The bold vision of Kira Muratova and its distorted reflection in New York
by Yuri Shevchuk
NEW YORK - Can a film-maker who was born in Romania, speaks Russian, has lived all her life in Ukraine and made most of her films at the Odesa Film Studios be considered a Ukrainian artist? Not according to the organizers of the retrospective "Take No Prisoners: the Bold Vision of Kira Muratova" which opens at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater in New York on February 25. The retrospective organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Seagull Films includes eight full-length feature films made by Ms. Muratova over the period from 1967 to 2004 and will last until March 10.
Ms. Muratova and all of her films are billed as Russian in all the materials of the retrospective - the Walter Reade Theater monthly program, the press release that was distributed at the press screening on February 10, and on the Film Society of Lincoln Center website. The only time Ukraine is mentioned in an indirect way is in the special thanks that the organizers of the retrospective extend to, among others, "the Ukrainian National Center of Alexander [sic] Dovzhenko and the Consulate General of Ukraine in New York." An uninformed reader will get the impression that Ms. Muratova is a Russian director.
Is this innocent ignorance or a deliberate decision by the organizers? Seeking clarification, I wrote to Alla Verlotsky, director of the Seagull Films, who was instrumental in organizing the Muratova retrospective. Here is Ms. Verlotsky's response:
"Only three of Muratova films in her retrospective are produced in Ukraine: 'Long Farewell,' 'Brief Encounters,' 'Asthenic Syndrome.' The rest, including 'Getting to Know the World' (Lenfilm), are Russian productions. Russian producers are the rights holder and they have provided us with prints. I am sure you understand matters of intellectual property and rights. I think that you should ask Ms. Muratova if she considers herself an Ukrainian artist. When we asked her this question she said that she belongs to the 'world.' As of her origins, as it has been mentioned in our press release, she is Moldovian/Rumanian."
Ms. Verlotsky continued: "Sorry I answered just a part of your question. As I looked closely, I see that you are asking me to give our curatorial rationale to the series. One of the reasons we wanted to show works by Kira Muratova is the fact of an incredible universal appeal of her work that make her a true international artist. As of the authenticity, there is none. There is no Ukrainian authenticity in any of her work as all the films were made in Russian, not Ukrainian language, they do not refer to Ukrainian history or culture, and they don't have Ukrainian film aesthetic like films of Dovzhenko, Osika [sic], Mashenko, Ilyenko and so.
"So who do you for example consider Paradzhanov? Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian filmmaker? I don't know... I consider him an artist, so do we consider Kira Muratova.
"In our program preface we say that she is a Soviet / Russian filmmaker which is correct. 'Long Farewells,' 'Brief Encounters,' 'Asthenic Syndrome,' 'Getting to Know the World' were made during the Soviet era, and her latest works are produced by Russian producers."
She went on to note: "From our perspective and from the perspective of international film scholars and critics there are no Ukrainians in any of Kira Muratova's work. I have never seen any mentioning of Ukrainian cultural influences in Muratova's work.
"As of the rights, four of her films in her retrospective were made in the Soviet Union (Russian language) and other four are Russian productions. I leave it up to you to make a conclusion of the ethnicity of her work. It might be an interesting critical discovery."
It takes a brief Internet search to find out where Ms. Muratova's films were produced. Here is the information from an article by Nancy Condee of the University of Pittsburgh (http://www.kinokultura.com/reviews/R1-05tuner.html).
While six out of eight films to be shown at the Walter Reade Theater are either entirely produced in Ukraine or are joint Russian-Ukrainian productions, the retrospective's program presents all of them as Russian.
Why is there not a single word about the Ukrainian part of Ms. Muratova's life and work? Why should an artist's self-vision ("I belong to the world") be the conclusive statement of their cultural identity? Can a director as sensitive as Ms. Muratova not be affected by the world in which she has lived most of her adult life? Who are the "international critics" Ms. Verlotsky refers to, who pass judgments on the "Ukrainian authenticity" of Ms. Muratova's films? Do they have what it takes to identify Ukrainian influences - the knowledge of culture, language, sense of humor, world perception, and, yes, geography?
There is a reason why Jane A. Taubman, professor of Russian at Amherst College in Massachuetts and author of the most recent Muratova biography "Kira Muratova : The Filmmaker's Companion 4" (The KINOfiles Filmmaker's Companions), February 2005, includes the chapter "Muratova as a Ukrainian Filmmaker" in her book.
What relevance does language have to the cultural authenticity of a film or even a work of letters? Is this why "international critics" still much too often consider Dovzhenko's silent films "Earth" and "Arsenal" to be Soviet and, therefore, Russian. Should Andrey Kurkov, Russian-language writer from Kyiv be declared to be without "Ukrainian authenticity," or should a host of writers - Nikolai Gogol, Isaak Babel or Shalom Aleichem to name but a few - who wrote of Ukraine in languages other than Ukrainian be considered without Ukrainian authenticity?
Ukrainian cinema does not begin and end with the poetic cinema of Oleksander Dovzhenko, Serhii Paradzhanov, Leonid Osyka, Yurii Illienko and recently Oles Sanin. There are other Ukrainian film schools and other film-makers, and Ms. Muratova is one of them. Upon her graduation from the VGIK Film School in Moscow, she began working at the Odesa Film Studios in 1961. She has lived and worked in Odesa ever since. As for the Ukrainian authenticity in her films that the retrospective's organizers refuse to acknowledge, it can be argued that it is subtle, understated, unintended, perhaps, yet unmistakable.
I discovered Muratova only recently. Until the early 1990s, when I left Ukraine and made my home first in New York, then Toronto and then in New York again, to see a Muratova film was not so easy. Initially this was because the Soviet authorities considered her films "strange and formalistic" and prevented them from being shown. (Her film "Asthenic Syndrome" (1989) has the dubious distinction of having been the only picture forbidden by Soviet censorship during the period of perestroika.) Later her films were not screened publicly because the cinema distribution system in Ukraine had collapsed.
My meeting with Kira Muratova, the Ukrainian film-maker, took place on February 10, at the press-screening of her two films, "Long Farewell" and "The Tuner" at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center in New York. It was a vicarious meeting, through her films. Ms. Muratova will not be coming to the opening of the retrospective.
The first film is a penetrating and poignant portrayal of the relationship between a mother and her rebellious son. The son goes through a tumultuous puberty and comes close to fleeing from his mother in pursuit of an illusory freedom by the side of a father who had left them and years later resurfaced. The unknown father became to the boy a promise of freedom. Ms. Muratova seems to shun any verbal mention of the location - Odesa, where the action takes place or Ukraine, its greater context. The only geographical references are to Moscow, Saratov, Cheliabinsk, Novosibirsk - all in Russia - the illusory world of freedom for which the rebellious son wants to leave his mother.
Cinema is not primarily a verbal medium. There is a wealth of visual, vocal and symbolic references to Odesa and to Ukraine in this film. I'd say, it is these references that give the film a special feeling. The undoubtedly local Ukrainian accent of her characters, the Ukrainian music ("Chervona Ruta" sounding in one of the film's central scenes, was in the 1970s, and is easily today one of the symbols of Ukrainian identity), a Hutsul folk band, the Ukrainian announcements at the Odesa railway station - these are but the most obvious references to Ukraine in the "Long Farewell."
What is particularly interesting about Ms. Muratova is her less obvious, veiled, unintended Ukrainianness despite herself, which still is largely undiscovered but without which Ms. Muratova is somehow incomplete. Her relationship with Ukraine is complex, complicated and at times problematic. Maybe that is why she'd "rather belong to the world." Yet, much like the youth in her "Long Farewell," she stays in Odesa.
Ms. Muratova's latest film, "The Tuner" is an example of a more complex and hidden influence of the Ukrainian reality. "The Tuner" is about the clash of two worlds: the old world of Soviet Odesa, where the official immorality was compensated for by close-knit ties between private individuals, and the new world of Kuchma oligarchic capitalism, with its degradation of human values and disappearance of distinctions between good and evil. The plot unfolds around two old ladies who do not notice society around them and insist on living by their own rules, in their own worlds of such old-fashioned values. Their houses are filled with antiques, an out-of-this-world atmosphere, and are visited by guests as strange as their hostesses. Their homes can be construed as metaphors of their values - grand, impressive, removed to a distant periphery, in the suburb of Odesa. A rickety old streetcar is their own physical connection to the real world. Their spiritual connection is even more tenuous.
This self-imposed isolationism, their willful blindness toward socially imposed norms, which was an effective, or even the only, way of staying "human" under the old Soviet regime, implodes from the first contact with the corrupt, quasi-criminal society that flourished during Leonid Kuchma's presidency, and its overarching moral maxim - money does not smell. The ladies, each in her pathetic and charming way, are by choice out of tune with the world. Enter the tuner. His nice manners, quick wit and empathy are but a subterfuge so skillfully staged that the viewer will, until the end, be ready to believe that the tuner will desist from his cruel intentions. Ominously, the tuning up of an old piano becomes the "tuning" of the two ladies to the new reality. The result is predictably disastrous.
"The Tuner" is Ms. Muratova's brilliant portrayal of a sick society on the verge of complete moral collapse. Her protagonists are the little people so removed from reality that they seem at times unreal, invented, and their actions unmotivated. In the end, their weakness and a crushing defeat by the petty con artist gives them moral power that vindicates their social marginality. Their quirkiness, their refusal to live by the rules or, as in the last scene, to accept their own defeat even when their very survival is at stake becomes, paradoxically, the last hope for humanity. Against the context of the Orange Revolution, "The Tuner" becomes Ms. Muratova's prophetic vision of the return of human dignity in her home country.
While this is my personal view of the film and, as a matter of interpretation, is arguable, there are things about "The Tuner" that are givens. One such fact is that "The Tuner" is a joint Russian-Ukrainian production. It is billed as such on the official website of the Pigmalion Production Co., the film's producer. As to there being "no Ukrainians in Muratova's films" that is not quite so. Georgiy Deliyev who plays the con artist Andrey in "The Tuner" is a Ukrainian from Odesa. According to the authoritative Kyiv weekly paper Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, Ms. Muratova's entire film crew is Ukrainian. The musical score to the film was composed by Ukraine's world acclaimed Valentin Silvestrov, who was nominated in two categories of classical music for this year's Grammy Awards.
The problem with the retrospective, however, is not Ms. Muratova's identity, her films, or Ukraine and its cultural authenticity. It is the tenacity of imperialist attitudes that are so manifest in the curatorial decisions of the retrospective's organizers. Even in the wake of the Orange Revolution that won for the Ukrainian people the admiration of the world, there are still "experts" who deny Ukraine the right to exist as a culture in its own right. It is a disappointment that the respected Film Society at Lincoln Center, knowingly or not, went along with what seems to be a deliberately narrow-minded and sloppy presentation of Kira Muratova's work. New York's movie-goers deserve to see the full picture, to know all the pertinent facts and be allowed to decide for themselves.
Yuri Shevchuk is lecturer of Ukrainian language and culture at Columbia University and director of the university's Ukrainian Film Club.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 27, 2005, No. 9, Vol. LXXIII
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