 441]untitled [pp. 442 - 443]untitled [p. 443]

Letters to the Editor [pp. 444 - 445]Publications Received [pp. 446 - 449]Back Matter [pp. 450 - 450]

the cinema of kira muratova

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