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| Kira Muratova |
Editor's Note: This is one of several introductions to films recently screened at Cinema Reborn 2023 which it is planned to publish on the Film Alert 101 blog. Margot Nash, is a filmmaker and a Visiting Fellow in Communications at the University of Technology Sydney. This introduction was delivered at the screening of THE LONG FAREWELL on Saturday 29 April at 10.45 am
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I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unceded land we meet on today. The Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respect to elders past and present. Always was always will be Aboriginal land.
When Geoff asked me to consider introducing this film I had never heard of Kira Muratova or her films, but she was from Ukraine and it was made in 1971, so I thought I‘d just watch it and see if I liked it before I said yes.
I started, but the opening threw me. I thought what the hell is this!! Jump cuts, discontinuous editing, odd spatial relationships between people… so I set it aside to watch later. I wondered if Muratova had been influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague with those jump cuts. I knew Adrian Martin was writing the catalogue notes and was a fan, so I did a bit of reading.
I put aside a clear space to watch the film and slowly, but surely, she drew me in. By the end I found myself deeply moved by this unconventional narrative of a long, drawn-out separation or ‘farewell’ between a mother and son, so I said yes.
Zinaida SHARKO as Evgeniya
But why had I never heard of Muratova or seen any of her films? It looked like a classic case of women being written out of film history, but I watched a documentary about her, and she was clearly a legend in her own country; inspiring and influencing different generations of filmmakers. Adrian Martin describes her as ‘intransigent and uncompromising to the end of her days’. I think I would have liked her.
His notes in the catalogue are excellent and will give you more background to her and her other films, but I shall focus of this one.
A note to those of you who heard my conversation with Jason di Rosso on the Screen Show about this film as I will go over much of the same territory.
Born in Kiev, to a Romanian mother and a Russian father, Muratova made films in Odessa in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, so this film was financed by Moscow and they controlled the distribution. Something must have really infuriated Moscow because they refused to release it, destroying all the release prints and putting the film on a shelf where it stayed for 16 years.
It was not until Perestroika in 1987 when Gorbachev appointed filmmaker Elem Klimov (who had made a film critical of Russia) to head the film bureau, and he went in and released everything that was on the shelf.
Oleg VLADIMIRSKY as Sasha
After seeing the film, my question was Why didn’t they want people to see this film? The official narrative was that it was ‘too bourgeois‘– referring perhaps to the nouvelle vague jump cuts and discontinuous editing, and that ‘people’ didn’t like it, but I suspect there were other reasons behind its suppression.
Muratova had to navigate the edict of socialist realism, which was the approved art of the Soviet Union. It was a style of idealized realistic art that depicted communist values. The guidelines were 1) art should be relevant to the workers and understandable to them, 2) show typical scenes of everyday life of the people, 3) should be realistic in the representational sense and 4) be partisan to the State and the Party. Realistic and representational were however clearly open to interpretation.
Last year I introduced some of the Waterside Workers Film Unit films made here in the 1950s. Norma Disher, who turned 100 last year, was part of the Film Unit and back then also worked at New Theatre in Sydney where she came into contact with communist ideas and joined the party for a short while. She told me how the Cultural Commissar in Moscow’s edict of socialist realism guided the choice of plays they put on at New Theatre and while she agreed with the socialist realism showing the real lives of working people, the heroic workers overcoming all odds meant plays had to show the workers triumphant in the end. There had to be images of success, not failure, so plays that didn’t have happy endings were questioned and usually rejected. Norma spoke up about this and ‘spoken to’ about it.
She liked plays that made people think, that activated them to ‘take action’ and make change, and this meant plays that didn’t necessarily have triumphant endings, plays where people make mistakes and sometimes failed, where people were human, and this is what interested Muratovar.
Norma told me about a 1950 Russian film called the Fall of Berlin where Stalin (played by an actor) descended from a white plane wearing a white suit like God coming down from the clouds to an adoring crowd. Communist heroes were infallible like gods and the workers were always triumphant. Norma didn’t buy it back in the 50s and Muratova didn’t buy it in 1971.
In many ways Muratova’s film is socialist realism because it shows how real people were living at the time. But it shows the messy nature of ‘real life’, all her characters are messy and this was at odds with the positive images Moscow wished to convey.
Muratova created the character of Evgenia a single mother, who is an interpreter, a translator working in the bureaucracy. She lives with her son, Sasha, in one large room that is divided by a wardrobe. He is now a teenager and while the space is an almost magical container of memories and dreams for them both, he is a typical surly teenage boy who wants and needs to explore the world men and of sex outside the maternal cocoon.
Evgenia is silly, impetuous, emotional and laughs too much, she is irritating at times, but she stands up for herself when she feels wronged, and she doesn’t shut up. She is a long way from the heroic worker overcoming all odds. How brave of Muratova to create an irritating character, a middle-aged women who is complex and refuses to shut up. She reminded me of some of the characters Gina Rowlands played in Cassavetes’ films and I was interested to note that Adrian Martin also cites a Cassavetes film Minnie and Moskowitz, which was also made in 1971. I thought about Opening Night, although Evgenia doesn’t drink so much!
Muratova’s men are not heroes either. Nasty at times, they are often arrogant, rude and sexist as well as authoritarian. Sasha’s father abandoned them both when he was a baby, and now Sasha wants to go and live with his father. No wonder Evgenia is upset. This threat of her abandonment provides the central conflict and tension in this film.
But Muratova doesn’t paint all men in a negative light. There is a wonderful letter writing scene in the Post Office when an old man has forgotten his glasses so he can’t see to write. He asks Evgenia to write the letter to his son while he dictates it, and she does.
There is another great scene where Sasha and his cousin muck around and flirt. They play Western music ‘Black is Black’ and a man from the Public Committee (as sort of local commissar) interrupts them concerned that Sasha’s cousin has left her job, yet again. Sasha accuses him of spying on them, suddenly droppings his teenage surly silence and becoming outspoken, just like his mother! They argue about ‘Society and the Individual’. Muratova may have steered clear of political propaganda in her films, but her characters just can’t seem to shut up. No wonder the Cultural Commissar in Moscow wasn’t pleased.
There are also wonderful cinematic moments where the sound drops away and time stands still as we look at something, a shadow, a plant, a young woman brushing her hair. The main narrative interrupted by silent contemplation. Like life.
At one stage Sasha talks to himself when he is alone in the apartment. It is a one-sided conversation which doesn’t make much sense to us. Again like life.
These are human moments, not narrative moments, and it is the minutia of daily life, a look, a touch, a shadow and the silent play in relationships that interests Muratava.
I saw an interview with her where she talked about how much she loved the film shoot, because of the freedom it gave her to do exactly what she wanted. I suspect she was spontaneous on set and trusted her intuition to depart from the script if she saw something she liked and then later reworking or restructuring in the editing room. I like how she allows spaces for us to think and put things together later, the ending is a great example of this.
I doubt she would have considered herself a feminist, but she unflinchingly explores interpersonal relationships through women’s eyes.
What is marvelous about Muratova is how absolutely recalcitrant she was. She found other ways to finance her films and kept making them. Adrian Martin writes that ‘her cinema will become in later years: baroque, deliberately excessive, hyper-textured, gleefully artificial, anti-realistic’.
I am glad she lived to see this film released. I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you
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