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.

At the Randwick Ritz, Hawthorn Lido and Elsternwick Classic - Sculpting in Time: The Films of ANDREI TARKOVSKY

 

The Ritz, Lido and Classic Cinemas, supported by Cinema Reborn, are presenting a complete retrospective of the feature films of master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (pictured above). These will be the first ever screenings in Australia to be devoted to a full career review of this master filmmaker. Tarkovsky’s work was previously at Cinema Reborn in 2022 when his masterpiece Mirror was presented in a superb 4K restoration.

 

The retrospective will begin at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney on March 20 and Lido and Classic Cinemas in Melbourne on March 27, where Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood will be screened at 7pm on those dates. In Sydney there will be an introduction to the season at the Ivan’s Childhood screening by Sydney University film studies scholar Matilda Mroz and the main screening of The Sacrifice during the Cinema Reborn 2025 season will be preceded by an introduction by critic Janice Tong. In Melbourne, critics Grace Boschetti (Ivan’s Childhood) and David Heslin (The Sacrifice) will introduce those sessions at the Hawthorn Lido. The Sacrifice will be a part of the 2025 Cinema Reborn season at the Ritz on Thursday 1 May and at Lido on Thursday 8 May, and will  also screen at Classic Cinemas, Elsternwick on Thursday 8 May.

 

Full details of the Tarkovsky retrospective, with links to bookings at each of the cinemas, may be found at these  links.

 

The Hawthorn Lido

The Randwick Ritz

The Elsternwick Classic 

 

The autobiographical note published below was written by Cinema Reborn Foundation Committee member Rod Bishop and was first published in the 2022 Cinema Reborn catalogue when the festival screened Tarkovsky’s 1975 film Mirror. (Click on the link to read Rod's excellent and most comprehensive notes on the film and its restoration)

 

“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had until then, never been given to me…Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream”.

 

-      Ingmar Bergman

 

Born in 1932 in Zavrazhye, 300 kms from Moscow, Andrei Tarkovsky’s father was the poet and translator Arseny Tarkovsky and his mother Maria Vishnyakova, a graduate of the Maxim GorkyLiterature Institute. He was only five-years-old when his father left the family, volunteering for the army during World War II and being awarded the Red Star. During the war, Andrei Tarkovsky moved to Moscow with his mother and sister where Maria worked as an editor and proofreader.

 

After high school, he studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow, but dropped out to work as a prospector for the Academy of Science Institute for Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold, spending a year living in the Siberian taiga in the Krasnoyarsk Province.

 

He was accepted into the directing program at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), making several short films and at least one television docudrama. Collaborating on a script with fellow classmate Andrei Konchalovsky, The Steamroller and the Violin(1960) became his graduation film and won First Prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961.

 

His first feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), centred around an orphan who becomes a scout for theSoviet army during World War II, brought Tarkovsky to international attention, winning the Golden Lion at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. Problems with Soviet authorities and several different versions of his second featureAndrei Rublev (1966), a historical epic based around the Russian icon painter, meant the film did not appear at Cannes until 1969 where it won the FIPRESCI prize.Soviet authorities had insisted it be screened Out of Competition.

 

The near three-hour science fiction drama Solaris (1972), adapted from the novel by Stanislaw Lem and described as ‘a sci-fi masterpiece’ by Salman Rushdie won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury atthe 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Mirror(1975) was not well liked by Soviet authorities and suffered severely limited distribution in the USSR in third-class cinemas and workers clubs. It was, however, heralded in the West and its reputation has continued to grow significantly over the past 45 years.

 

His last film in the Soviet Union was Stalker (1979), a philosophical and theological science fiction drama following three men journeying to a mysterious “Zone”. It won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes.

 

Some sources report The First Day (1979),a script by Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky set during the reign of Peter the Great in 18^th Century Russia, was stopped half way through production when it was learnt the film differed from the script submitted to Soviet censors. Tarkovsky was reported to have destroyed most of what was filmed.

 

In Italy, he made the documentary Voyage in Time (1983) with Tonino Guerra and again, with Guerra, started production on Nostalghia (1983), a film set in Italy about a Russian writer who is stricken with homesickness while researching an ex-pat Russian composer.At Cannes, it won the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI prizes and shared a specially created prize ‘Grand Prix du cinema de creation’ with Robert Bresson (for L’argent).

 

In 1985, he was processed as a Soviet Defector in an Italian refugee camp although declaring: “I am not a Soviet dissident. I have no conflict with the Soviet Government…I would be unemployed [in the USSR].”

 

His last film was the spiritually apocalyptic The Sacrifice (1986) made in Sweden and winner of the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the Ecumenical and FIPRESCI prizes at Cannes. He could not attend the festival to accept the awards and died of cancer on 29 December 1986.

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

On (French) Blu-ray - David Hare notes the restoration of Sergei Eisenstein's final masterpiece IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Ivan the Terrible (the great Nikolai Cherkasov) and his "aide" Malyuta (Mikhail Zharov) above in a screen from the incredible final Agfacolor reel/male ballet/orgy from Eisenstein's last masterpiece.

The last time I saw it on Oz TV every edit was accompanied by a jump, presumably sourced from a master without timing notches. It was incredibly disturbing viewing in a bad way.

The current Bach Blu-ray of this in France (used for these screens with French subs) is the restored print with restored and properly synched audio. but it's encoded in 25fps 1080 interlaced with a shitty Mpeg2 folder. The originals should be correct speed. It's better than anything else I've ever seen and the restoration is very detailed down to the individual edits which are smooth and without jerking. 

The movie as we all know was banned by Stalin who recognized in Ivan both his own paranoid evil and his betrayal of Soviet ideals) before it could even be released in 1946. It remained verboten under Politburo rule until Krushchev's gradual liberalization of the USSR saw it given limited release in 1958.

It's still underrated and misunderstood, in major part because of the post Soviet determination to deny not only the politics of the past but also Eisenstein's homosexuality which he literally ramps into the imagery and style of this extraordinary ballet sequence down to referencing the murder of Ivan's mother, and possibly his rape as a child by the Boyars.

All this of course is still poisonous slander to old time leftie homophobe critics like the appalling Jay Leyda.

These screens from a recent restoration by Mosfilm which premiered at the Berlin FF several years ago in the form of a concert presentation using Prokofiev's great score live which unfortunately also second stages the movie itself.

When will this masterpiece get the theatrical and Blu-ray lease it deserves?