At CINEMA REBORN - David Heslin's introduction to the Melbourne screening of THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME (Kira Muratova, USSR, 1989)

 Editor's Note: This is the fourth transcript of an introduction to a program in the Cinema Reborn 2026 season. Previous introductions published by Margot Nash on the Australian Social Realism program,  CJ Johnson on One Hour with You  and Barrie Pattison on The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul can be found if you click on the author's names.

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Kira Muratova

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes of The Asthenic Syndrome  that “From beginning to end, this movie comes at you like a tidal wave.” If that sounds like it could be either an exhilarating or rather unpleasant experience, I hope I can provide a little context here to help you swim through this brilliant but very unconventional film. 

The best place to start might be to say something about its director, Kira Muratova. Born in 1934 to Romanian parents in an area now within the borders of Moldova, she began making films in the early 1960s with her husband, Aleksandr Muratov, before launching a solo directorial career that would span nearly 50 years. Much of that time was spent in Odesa, and specifically the Odesa Film Studio, which had been famous for producing the early works of Alexander Dovzhenko, among other pioneering Ukrainian filmmakers. 

By 1989, Muratova had already been making feature films for two decades, but she was mostly unknown abroad thanks in part to the suppression of her early films – particularly her 1971 masterpiece The Long Farewell, (Cinema Reborn, 2022) which was banned for its failure to adhere to the dictates of social realism. Like many iconoclastic Eastern European directors of the time, her career throughout the 1970s and early 1980s existed in tension with authorities. She spent years on end unable to make films, and when she did, the interventions were often intolerable; indeed, her 1983 film Among Grey Stones received such a butchered final cut that she refused to be credited. 

That all changed with glasnost; keen to atone for the sins of their predecessors, a newly appointed film commission rushed to revive her work. Her first two features, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, were finally allowed to be screened at festivals abroad across 1987 and 1988, where they received major awards, and The Asthenic Syndrome was fast-tracked into production. But her troubles with the censors weren’t over: The Asthenic Syndrome would go on to receive the honour of being the only Soviet-produced film to be banned during glasnost, having been suppressed for six months due to Muratova’s refusal to remove the profanity in a scene on a train at the very end of the film. After the film was screened at festivals abroad to acclaim, the Soviet censors relented and finally released it without cuts in April 1990.

But it’s hard to imagine that this could have been their only misgiving about the film. The Asthenic Syndrome is an extraordinary satirical portrait of life during the last spasms of the Soviet Union; what it depicts is no less than a society and individuals within it in a state of collapse. Basic amenities don’t work; day-to-day interactions are guided by haphazard, meaningless aggression; aspirational slogans in the classroom are met with indifference. It’s not for nothing that Adam Curtis gave the subtitle TraumaZone to his recent documentary series about this period. Those who lived through these years in the USSR and its successor states – in which scarcity prevailed, institutions crumbled and organised crime was rife – know all too well that that is no exaggeration.

Even in the somewhat heightened, darkly comical version of that reality that The Asthenic Syndrome presents, there is an aspect of documentary. Thus you have some of the film’s stranger excursions, such as a scene in which four women go to look for a lost dog at a pound; we’re subsequently treated to a rather harrowing montage of dogs crowded together in squalid cells that seems to step outside of the film, even ending in an on-screen quotation as if we’d just watched an RSPCA ad. For Muratova, a vegetarian, this sequence indicts her society as a whole; if the most vulnerable are treated this way, what hope is there for humans? But the goal here isn’t didactic; indeed, Muratova approvingly cited Tolstoy for revealing, in her words, “the naivety of the intelligentsia who believe that culture and art can transform the world”. In contrast, Muratova says, “I’m not out to re-educate; I aim only to reflect.”

There’s a lot of bleakness in those reflections, but also a great deal of beauty. Muratova often uses the music of Schubert as a lyrical counterpoint here; and there’s a particularly lovely sequence with a slightly out-of-tune rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” that I think sums up the film’s melancholic humour.

The Asthenic Syndrome has quite an unusual structure: in a sense, it’s two films in one. The first, which goes for about forty minutes, follows middle-aged doctor Natasha, played by Olga Antonova, whose husband has just died, through the streets of Odesa in black-and-white; in the second, in colour, it’s revealed that the first was a film-within-the-film that a schoolteacher, Nikolai, played by co-writer Sergei Popov, has been sleeping through in a cinema. Contrary to what some might assume, Popov was primarily responsible for devising Natasha’s story, whereas Muratova claimed to identify most closely with the character of Nikolai.

Both of these characters have their own struggles: Natasha, in her grief, lashes out at everyone within arm’s reach; Nikolai, on the other hand, a sensitive intellectual who fancies himself a writer, is narcoleptic, and when awake shuffles through life in a detached manner. Both seem to be suffering in their own way from the syndrome of the title: asthenia, or a weakness that renders them unable to function properly. But this is clearly an infirmity shared by everything and everyone that surrounds them, and there is little hope for recovery.

Jane Taubman, whose 2005 monograph on Muratova is still one of the key English-language studies of her work, says of The Asthenic Syndrome that “Muratova’s triumph is in making apocalypse palpable.” So, with that, I’d like to welcome you all to the end of the world – or the end of a world, with the caveat that all empires in decline eventually come to resemble one another.

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Eastern Europe - 6 (41) The Soviet Union

Russia: Mikhail Kalatozov b.03    Grigory Chukhrai b.21    Marlen Khutsiev b.25     Mikhail Kalik  b.27    Vassili Shukshin b. 29     Andrei Tarkovsky (International Film Guide Director of the Year,1983) b.32    Andrei Konchalovsky b.37    Larisa Sheptiko* b.38    Georgia : Otar Iosseliani b.34   Giorgi Shengelaia b.37     Ukraine : Serge Paradjanov b.24    Kira Muratova* b.34   Yuri Ilienko b.36

The Thaw and the counter-offensive.

The Thaw was given its name in 1954 by a writer, Ilya Ehrenberg, applying equally to all the arts. While not rejecting Socialist Realism, writers began calling for ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’ in art and a new focus on individual human beings in place of stereotyped heroes in simplistic monumental epics that rewrote history (Johnson  641). Following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, the Thaw took effect in all spheres of political and social life. Film critics considered that the following decade (1957-67) as the time in which the ‘liberal generation of the 60s’ held sway in the cinema. What was considered relevant was not the age of the film director but the designation of a new film style and thematics. Films directed by the ‘old guard’ such as Mikhail Kalatazov and Mikhail Romm or those whose debuts were delayed by the war like Grigory Chukhrai, were rapidly approved by an administration bent on changing the Stalinist system, along with projects directed by newcomers like Andrei Konchalovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky (ibid).

Grigory Chukhrai (1921-2001, above) was the director of two of the three films that brought Soviet cinema back onto the world's stage: The Forty First (1956) and The Ballad of a Soldier (1959). The first film's central focus on the emotional complexities in a relationship between a Red commissar and her White prisoner during the civil war of 1918-20 was taken to be an initial sign in Soviet cinema of the political and  cultural Thaw following Stalin's death in 1953. This seemed to be confirmed by Chukhrai's second feature, the humanity in portraying the suffering inflicted on ordinary Russians by war taking precedence over ideologically driven heroics. Both films won the Cannes Palme D'or for their humanist expressiveness.

The Cranes are Flying (1957), directed by Georgian Mikhail Kalatozov (1903-73, above), attracted criticism at home for “formalism and naturalism” not for the first time in Kalatozov's career. In the early thirties his second film, a semi-documentary Salt for Svanetia (1930) was banned for its lyricism. The “formalist” shibboleth arose yet again when in the early sixties he made a Russo-Cuban tribute to the Cuban revolution, four stories illustrating pre-revolutionary inequalities , I am Cuba (1965), filmed on location from a script by two poets, Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Enrique Barnet. The resultant  cine-poem in dazzling widescreen imagery, loosely inspired by Eisenstein, is a textbook of the formal possibilities of cinematography. It was poorly received both at home and in Cuba only to be revived and internationally rediscovered decades later.

Revisionist views of the war and youth coming of age films were major themes in the thaw period. Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86, above) in his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), merged the two in a completely original way. The potentially conventional heroics of a young scout's exploits in war normally required to meet the demands of social realism, Tarkovsky transforms by interspersing minimal action in an hallucinatory landscape merged with the boy's dreams of a tentatively happy childhood and of his mother and sister lost in the war.  Central is a “finely placed profound relationship between the boy and a captain and a younger lieutenant in a paternal bond. “Tarkovsky’s visual and aural presentation, his stylized, often expressionistic camera work and sound [are] all used to present the sharp contrast between Ivan's two worlds... [he] is a man-child whose normal childhood is destroyed by war and his psyche warped by his desire to avenge his dead family.” (Johnson 643). Mark le Fanu finds Ivan’s Childhood “full of mysterious poetic assonances which seemingly come out of nowhere and can scarcely have been foreseen in the planning stage.” Le Fanu gives assurance that he uses the word ‘poetic’ with caution : “the assonances (internal rhymes) are indeed poetic, emotionally speaking, but translated out into meaning they can be grim and terrible” (28).

In the mid-60s Tarkovsky and scenarist Andrei Konchalovsky “found a hero who seemed to personify all the important themes of their own time” : Andrei Roublev, a monk who in the early 15th century had brought the Russian school of icon painting to its peak “appeared to them to embody the struggle between Russian backwardness, barbarism, and Asiaticism, and the effort to confront all this with an ideal” (Liehm 308). The film is structured in 7 episodes beginning in 1400 with Roublev travelling from the monastery, where he had been installed in the 1390s, a proponent of brotherly love, beauty, and goodness. He leaves the seclusion of his religious order and finds a chaotic world ruled by the invading Tartars, the film finishing in1423 with the 7th episode: the great scene of the casting of the bell. His art served the ideal that was not subservient to the powerful. The monk found faith in his mission “by merging  with the creative forces of the ordinary man who was disdained and unseen by the powerful.”  For Le Fanu “what makes Andrei Roublev so powerful is the film’s “uncompromising spiritual authenticity“ that at the deepest level, “culture and religion belong to each other […], indeed are each other, the single most daring proposition in Andrei Roublev,” Le Fanu suggests (45).  

In making the film Tarkovsky combined with his cameraman Vadim Yusov, “the inspirations of Eisenstein with a modern cinematic view of history as the real present” (ibid). After a memorable showing at  Moscow’s Dom (House of Film) surrounded by police, Andrei Roublev was shelved because of the portrayal of conflict between the artist and the political power structure. Tarkovsky refused to accept numerous editing changes suggested by the censor. It was finally given limited distribution in the Soviet Union in 1971 and after further cuts broader international distribution in 1973.

In the five films he directed between 1962-86, Paul Schrader identifies Tarkovsky as a pivotal figure in the evolution of time in the cinema. While acknowledging that Tarkovsky was not interested in the religious per se, Schrader notes that “he often spoke of the spiritual nature of film art and employed religious imagery“ (6). Schrader continues that Tarkovsky’s “primary interest was in cinema’s ability to evoke poetry and memory that is ‘more pantheistic than theistic’, a disputable opinion, Schrader notes, quoting theological film scholar Joseph Kickasola who in his book on Kieslowski’s films described Tarkovsky as “one of the most directly religious filmmakers ever.“ Schrader concludes that “Tarkovsky was more interested in passing through the portal [into transcendental film] himself than he was in escorting his viewer“ (23). Standing in a long line of documentary observers of life and more particularly contemplative stylists  - Ophuls, Mizoguchi, Rossellini, Resnais, Dreyer, Bergman and Bresson - Tarkovsky embraced Andre Bazin’s ontology of cinema (“the photographic image is the object itself”) while turning it on its head in asserting “that the image of things is the image of their duration.”  What distinguishes Tarkovsky in his interest in Bergson’s durée - time itself - Schrader suggests - is that he used film techniques to study time “as the vital force governing and meditating on all organic life” (ibid 7). Like Pasolini, Tarkovsky believed that “modern mass culture aimed at the consumer, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being”(42). He believed that “through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form”(37).

A key to Tarkovsky’s cinema is what critic J. Hoberman calls his “profound immersion in the image.” Graham Petrie sees in Tarkovsky’s films “the creation of a filmic world that has the power, mystery, ambiguity and essential reality of a dream.” The way time and space can be modulated within the individual shot is suggested by the evocative title of Tarkovsky’s  book, ‘Sculpting in Time’. In his writing this is expressed as an antagonism to Eisenstein’s immersion in the juxtaposing of shots (montage). It is this immersion in the image (and the resultant preference for long takes) that gives Tarkovsky’s images the hallucinatory quality that increasingly pervaded his work. Andrei Konchalovsky’s (pictured above) first independent production The First Teacher (1965), centred on the post-revolutionary conflict between the values of a young teacher and the ancient traditions of the Kirghiz mountains filmed on location, marked by the then unorthodox development in Soviet cinema of “a poetic yet gritty neo-realism.”  Soon after the completion of the script for Andrei Roublev, Konchalovsky made The Story of Asya Klyachina (1966) in which a crippled village girl refuses to accept her conventional fate as an unmarried mother. In documenting the hard life of a typical Soviet collective farm made with barely concealed anger on location with farmers playing all but the major roles Kochalovsky’s film was damned and banned outright without appeal in 1967 for showing clear economic failures of communism. He turned to adaptation of Russian classics filmed impressively in colour visually following in the tradition of Russian painting: an adaptation of Turgenev’s Nest of Gentry (1969) and Uncle Vanya (1970) widely considered the best adaptation of a Chekov play.

Vida Johnson makes the point that while western sources on the cinema of the Thaw tended to focus on the ‘serious films’ that garnered festival attention and art house release, it was comedies like the 1956 hit with comedy-starved Russian audiences (comedies had disappeared after the war), Carnival Night (Karnavalnaya) satirising bureaucracy, the debut of the prolific comedy director Elder Ryazanov, that even had Party leaders calling for revivals (641).

Spring on Zarechna Street (1956), was co-directed by Marlen Khutsiev (1925-2019, above) “one of the most talented of the middle generation,” co-directed with Felix Mironer the first of a number of films directed by Khutsiev on the life and loves of young adults. In Khusiev’s solo debut, Two Fedors (Eva Fedora 1959),   a friendship between a demobilised soldier and a small homeless boy is set against the backdrop of the everyday reality of postwar Soviet life. In 1962 film culture came under attack from Khrushchev with Khutsiev's controversial. Lenin’s Guard (Zastava Ilyicha ) and Mikhail  Romm's  Nine Days of One Year (1961) which raised contemporary issues and problems as the main targets. “Romm both accurately captured the mood of Soviet society and strove for a new, contemporary approach to its problems […] that could no longer be shelved” (Liehm 212).

Lenin’s Guard “presented an almost plotless flow of narration that showed the everyday life of three young people of Moscow seeking desperately for a moral ideal. “The past of the fathers, who had an ideal to live and to die for, is mute, the present empty.” (ibid 216). The Liehm's comment on the film's stylistic authenticity is consistent with Khutsiev's belief that he was presenting an ”ordinary” view of the world but his portrait of the city and its inhabitants “was then unique in Soviet cinema.” Khrushchev attacked the then unfinished work's view of the older generation. Shelved, then re-edited, partly reshot, and re-titled as I’m Twenty (Mnye dvadsat let) re-released in 1964 stripped of the chance to establish what should have been a new trend in Soviet cinema. The Liehms add that its gifted scriptwriter, Gennadi Shipalikov, killed himself 10 years later “when he saw no hope for independent work.”

Kalatozov, Kalik, Tarkovsky Mikael Kalik et al, directly challenged the doctrinaire realism imposed by the social realist formula, others were attempting to find a path to a new realism in an understated, sparer style. Films about children, partly inspired by Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956) were quite popular, opening up the possibility for the fresh perspective offered by children not burdened by life's experiences, politics and ideology. The Thaw did allow for a variety of styles to emerge, the lyrical side by side with more prosaic narratives. Suggested better examples of the genre are Khutsiev's Two Fedors (1959) q.v., Igor Talankin's Seriozha (1962) and “probably the best of them,” Mikhail Kalik's (1927-2017, above) first feature, Man Follows the Sun (1962) which “follows a boy's lyrical, fable-like journey through the city to face a number of […] vignettes of good and evil” (Johnson 644) further described by the Liehms as “a truly revolutionary attempt to return to the inspiration of the avant garde and its concept of the film as visual art” (212). Kalik’s short but significant career of five features continued in the Moldavian film studios with Journey Into April / Puteshestviye v aprel (1963) followed by The Last Month of Autumn / Prosledniy mesiats aseni (1965) “a mature lyrical film about the yearnings, dreams and disappointments of old age - above all a poem about [his cameraman Vadim] Derbena’s native land” (Liehm 311). Kalik’s  4th feature Goodbye Boys / Do svidanya malchiki (1966), based on a popular book for young readers, presents an ironical picture of the manner in which its empty, superficial “young heroes” were raised and educated. After much hesitation it was given a limited release and never shown abroad. Kalik made one further feature, To Love / Lyubit (1968), and then emigrated from the Soviet Union (ibid 312).

Johnson notes that the Moscow International Film Festival was founded in 1959 to provide a showcase for Soviet films, and reestablish contact with western cinema which had been cut-off under Stalinism. In the mid-60s “a number of clearly formulated cinematic attempts were made to show the difficulties of communication within the structure of modern urban life which did not stabilise in the Soviet Union until the sixties” (ibid 319). The Liehms nominate the most interesting of these films as Ukrainian Larisa Shepitko’s (1938-79, above) The Wings / Krilya (1966), the portrait of a famous woman pilot unable to spend the rest of her life living on her past reputation and experiencing great difficulties coming to terms with her surroundings. Shepitko’s “almost Antonionian” portrait, in You and I / Ty i ya (1971), is of a successful man in his thirties, in a desperate attempt to recover his identity, flees from the city to the natural surroundings of Siberia. Both in the choice of subject and Sheptiko’s attempt to move away from descriptive social realism to a more interior style in all three features completed prior to her award winning breakthrough with The Ascent (1977), ran into censorship problems. The Liehms praise writer Vassili Shukshin (1929-74 ) for having the courage to show on the screen the “real Russian peasant” and his inner world, not just as a dressed-up image. His great success on film was The Red Snowball Bush (1973), the tragic and off-beat story of an ex-convict showing urban life as a corrupting source from which it was possible to rebuild one’s morality by returning to roots in the ethically pure countryside.

The Thaw came to an end in 1967 with the banning of The Story of Asya, along with Tarkovsky's second feature Andrei Roublev and Alexandr Askoldov's (1932 -2018, above) The Commissar (1967). Askoldov's film was banned  because it offered an uncomfortably ruthless portrait of a female commissar during the Civil War in 1920 but it was also seen to present the Jewish family she is billeted with more sympathetically than the commissar, despite their reconciliation at the end.  Askoldov was officially stripped of his profession and was never allowed to make a film again. Johnson adds that not even Paradjanov, who was jailed for 4 years in 1974  (on trumped-up charges of homosexuality and inciting nationalism), was not prevented from making films upon his release.

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The Soviet film industry would continue to increase output to 140-150 features per year  in the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority produced in the studios of the Russian republic, mainly in Moscow and Leningrad. However, the 1960s saw the reopening of of regional studios and the revival of national film traditions which had been suppressed under Stalin. This was particularly evident in Lithuania where the talented director Vitautus Zhalakevichius worked and in the Ukraine, where the tradition of Dovzenko productions  was carried on by Sergei Paradjanov and his cameraman, Yuri Ilienko (1936-2010), ‘the surrealist from Zaporozhye’, who directed the ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ White Bird with a Black Spot(Belaya ptitsa s chernoy oymetinoy 1971)  (Johnson 641). Paradoxically the authorities in Moscow created exceptional circumstances for film production in the republics only to restrict production and especially distribution with the ‘yoke of finicky ideology’ (Radvanyi 652).

Sergei Paradjanov (1924-90, above) was born of Armenian parents in Georgia. An adolescent passion for music shifted to cinema.  He graduated from the Moscow film school VGIK in 1952. He began directing features for the Dovzhenko Film Studios in the Ukraine and achieved an artistic breakthrough, together with cameraman Yuri Ilyenko, with his fifth feature, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a film poem inspired by the writings of Ukrainian impressionist author Mykhailo Kotsyubinsky and Western Ukrainian folklore. The theme is a Romeo and Juliet love story set against the background of warring families in 19th-century Carpathia. There are tensions in the culture where Christianity is the main religion yet pagan practices remain. “Paradjanov was the first to indicate the degree to which folklore and local artistic tradition could once again become a source of visual wealth in Soviet national cinema. Dovzhenko seemed to live again on the screen - though not through imitation.” (Liehm 218)

In 1968 Paradjanov returned to Armenia to continue his efforts to break the convention of narrative film by speaking a purely pictorial language unheard of in Soviet cinema since the liquidation of the avant garde. Based on episodes from the life of 18th century Armenian poet-troubadour Sayat Nova, the film is also a paean to Armenian history and culture. The Colour of  Pomegranates (1969) was accused of formalism and other sins, meeting the same fate as Andrei Roublev, screening briefly in cut and re-structured form only in Armenia, blocked from wider release. A print of the original version was rediscovered and restored to be released on Blu-ray in 2018.

“If The Colour of Pomegranates was a building it would be a world heritage site. Paradjanov's masterpiece stands as a monument of 'poetic cinema', an edifice composed of tableaux in the vein of Persian and Armenian miniatures. Its images are finely balanced between exquisite spirituality and gleeful vulgarity […] The film is more profane than sacred, in fact, and all the more magical for it” (Tony Rayns). Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is as chaotic as Pomegranates is formalised, confirming Parajanov was 'dangerous' because of the strength of his commitment to artifice – and imagination.                                                                                                                                                             

 Pirosmani (1971) is an effectively restrained portrait by Georgian filmmaker Giorgi Shengelaia (1937-2020) of the tragic life of the great Georgian primitive artist’s forsaking all security in order to paint. Based on the artist’s perception of reality - the subjects are composed on the screen as the artistwould have seen them - Shengelaia’s film, like those of Paradjanov, Muratova et al, “reaffirmed the importance of the national element and its autonomous artistic perception in the cinema of the Soviet republics.” Shengelaia’s film musical about the inhabitants of an old district in Tbilisi, Melodii Veriyskogo kvartala / Melodies of an Old Quarter (1973) revealed the same characteristics (Liehm 331).  

Kira Muratova (1934-2018, above) born in Soroca Romania (now Moldavia), made most of her films at the Odessa Film Studio in the Ukraine. She was largely unknown outside the Soviet Union until 1987 when, with the advent of glasnost, her films were released from censorship and screened at film festivals. Idiosyncratiic and totally independent, her vision has remained uncompromised. Neither seeking political interpretations nor moralising, Muratova presents an uncensored, often nihilistic, take on everyday life complete with its ugliness and cruelty. Breaking away from conventions and using experimental techniques such as punctuating fragmented storylines with absurdism, nonsensical behaviour and bizarre montages Muratova often assaults audiences with manically repeated dialogue or sudden shifts in editing. Her films focus on strong female characters, deconstructing gender roles and relations in a society in moral decay.

Muratova's first solo feature Brief Encounters (1967) breaks most of the narrative conventions in its documentary-like portrayal of Soviet life in a portrait of two women - one a village girl the other a head manager in love with the same man - highlighting the urban intelligentsia/peasant underprivileged divide. In Long Farewells (1971) strained relationships in a family scripted by feminist Natalya Ryazantseva, are explored “with almost unbearable tension in a series of fluid inventive sequences.” Her glasnost tragi-comedy The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) puts the audience through it in creating a window into the future of post-communist Russia through the lens of affliction known as hypochondria. Source: Melbourne Cinematheque 2020 program.

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Vida Johnson, “Russia After the Thaw” essay, Oxford History of World  Cinema  Nowell-Smith ed.1996    

Jean Radvanyi “Cinema in the Soviet Republics”; Graham Petrie “Andrei Tarkovsky” (ibid)                                                                                                                                                                                                     

 Mark Le Fanu  The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky  1987                                                                                           

Mira &  Antonin Liehm The Most Important Art East European Film After 1945  1977                                  

Andrei Tarkovsky  Sculpting in Time : Reflections on the Cinema 1986                                                                                                                         

Mark Cousins The Story of Film  2004                                                                                                             

Paul Schrader Transcendental Style in Film  2018 with a new introduction                                                                                                       

Maxmilian le Cain, Great Directors: Andrei Tarkovsky Senses of Cinema May 2002                                                             

Rusian Janumyan, Great Directors: Kira Muratova Senses of Cinema October 2003

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

AT CINEMA REBORN 2023 - Margot Nash introduces THE LONG FAREWELL (Kira Muratova, USSR, 191-1987)

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