The Mirror

1975 time travel movie

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A guy who may or may not be married to his own mother has his life flash before his eyes while he lies on his deathbed.

I should start off by confessing that I have no business writing about this movie. A lot of people who have stumbled upon my little blog probably wonder if I have business writing about any movie. The Mirror is a tough one to write about because it's in a different language. I'm not talking linguistically here although this is in Russian and I did have difficult reading the subtitles because I didn't really want to force my eyes away from doing their job of soaking in everything on the screen. Words were almost distracting in The Mirror. But I'm talking about the language of film. This is almost otherworldly in its storytelling, shifting from the past to the earlier past to the present in ways that make it difficult on the soul. You have to allow yourself to drift, admire the shots that seem like they're borrowed from paintings, and appreciate Tarkovsky's ability to make you feel--even if you don't completely understand--through visuals. There are all these perfectly little orchestrated shot sequences, awe-inspiring. And Tarkovsky is one of those rare directors who can make the wind blow and make birds land on top of kids' heads. It's like he's making magic instead of making a movie. There was some narrated poetry which was tough for me because I wasn't smart enough to understand it, and at times this thing seemed so personal to its creator that I had a little trouble connecting, at least on a superficial level. But then there were shots I couldn't get out of my head as I went to sleep after watching this, and I realized that this is the type of movie that you understand in ways you don't understand. One of those is a shot of Margarita Terekhova--the actress who plays both the mother and the wife in this, a choice Tarkovsky made because, I assume, he wanted to confuse me even more--after she kills a chicken. She stares a haunting stare at the viewer from another time. Time, time, time. That's what this movie is about. Past, movie present, the future when the audience is watching the movie. The final five or ten minutes of this thing has at least two of those coming together so effortlessly and so gorgeously. It's poetry on the screen.

Ashik Kerib

1988 Paradjanov movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A poor minstrel falls in love with a rich gal and then wanders all over the place having various misadventures, most of them colorful.

It's lucky for us that the U.S. and Soviet Union stockpiled nuclear weapons during the Cold War because if we had decided to attack each other with color, it would have been hopeless. This is my fourth and likely final Sergei Paradjanov joint (that's what he called them), and like the other three, this is an unusual but wonderful experience. This is very obviously filmed on a tight budget, but Paradjanov overcomes that with his creative spirit and visual eye. Admittedly, I was frustrated early. It either took this story about this minstrel a while to gain momentum or I just needed to be warmed up a bit. My suggestion would be to try to find a Paradjanov short to use as foreplay before letting one of his features seduce you. This not only looks great; it sounds fantastic, too, with a soundtrack rich in Georgian folk music, the only kind of auditory daffiness that could fit a lot of this imagery. Observe: lots and lots of camels and guys with unibrows, beard thievery, a guy with fuzzy dice hanging from his crotch, birds and more birds, evil spirits arriving on ponies. Visual bliss if you ignore some of the most stilted acting you'll ever see and a story that didn't make a lot of sense. That acting. Yeesh. It was like a church group performance with even less of a budget. This movie might have the cheapest special effect I've ever seen, by the way--horse flight simulated with a close-up of a spinning globe. Oh, with a couple of dudes blowing shells in the only way shells can be blown into--gaily. My favorite scene features a guy sharpening knives while a guy spins a colorful umbrella behind him and to his right. It's a beautiful shot anyway, but then the camera pulls back and you have all these women undulating on the ground in the foreground pretending to be snakes. I think it's symbolic. Which reminds me--for a movie that is supposed to be a children's movie (I read), this is sure heavy on the symbolism. I don't think children can think this abstractly. And there's also a sex scene where some clowns toss a curtain over a man and a woman before the shell blowers do their shell-blowing thing and a guy starts throwing doves around. Yeah, that's exactly as spicy as it sounds. Ashik Kerib is more flawed than the other Paradjanov movies, more meandering and choppily incoherent, but if you're hip to the guy's cinematic voice, you'll be glad you popped this in. If I get married again, I'm having a Paradjanov-inspired wedding and reception, by the way.

The Legend of the Suram Fortress

1986 folk tale adaptation

Rating: 17/20

Plot: All these crazy Georgian cats want to do is build their goddamn fortress, but it keeps falling down. Drastic measures have to be taken to ensure that the walls will stand.

My third Sergei Parajanov movie (see this one here and that one there, both highly recommended for anybody with a tolerance for the unconventional) and another winner. This one came after a lengthy sabbatical when Parajanov was jailed for homosexuality and smuggling religious icons [My guess is that doing just one of those is fine, but combined? Oh, boy.] and is somewhere in between The Color of Pomegranates and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, borrowing the folkloric source material and general narrative feel of the latter and the visual flair and complete abandoning of cinematic conventions of the former. Being from Georgia, Parajanov's movies are naturally foreign, but his are in this second level of foreign movies, the types of film that seem almost alien or made by a creative spirit who either hasn't seen very many movies, refuses to be influenced by other movies, or just can't obey the rules. His movies are in a different spoken language, but they're also in a completely new cinematic language. Like Pomegranates, this has these great artistic shots filled with numerous colors and is stuffed with symbols, most which I'm missing too much cultural context to really connect with. The actors stare mutely directly into the camera, and although there are some close-ups, most of the movie is made up of these deep deep (way back, it might be, it could be, it is) long shots where you almost have to squint to see what's going on. The narrative's confusing, but the strong mood makes up for it and I always felt like I had enough of the plot to grasp on to keep me from being frustrated. Also like Pomegranates, I couldn't piece everything together, but the visual details and novel camera work kept me interested for the duration. It's like my brain was saying, "Hey, wait a second. Can we pop in Dumb and Dumber or something? This Russian crap is confusing!" but my eyes just kept saying, "Ssshh! Hold up a second. Let's see what Parajanov shows us next!" and my brain answered, "Fine! I never get what I want! I need to be in the cranium of somebody who's not a pretentious knob!" and my eyes said, "If you don't shut up, I'm coming up there!" My ears then added, "Hey, the music's really cool, too! It'd be nice if I could hear it over your bitchin', Central Nervous System!" I had to pause the film so my nutsack, the pacifist, could break up the little fight. Anyway, a great movie for that class of cinephile like me who appreciate visuals and aesthetics more than anything else going on in a movie.

There's one more essential Parajanov (Paradjanov?) film--Ashik Kerib--to watch and then I'll revisit those other two again. And speaking of movies from this area of the world, I just remembered my goal to watch all of Tarkovsky's movies this year.

Ivan's Childhood

1962 war movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Poor Ivan. Germans killed his parents. He attempts to avenge their deaths during World War II by acting as a Russian spy, taking advantage of his tiny frame to sneak around undetected and bring back important intelligence.

I told Jen that she had to watch this with me because I watched (survived) the painful Meet Me in St. Louis. She agreed, but she didn't last five minutes. Too bad because this is one terrific movie! I've got plans to watch all of Andrei Tarkovsky's movies this year and decided to start with this, his first. Although this maybe isn't as avant-garde as the other movies of his I've seen, there's still a lot of stunning stuff going on here, especially for a directorial debut. What you notice first is the cinematography. The black and white gives this a dreamy quality, and the locations (swamps with streaks of dark trees cutting across gray skies, dilapidated buildings devoured by war) are filmed so beautifully. Ivan's Childhood is also the type of movie that makes you think about lighting. Three or four dream sequences, including a startling bit with a truck full of apples that represents the most experimental part of the movie, give Ivan some backstory as well as bringing his character, in his current state, closer to you. The kid (Nikolay Burlyaev) is really good, a child performance that rivals Jake Lloyd's in The Phantom Menace. The ending is a real downer but just about perfect. It, along with a few other scenes, are so good that you almost have to pause the movie to pick your jaw off the floor. A real soul rocker!

Next Tarkovsky movie: The Mirror. If anybody's interested in simul-watching, let me know.

Russian Ark

2002 trip through a museum

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A guy stumbles awake at the Winter Palace of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. I think he's a ghost. Anyway, nobody seems to be able to see him, but he encounters a Frenchman in black who can and they wander about meeting historical figures and looking at pretty pictures.

Favorite scene: The Frenchman leaves a room. The door closes behind him, and he just stands there for a moment. The door opens slightly, and a guy's head and shoulders peek out. He blows a raspberry at the Frenchman who immediately blows one back. Then, the guy's head and shoulders go back into the room, and the door closes.

This movie is boring. Maybe even really boring. Part of the trouble was probably that I don't know anything at all about Russian history. I recognized some names (i.e. Catherine the Great), but those names might as well have been anything (Danny Doppleheimer, Lance Bickenstaff, Corrina Peabody, etc.)because they didn't mean anything to me. Despite the movie's relatively short running time (just a bit over 90 minutes), I had to watch this in two installments. My son couldn't make it through fifteen minutes. Having said that, this is a remarkable achievement, and the more I think about the amount of work that had to have gone into this production, the more I'm impressed. The film's famous for being the first film that is an uninterrupted single shot, the camera flowing through a myriad of rooms occupied by seemingly thousands of actors and actresses. The effect is dreamy, hypnotic, and exceptionally beautiful. There's artwork--naked people statues, paintings--and the architecture of this palace is artistic itself. Most of the time, the screen is stuffed with beauty, and I found my eyes wandering from corner to corner of my too-tiny television to take it all in. Technically, it's just an amazing long take. If one of these thousands of people screws up, everybody has to get back in their places and the whole shoot starts over again. And even though this movie was shot in 96 minutes or so, it actually involved four years in preparation, practice, and positioning. When I think about how much work had to go into things like lighting, I'm just amazed. Truly an ambitious and extraordinary feat. The guy who plays the Frenchman, Sergei Dontsov, is especially good, and I loved how the camera would drift over a wall or a painting or thousands of dancing people and then settle on the guy just standing there waiting. Russian Ark is also interesting because you get a first-person point of view. You borrow the anonymous narrator's eyes for 90 minutes which puts you right in this museum. And you don't even have to pay to get in! I wonder if there are any other first-person movies like this. Is anybody even reading this far? This is too dull, too haunting, too historically dense, and too Russian to appeal to most folk, but there's really something fascinating about the whole thing. It absorbs you.

I looked it up, by the way. The finished film was actually the fourth take. The first three had to be stopped because of technical difficulties.

Masters of Russian Animation Volume VII

1997 compilation

Rating: n/r

Plot: Three stop-animators and four pieces by Andrei Khrjanovsky.

I likely picked this up for the stop-animation, but I was bored by those three shorts. Michail Kamanetsky's "Wolf and Calf" and Vadim Kurchevsky's "My Green Crocodile" are both kiddie works with cute talking animals and bright colors. Nikolai Serebryakov's "Ball of Wool" is more of an animated fable for adults about greed. They're fine, but they're nothing I really care to ever think about again. It is likely the only time a movie will make me wonder what a sex scene between a crocodile and a cow would look like though. The four Khrjanovksy works are fantastic though. "There Lived Kozyavin" is a brutally absurd look at the work of an office peon who faithfully follows his boss's order to "Look for Sidrow" and winds up circling the globe. "Armoire" has the same sort of surreal imagery and subtle humor. Things get wackier with "King's Sandwich," a playful short with bizarre contraptions and grotesque characters that reminded me a lot of Sylvain Chomet's characters in Belleville. The real treat in this volume is "Glass Harmonica" in which Khrjanovsky plunders images from easily recognized works of art. It's the language of Dali's wet dreams and as hilarious as Bosch's The Last Judgement. I was left wondering how Mr. Khrjanovsky got away with all of this subversive art working in the Soviet Union. The twenty minutes that make up "Glass Harmonica" are the best animated twenty minutes I've seen in a long time.

I Am Cuba

1964 Soviet/Cuban film

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Cuba, circa revolution. There are four stories here. The first shows Cuba's most destitute juxtaposed with the rich enjoying the festivities at an American night club and one bearded guy's night with a prostitute. The second deals with a sugar cane farmer who is about to lose his property. The third concerns the conflict between rebellious students and the authorities, and the final part is about a farmer being pressured to join rebel forces in the mountains.

Although there was very obviously an agenda here and although this could be used to teach about a variety of propaganda techniques, I really really enjoyed watching this beautiful film. It's a visual feast, and there were countless times when I thought, "Wait a second. Cameras just aren't supposed to do that." This 2 1/2 hour movie is just stuffed with the most elaborate and complex shots, long shots with hundreds of people, numerous props, and a variety of architectural or natural obstacles. One example is during a funeral scene. The camera follows a coffin ahead of a funeral procession through the streets. Then it stops and starts moving several stories upward along the side of a building. From there it moves vertically, across the street into another building where people are making cigars which, as I understand it, is all people in Cuba do. It then moves forward through the room until it reaches the window where it is supposed to stop. But it doesn't. It keeps going and going, hovering above the middle of the street for a while. It's ridiculously amazing, and there are lots of shots like this--cameras diving into water, meandering through swarms of folks at a night club, wandering slums dizzyingly with a character, swimming through the flames of a field, stumbling around a farm decimated by bombs. There's poetic realism to the proceedings, and one could almost mistake this for a documentary. It's such an intimate portrait of, well, at least what the filmmakers see as Cuba and its people. Absolutely amazing and highly recommended.

Man with a Movie Camera

1929 documentary

Rating: 18/20

Plot: None. A man with a camera photographs Russians going about their everyday business from dawn until dusk.

There's so much to see here. The titular man risks injury to capture some unique and kinetic moving pictures of everyday people absorbed in mundane activities. I struggle to understand exactly what the point of it all is (one could discuss its connection with modern day reality television or paparazzi, I suppose, but I'm not sure Dziga Vertov was familiar with MTV's The Real World--Tucson or how grotesque that Amy Winehouse looks in cut-off jean shorts); however, I sure enjoyed watching it. There's a lot of shots of men and women interacting with machinery which, in a way, makes this an interesting companion for Chaplin's Modern Times. Director Dziga Vertov uses (invents?) an assortment of film tricks--double exposure, stop animation, split-screen, slowed down film, etc.--which makes this not only an important document for sociologists but folks interested in cinema. Even if you're not interested in either, the images come at your rapidly enough that the movie remains interesting for its duration. Vertov creates a language of images here that is startlingly unique today and must have really blown 1929 audiences away. The version I watched had music by Michael Nyman who scores Peter Greenaway's movies, and it's always great to hear his stuff.

Recommended by Cory.

Masters of Russian Animation: Volume III

Animation from 1978, 1983, 1990, and 1979

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Shorts about rainbow blobs conversing with pipe smokers, injured ants trying to return home, cats befriending mice to the chagrin of babushkas, and children feeding apples to crows while bulls jump rope with little girls and Death taps brides on tender shoulders and asks, "May I cut in?"

Vladimir Tarasov's "Contact" shows us that hippiedom came to the Soviet Union kinda late. Some of the animation looks like it would fit right in with Yellow Submarine. It's a fun little short but nothing spectacular. Neither is "Travels of an Ant" although the insect voices, all done by director/animator Eduard Nazarov, are really cute. It's a nice little children's story. It's hard to believe that Alexander Guriev's "Cat and Company" comes from the 90's. Color schemes (purple birds flying over a yellow background?), style, and music makes it look like something straight out of the late 70's. It was a yucky cartoon. Finally, you get to the nearly 30 minute "Tale of Tales" (the original title "The Grey Wolf Will Come" didn't make it past the censors) which is unique and beautiful. There's a mix of animation styles (cut-outs, stop motion) and this gray and white texture that gives it a dreamy, sort of silent film quality that makes it really exciting visually. It's such a fragile-looking movie, almost like the images would start to crack if I stared too hard. I don't understand much of the symbolism (or narrative if there is one). If I had to guess, I'd say it contains a lot of allusions to Russian folk tales. Even without fully understanding what is going on, however, this is still a stimulating 30 minutes. The wolf is cute!

4

2005 Russian artsy-fartsiness

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Three strangers walk into a bar, have a few drinks, and have what has to be the longest conversation in the history of cinema, detailing every single last morsel of their lives. They smoke relentlessly; dogs bark outside. After more than a few lies, they depart and wander around in their bleak little lives. Then, some other stuff must happen. Then, I wake up, confused. Dolls get eaten by dogs. A large-breasted woman and some elderly women disrobe. A guy's arrested. There are some goofy looking pigs. I don't know what's going on anymore and wait for the credits. But they never come, and I'm still sitting here today, agonizing and wishing I were never born.

I know things aren't great in Russia, but surely somebody in the country has a tripod that Ilya Khrjanovsky could have borrowed. This handheld camera work was maddening and made me a little sick to my stomach. The imagery was grotesque enough; I didn't need to see it shaking around. It might be that I'm not Russian and missed some cultural stuff, but I found it impossible to care about any of the characters or whatever the heck happened to them. I was bored at the start, and the dullness sustained. This sort of reminded me of Tartovsky's Stalker, another long movie that a lot of people would find entirely pointless and boring, but whereas that was artistic and moving, this one just seemed like an attempt to show off how avant-garde Ilya Khrjanovsky can be. Good story and good film-making was sacrificed to the great God Artsyfart, the omni-incapable and all-noodling. Oppressive sound effects, extended scenes of walking through bleak wastelands, bread-chewing and breast-exposing babooskas with faces like catcher's mitts, general ickiness, more specific ickiness. It's even got a pretentious title. I mean, what are they going to call the sequel? 4 II? I think I've decided that I really hate modern Russian cinema and long for the days when things like this would be banned and never heard of again.

The Ascent

1977 Russian WWII movie

Rating: 16/20 (Dylan: 6/20)

Plot: Two Russian partisans leave their posse to travel through Nazi-peppered and brutal wintry conditions in order to find some food. They reach a village but discover it's been decimated. The one who sort of looks like Jesus is wounded, and the other helps him to a farm house. When German soldiers capture them there, they face their seemingly inevitable deaths in different ways, one with cowardice and selfishness and the other with dignity and bravery.

This is such a simple movie. There's nothing fancy, nothing much to look at, nothing spectacular about the dialogue or the story. However, it works as a powerful, if incomplete glimpse into the human soul. Told in stark black and white (actually, it seems almost entirely white at times), the film forces you to focus on the characters, so much that it almost feels like you're looking right through them. Without the shock and awe of a Saving Private Ryan, this manages to be more gripping and emotional. It's definitely a brutal couple hours. There's some Christian religious allusions here which makes it really interesting for a 1970s Soviet film. I'm baffled by the title. There is a literal ascent in the movie, but I'm not sure it's enough to have the movie named after it. The Plunge would have been a more appropriate title.

The Color of Pomegranates

1968 biographic poem

Rating: 19/20

Plot: Sayat Nova was an Armenian troubadour. He was born, had a childhood, read books, saw a nipple and a seashell, touched a chicken, learned the lute, fell in love, dressed in red, dressed in black, reflected, entered a monastery, swam in a river of lambs, moved his hands around, lit candles, and died.

So Parajanov made an even better movie than Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The fact that I have never seen a movie like this and will never see a movie like this again means something. With no camera movements and no dialogue (not to mention how the "actors" all stare expressionless directly into the camera), this is far from conventional. But it's also the most stunningly original thing I've ever seen. Symbols float in shots that belong on museum walls. Delicately surreal, jaw-dropping, and hypnotic, The Color of Pomegranates sucks you in and spins you, tickles your mind, licks your lungs, strokes your lobes, and sets fire to your genitals (in a good way). This is one of those movies you watch and then say, "I can't believe I just watched that." Can't remember the last time that happened. Actually, after watching this, I can't remember any other movie I've seen. I would not be surprised at all if this is the best movie I see this year.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

1964 romantic comedy

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Following the funeral of Ivan's father (a tree falls on him), he meets and skinny-dips with the daughter of a family with which his family is feuding. Later, she drowns. Oh, snap! He tries his best to live a normal life and winds up marrying another woman, but can't fall out of love with Marichka, the childhood sweetheart who haunts his dreams. So, he mopes around a lot and grumbles about having to share his vodka. His wife begins practicing sorcery in an attempt to change her husband's heart, and her actions lead to a weird pagan love triangle and a drunken fight with axes. Oh, double snap!

But the plot doesn't matter. It's all about the visuals! This has been sitting around the house for a while now, and I've been afraid it would bore me. I'm glad I finally felt in the mood enough for it because it's amazing and far from boring. Seeing the rituals and daily goings-on of these Carpatian folk makes for an odd enough experience, but the experience is doubly disorienting with the visual flare of director Sergie Paradjanov, a person I've never heard of. The camera (lots of times handheld) whirls, dives, loses focus, absorbs colors, slashes, swims, swoons, floats, jerks, and dances in electrifying ways that I've never seen before. There's so much visual creativity here used to make the beautiful into something even more majestic. Loved the surreal camera angles; really, almost every single shot in the movie was artistic and strange and just about perfect. Lots of religious imagery, colors and tones, and nature stuff, no doubt symbolic in ways that I'm too dopey to even understand, add to the depth of the story and gives it a perplexing grip. This is one of those films--like The Wicker Man, Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Story of the Weeping Camel, and the first Inuit movie The Fast Runner (the latter which I didn't like)--that creates an otherworldliness that just bewilders. This is one of the best movies I've seen all year that nearly everybody I know would really hate.