INFERNAL ENERGY: REVISIONING THE STALIN ERA

kinokultura.com
2011
Rimgaila Salys

As national identity was being reconstituted after the fall of Communism, in the drive to recover the historical truth of the Soviet past, Russian cinema produced an outpouring of representations of the Stalin years. While there have been arguments in the West about the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, Russian filmmakers felt no qualms about engaging the violent aspects of the period, and almost every major director from Nikita Mikhalkov to Aleksandr Naumov to Aleksei Gherman has made his Stalin era film, though many have remained unknown to broad Russian audiences. Most of these films were released between 1986 and 1999, thus straddling both the enthusiastic spectatorship of early perestroika and the disappearance of audiences during the economic crises of the 1990s that culminated in the financial crash of 1998.

During this decade the distribution system disintegrated, movie theaters became dilapidated and were turned into shops. At the same time, Western films and videos became widely available and audiences abandoned Russian products. In 1996 the industry released only 34 feature films, as compared to 300 in 1990. A number of historical films, such as Lost in Siberia (1991), Moscow Parade (1992), Hammer and Sickle (1994), and Khrustalev, My Car! (1998), fell victim to the chaos of a transitional period and were given either very limited or no national distribution. Lastly, when the rapid rise in world oil prices during 1999-2000 sparked the beginning of economic recovery and Putin was elected president in March 2000, Russian cinema gradually turned its attention to other concerns. ... Now that the wave of exorcistic-cathartic filmic interest in the topic has passed, it is perhaps time to revisit this substantial cinematic corpus.

There is no single lens through which perestroika and post-Soviet cinema viewed the Stalin era. Instead of such a monovalent approach, I propose a taxonomy of the differing – and overlapping – topics and agendas preoccupying filmmakers as they attempted to negotiate the Stalinist past. In formal terms, historical films are conventionally subdivided into mainstream dramas, experimental or innovative films, and documentaries. I will be discussing examples of the first two categories, with the exception of World War II films and biopics, which have differing genre paradigms. ...

MAINSTREAM FILMS


Historical dramas construct their world as a supposedly realistic window on the past. However, film can only create a past that fits within its practices and traditions as a visual medium. Mainstream dramas on the Stalin era thus follow the classic paradigm, which is governed by verisimilitude rather than documentary-style realism and emphasizes linear plot, cause-and-effect narrative, clearly defined conflict intensifying to a climax and ending in a resolution with formal closure, continuity editing which serves to further the narrative, classical cutting (the sequence of shots determined by dramatic-emotional emphasis rather than by physical action alone), and a generally functional visual style that does not distract from the action.

Robert Rosenstone offers a number of traits that specifically define mainstream historical drama. Mainstream films offer a closed, complete, simple story without alternative possibilities. They give us the look of the past, the myth of facticity, and it is this historical mimesis that validates their fictional narratives. These dramas place the individual, whether prominent or unknown, at the forefront of the historical process. Even ordinary people as historical heroes perform admirable actions or suffer oppression and exploitation, and the experience of the individual becomes metonymical to that of the nation. Like other mainstream films, historical films emotionalize and dramatize a situation using the special capabilities of the medium – "the closeup of the human face, the quick juxtaposition of disparate images, the power of music and sound effect – to heighten and intensify the feelings of the audience about the events depicted on the screen".

The myth of facticity is observed in all the mainstream films about the Stalin era, from the abundance of period material culture in Burnt by the Sun (1994) and Not by Bread Alone (2005) to the authentic post-WWII peasant izba in Harvest Time (2004). But, except for Stalin and his circle, most of the prominent individuals in mainstream Russian historical films are fictional. Serious historical films are defined by the sense of "historical thinking" the works communicate and the degree to which actual historical events have an impact on the plot. These films may vary widely on the reality scale: actual and fictional historical characters may coexist in various iterations of both documentary and imagined narratives. ... In Encore Again! (1992) an army colonel, a Hero of the Soviet Union, falls into bigamy because of the prohibitions against divorce for highly placed officials and shoots himself after beating up a villainous SMERSH officer. In Burnt by the Sun Mikhalkov generates sympathy for Civil War hero and army commander Kotov, arrested at the conclusion of the film, by initially situating him in an idyllic space of innocence and then counterposing his heroism and unconditional love of country to former White officer and NKVD agent Mitya's betrayals for the sake of personal happiness. ...

Rosenstone makes two further points about mainstream historical films: because individuals are placed in the foreground of the historical process, "the solution of their personal problems tends to substitute itself for the solution of historical problems. More accurately, the personal becomes a way of avoiding the often difficult or insoluble social problems pointed out by the film." Rosenstone also argues that the tale told by the mainstream film sends a moral message and usually leaves the audience with a feeling of uplift grounded in the premise of historical progress: the film "tells us things have gotten better" or "aren't we lucky not to have lived in that terrible time?" Only a few mainstream American films like Radio Bikini or JFK question the possibility of meaningful change or progress. ...

In a number of mainstream films the audience uplift is limited to satisfaction at the performance of justice or the moral victory of the hero. ... Although Burnt by the Sun makes it clear that the major characters – Kotov, his wife, their daughter Nadia, and former family friend Mitya – either die or spend their lives in exile, the "factual" notices of rehabilitation for the Kotovs on the screen at the conclusion of the film satisfy the audience by implying that life has improved because justice has been publicly performed.

Finally, a number of the mainstream films conclude pessimistically, openly questioning the possibility of historical progress, and instead positing only circularity. ... The ending of Pyotr Todorovsky's tragicomedy Encore Again! also denies the possibility of change in Russia. Gde naidyosh stranu na svete, the massovaya pesnya that begins the film optimistically, transforms into an ironic commentary on the Russian land, as it plays over the concluding events. While the good characters die or depart in disgrace, the villains and manipulators remain, and continue with their villainies to the refrain: "Svetit solnyshko na nebe yasnoye / Tzvetut sady, shumyat polya / Rossiya volnaya, strana prekrasnaya / Sovetskii krai, moya zemlya" ("The sun shines in the clear sky / Gardens bloom, the fields rustle / Free Russia, beautiful country / Soviet territory, my own land"). The predatory SMERSH woman censor ogles another potential young soldier victim; Vera strokes her pregnant belly through which she manipulates her wandering husband; Captain Kriukov again beats his unfaithful wife; Mikhailov again gallops to pull his love letters to multiple women from the mail. The film concludes with the tiny figures of man and horse in a vast, snowy, typically Russian landscape, opening out and extending meaning to the entire country, where there is no change, only repetition. ...

Most of the mainstream Russian films on the Stalin era can further be categorized as melodrama, which Peter Brooks defines as the principal mode for representing the moral universe, for articulating vice and virtue in a post-sacred, secular, post-Enlightenment era lacking moral certainty but grounded in rationality and a belief in progress. As an expressive code concerned with moral legibility, the melodrama thus serves naturally as an effective vehicle for the representation of the extreme moral-ethical transactions of the Stalin era.

In her work on American film, Linda Williams identifies central features of the melodramatic mode that extend beyond genre and established categories such as the woman's film or the family melodrama and are equally operative in its Russian permutation. As mainstream film, melodramas focus on victim heroes/heroines, whose virtue is eventually recognized in the course of the narrative. Melodramas often employ an aesthetics of astonishment: when virtue is finally acknowledged, there is a prolongation of emotion. Characters are relatively monopathic, lacking psychological depth, and embody Manichean conflicts of good and evil. Melodramas typically begin in a space of innocence, which the film strives to restore at the end. However, the mode is equally preoccupied with the passage of time, displaying a tension between being "just in the nick of time" (the happy ending) and "too late" (the tragic ending). "Too late," the impossibility of returning to an initial, innocent and idyllic state provokes nostalgia that, in turn, triggers pathos. ...

Burnt by the Sun initially defines a space of innocence, a paradisiacal blend of banya, dacha, Chekhovian characters, and happy family life. Mikhalkov constructs Kotov as victim, whose virtues are initially obscured and overshadowed by the talents and charm of family friend Mitya. Gradually Kotov's superiority over Mitya is revealed, as he wins back Marusya's love, outdances and then outpunches his rival. But it is "too late": with Kotov's arrest, the space of innocence is forever destroyed. Kotov's prolonged farewell to this idyllic existence toward the end of the film produces heightened pathos, due to the tragic knowledge that we possess and the family members do not. (In the original, longer version of the film, the dachniki, who are ignorant of the future, sing Vechernii zvon as Kotov departs, thereby prolonging pathos.) ...

EXPERIMENTAL FILMS


Rosenstone argues that the only way to characterize history as experiment is through films of opposition: opposition to mainstream practice, to Hollywood codes of realism and storytelling. Most experimental films include some of the characteristics of mainstream film, but each violates more than one of the conventions. These works may be "analytic, unemotional, distanced, multicausal; historical worlds that are expressionist, surrealist, disjunctive, postmodern [...] Rather than opening a window directly onto the past, it [experimental film] opens a window onto a different way of thinking about the past". ...

Aleksandr Kaidanovsy's The Kerosene Seller's Wife (1988) uses the same alternation between verisimilitude and the surreal as Repentance. The realistic crime narrative, a bribery investigation set in 1953 Kaliningrad, is punctuated by surreal episodes: a gypsy cools down a policeman's anger by making it snow; the heroine's flutist-lover falls from the ceiling to play Schubert in evening dress; during a concert the heroine's husband pours kerosene on the flutist, lights a match and burns him to ashes as he performs; the investigating prosecutor sees an angel on the street after a priest tells him "we don't have them." ...

HISTORICAL THINKING


Both mainstream and experimental films on the Stalin era define themselves by the nature of their historical thinking. In considering these works, I suggest several overarching categories: 1) the assessment of the Stalin era from a moral-ethical or related socio-cultural standpoint, consisting of retribution-remorse films, films that deconstruct the myths of the Stalin era, and compensatory films that seek to recover the people of the period; 2) indirect consideration of positive and negative aspects of the present via the Stalinist past and 3) the absence of historical thinking, which is replaced by costume dramas and a collection of consumable images. I list separate categories for purposes of analysis, but also want to underscore their permeability: these categories are not mutually exclusive and several may converge in a single work. ...

The evolution of historical thinking on the Stalin era moves, not surprisingly, from early retribution films to critiques of Stalin era myths, which are generally simultaneous with compensatory works. The earliest films on the Stalin era, such as Repentance, already gesture toward their present, but this tendency strengthens during the late nineties and has become dominant during the past decade. Films that eschew historical thinking completely are rare and date from the last decade. ...

Deconstructing Myths of the Stalin Era
Historical films on the Stalin era engage and deconstruct its core myths: the Great Family with Stalin as father-leader, the New Man, historical optimism and the future in the present or millennial thinking, the enemy of the people, and the functional society. ...

The Enemy of the People
The myth of enemies of the people is, of course, deconstructed through every cinematic arrest of innocents in Repentance, Defence Counsel Sedov, Ten Years Without the Right to Correspond, The Cold Summer of '53, Tomorrow Was the War, The Law, Koma, and other films. ... Aleksandr Mitta's Lost in Siberia, a Russian-British co-production, set in the GULAG and with a detailed representation of its warring criminal elements (suki vs vory), boasts an unusual foreign hero, whose story is calculated to appeal to Western audiences. In 1945 a British archeologist, Andrew Miller, mistaken by SMERSH for a spy, is kidnapped while working at the Iranian border and sent to the camps, where he manages to survive and even fall in love. At the last moment, he is saved from certain death in Kolyma by a request for his release from his former patroness, the Shah's wife. Miller also becomes a homo sacer – starving, degraded and suicidal – who develops into a moral man. Completely demoralized by a double degradation, the harsh camp conditions and the dehumanizing of political prisoners by criminal inmates, Miller's epiphanic moment comes when he fights back, beating up the offending criminal who has put a dead rat in his soup, and declares, "I'm a human being!" Miller refuses to inform on fellow inmates, dares to attempt an escape from the camp, saves the life of an orphan girl, and refuses to stoop to a thieves' ploy to avoid transfer to the death camps of Kolyma. His transformation is an extreme example (he begins as a free citizen of the West) of Alexander Etkind's observation about the narrative pattern of citizen to victim to moral citizen in Russian films dealing with the camps as indicative of the workings of recuperative memory, which transforms the historical reality of the victim's senseless suffering into a moral journey.

The Functional Society The myth of a rationally functioning society under the rule of law is filmically deconstructed both through its most obvious iteration, the randomness of the purges, and at a deeper level – through the representation of a fragmented, dysfunctional, and pervasively criminal world. ... In both mainstream and experimental films the State and society enact not the Soviet legality of the 1936 constitution, but a pervasive criminality. ... A number of films on the Stalin era construct the entire country as a locus of criminality with the People as its victims. ... The Kerosene Seller's Wife is set in 1953, in a surreal and impoverished Kaliningrad, metonymical to the country under late Stalinism. The surgeon Pasha Udaltzov was imprisoned for negligence in the blood transfusion death of a patient and became a street vendor of kerosene after his release. His evil twin, Sergei, who ruined Pasha by switching the containers of blood, becomes the chairman of the city council and at the same time, the head of the local mafia. When a prosecutor is sent to investigate his bribetaking, Pasha plays the part of his twin in a masquerade meant to confuse the prosecutor. Good and evil, as figured in the twin brothers, are thus indistinguishable in Stalinist society, and the city government is allied with the criminal world. ...

Compensatory Films
This category strives to recover some aspect of the era from its negative connotations. ... One group of compensatory films strives to rehabilitate the idealist, patriotic Communists of the Stalin era. ... The problematic film of this group is the famous Burnt by the Sun, which seeks to recover a peasant Civil War hero (a refined Chapaev), who perished in the purges. The film skillfully manipulates the audience via the traditional devices of melodrama, establishing a space of innocence (the dacha and its environs, its eccentric inhabitants, Kotov as ideal family man), which is then lost, giving rise to extended pathos at the end. The film also sets up a loaded opposition between Kotov, the Civil War hero and Stalinist army commander, and Mitya, former White Guard, émigré and now NKVD agent, which favors the former on patriotic grounds: love of motherland and loyalty to one's cause, right or wrong. The increasingly lopsided opposition can be traced in the evolution of screenplay to film, such that summa summarum, the agent of Stalinist repression turns out to be not the committed Bolshevik, but a former White officer and émigré. In Burnt by the Sun Kotov's bravery is demonstrated in early scenes when he saves peasants' fields from tanks, while Mitya's Civil War service is elided: the depiction of scars on his face and upper body were dropped from the final version of the film. (See the 1993 script published in Kinostsenarii 4 (1994), available on the menshikov.ru website. In this first script Mitya also saves the Golovin family from intruding ball lightning. In the original version of the film, at the beach Marusya notices the scar under Mitya's shoulder blade, but this scene was cut from the American release.) Kotov's OGPU deeds are downplayed; he is now a national hero and a happy family man, while Mitya is an isolated unknown who serves the NKVD. Kotov essentially convinces Marusya of Mitya's guilt by overcoming her resistance through sex. In the process he argues that one always has a choice in life, although he himself gave Mitya the choice between espionage abroad and death at home, and Kotov himself has no choice in his arrest. Finally, in historical terms one can argue that there were many Kotovs but few Mityas, as modeled on Sergei Efron, who was moreover arrested and executed several years after his return to the USSR.

The clothing symbolism of the film supports Mikhalkov's argument. We first see Kotov and family naked in the banya, for they have nothing to hide. By contrast, Mitya wears fashionable clothing that masks his identity: he even jumps into the river fully dressed and slits his wrists in the bathtub fully clothed. Only briefly does he reveal himself to Marusya by throwing off his bathrobe. Mitya projects multiple, mostly performative, identities: the blind old man at the end of a Pioneer parade, the magician from Maghreb, the Summer Santa, the Mitya we all knew, the sinister man in a gas mask, musician, singer, dancer, storyteller, and NKVD agent. Nevertheless his performative identities contain elements of truth, e.g., the circumstances of his service to the State situate him as a belated participant at the end of the Soviet historical parade, and as magician from Maghreb he references his years in France: although "Maghreb" refers to North Africa, the word literally means "the place of sunset or west." After his grand-entrance performance, he plays and sings the "Vesti la giubba" ("Put on the Costume") aria from I Pagliacci in which Canio discovers his wife's betrayal, but must nevertheless don his clown costume, for the show must go on – and for Mitya the show is just beginning. Multiple hiding shots in Burnt by the Sun visually support Mitya's masking: he is hidden behind a glass door from his former tutor Philippe as he plays Russian roulette; he is offscreen as he washes off his old man disguise and tells lies about his personal life; he discards his robe only in offscreen space; as he tells the fairytale about his past, he repeatedly goes behind a lace curtain; his conversation with Kotov about the arrest is hidden from Marusya, who cannot hear behind a glass door.

Burnt by the Sun incorporates a folkloric stratum that comes out of the lines of the "March of Aviators" sung by the parading Pioneers at the beginning of the film: "We were born to make fairy tales come true" and continues in Mitya's created skazka. While he vindictively identifies Kotov as the fairytale monster Kaschei the Immortal, at the beginning of the film he self-identifies performatively to Nadia as an ogre: "Whom do I smell?". This folkloric code, in its imbrications with the paradoxes of life in Stalinist society, supports the framing of Mitya as villain and Kotov as hero. The surface narrative of Burnt by the Sun is concerned with the purge of a member of the Soviet military elite. In the deep narrative, a stranger arrives in a stable society, destabilizes and destroys it through performances that both deceive and expose the truth. However, Mitya's performances far exceed their official purpose: to forestall suicide or the destruction of evidence, a subject must be ignorant of the approaching arrest and, in any case, Mitya violates procedure by forewarning Kotov. The excessive, gratuitous extravagance of Mitya's performances identifies him as a trickster – a transgressive folkloric figure, both a malicious destroyer and mischievous prankster, driven by his own desires, who is able to change shapes and adopt disguises, and uses his wits rather than brute force to attain his ends. Through his pranks and violations of convention, the amoral trickster may function as a culture hero, revealing the truth about a society through his antisocial activities. Although he is cunning in laying traps for others, he is often not sufficiently cunning to avoid them himself.

Contrary to appearances, Mitya does not return to reclaim Marusya. He has finished with his life, as demonstrated by actual and symbolic suicide attempts and his self-definition as dead victim during the gas attack drill: "What about me? I've been killed!" Mitya has agreed to carry out Kotov's arrest, but he does it according to his own desires and in his own way, driven by the need to return home to the idyllic world of his youth for one day, to achieve the impossible – to have "coffee with jam," as he tells Nadia. He wants to go out with a grand performance, unlike Marusya's father, who lived an interesting and creative life but saw only "trains with geese" in his last hours, or Kotov, who talks mundanely about restaurants on his way to the Lubyanka. (The story is Mitya's response to Marusya's question, "Why did you make up that fairytale?" "Poezda s gusiami" is borrowed from Mikhail Chekhov's The Actor's Path (Put aktera) and pertains to his father's last days.)

Like the trickster, Mitya has lived his life under physical and verbal disguises and possibly there is no longer a real self behind the shifting masks, or "the real self lies exactly there, in the moving surfaces and not beneath". Mitya uses his wits to effect both his performance and spirit Kotov away. He plays pranks, grabbing Marusya under water and pulling a chair away from Kirik. His attitude toward Kotov, who sent him out of the country and then married Marusya, is uniformly malicious. Mitya disrupts the status quo by his sudden appearance and his truth-telling: he calls Marusya's uncle a polygamist, repeats Kotov's OGPU phone number to him, gropes the phobic spinster Mokhova's breasts and points out her careless dusting, and calls Kirik a lover of sweet wines and undemanding women. His fairytale tells truths that the family does not wish to revisit. Nevertheless the trickster is often too smart for his own good: Mitya himself falls into the symbolic trap laid for Kotov – at the beach he cuts himself on the broken glass that Kotov had earlier unconsciously avoided.

Rather than focusing on the more common melodrama of victimization, another group of compensatory films stages Stalinism via modes of active and overt resistance to State terror, resistance which is simultaneously figured as comic with the added lift of chanson and light instrumental music. Just as with the vigilante film, audiences reap satisfaction from the successful performance of resistance and justice (however temporary), while transgressive comedy and music serve to distance, to allow the audience to come to terms with, to put away, and, in some cases, remythologize – at least visually – a disturbing, painful era. In Pyotr Todorovsky's Encore Again!, the colonel and young lieutenant, who have bonded in homosocial triangulation over a shared woman, get roaring drunk and beat up, in prolonged farcical detail involving displays of long underwear and hysterical wives, the local SMERSH major Skidonenko, the villain who is responsible for the ruin of all the film's heroes. ...

The Absence of Historical Thinking
Several more recent films on the Stalin era, such as Two Drivers (2001), Nanking Landscape (2006) and You Won't Leave Me (2006), are devoid of serious thinking about the past, instead rendering it as a consumable set of images in the Jamesonian sense. The films are not concerned with historical realities, instead employing stereotypes and "ideas of facts and historical realities". Historical images, especially costumes, period artifacts and settings, serve as background or sources of entertainment for modern narratives, such as romantic comedy and melodrama. ...

While the older generation of directors who grew up in the post-war Stalin years recreate the era in loving detail (e.g., Gherman's Khrustalev, My Car! or Maryagin's The 101st Kilometer), they cannot be accused of simultaneously applying a purely nostalgic glaze. At worst, films like Pyotr Todorovsky's Encore Again! give us a happier unhappy time, but end in tragedies that preclude or lessen nostalgia. It is rather the films of much younger directors, like Ogorodnikov and Kott, that offer an uncomplicated return to a better time, one of course not experienced by them. ... In the context of sociopolitical liberalization and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the valorization of the Stalin era in cinema reached its apogee in the late 1980s-early 1990s, but the topic has continued to signify as it gestures toward the present. Given the significance of the Stalin years for Russian culture, there is no question that filmmakers will return to them again and again to reappropriate the era for their own time. Yuri Bogomolov has defined its paradoxical allure: "We're still going to return to that time, not because it's so attractive, but because within it is imprisoned a terrible, infernal energy".