Russian Upheaval • Spring 2017 Film Series

 

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE LIVED A SIMPLE WOMAN • ЖИЛА-БЫЛА ОДНА БАБА

World War I, the Russian Revolution, the ensuing Civil War and famine had a catastrophic effect on the way of life in an “average” Russian village. Peasants who refused to obey the new authorities found themselves dispossessed of their land, property and, all too often, their lives. Smirnov’s controversial film tells the brutal story of Russia’s suffering during the darkest pages of its history as seen through the life, loves and tragic fate of Varvara, a simple Russian woman.

One of the most prominent Russian-speaking writers of the twentieth century, an émigré to France and the 1933 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, Ivan Bunin, is portrayed here as the writer whose unabashedly bohemian lifestyle caused somewhat of an uproar in Europe and Russia in the years leading up to World War II.

Мuch admired by the contemporaries but seldom seen abroad in original form, this film can be considered something of a companion piece to the legendary The Man with the Movie Camera, directed by Kaufman’s brother Dziga Vertov. A gorgeous meditation on daily life in the town and the rural countryside, it portrays the spring-time devastation of rain and flood – preliminaries to rebirth – making spring a metaphor for revolution.

This program of short non-fiction films gives us a glimpse into the life in the Soviet state on the brink of its collapse and the reverberations of the momentous event in the decade that followed.

Amid the accelerating social breakdown of the Soviet Union, an unlikely bond forms between a burly, anti-Semitic cab driver—the hulking embodiment of Old Russia—and a birdlike Jewish jazz musician. As it examines the problematic relationship between the working man and the intellectual, to which the Soviet era paid such lip service, the film explores the paradoxes of a repressive culture on the verge of collapse.

Kira Muratova’s idiosyncratic, experimental cinematic vision was largely unknown outside the Soviet Union until 1987 when, with the advent of glasnost, her films were taken off the censors’ shelves and internationally recognized at film festivals. And yet her films do not focus on resisting or denying the Soviet — or any other – social system. They go further and deeper in their search for the timeless and disturbing reflections on human nature and existence in general. No surprise that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of censorship, Muratova became even more uncompromising as she renewed and extended her focus on pain, violence and death. Her latest film is an embodiment of her cinematic universe, with absurdity and melancholy taken to extremes.