On the Big Screen: THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017)

Russia banned Armando Iannucci's burlesque of Soviet history shortly before its scheduled release in the former U.S.S.R. The country's culture ministry describes it as an incitement to ethnic hatred and an insult to those who lived through the Soviet Union and apparently liked it. The Russians protest that Ianucci and his co-writers, adapting a French graphic novel, sought to brainwash moviegoers so that "the thought of the 1950s Soviet Union [would make] people feel only terror and disgust." A westerner's inevitable rejoinder might be, "what else was there to feel?" but we should never underestimate the persistence and virulence of "my country right or wrong" thinking anywhere, or the legitimate pride Soviet citizens may have felt or still feel about the nation's technological achievements, particularly in space exploration. Also, to the extent that Russia was a different culture before Stalinism arguably warped it further, patriotic Russians today, from the president on down, may simply disagree with the admittedly reflexive western assessment that Stalinist terror -- the killing of actual and (mostly) suspected political enemies -- disqualifies Josef Stalin's every other achievement, from the decisive battles against Nazi Germany to ... well, whatever Russians think he achieved. The irony of Russian outrage, no doubt exacerbated by their resentment of the persistent vilification of their country since the ascent of Vladimir Putin, is that The Death of Stalin may well offend people who have the polar opposite view of Stalin and his collaborators. Iannucci's burlesque treatment of the power struggle following the tyrant's demise will no doubt appear to trivialize the cruelty of Stalin's despotism by making it an occasion for black comedy.

Imagine the Coen brothers (or Martin Scorsese in comic mood) directing the Three Stooges in one of those wartime propaganda pictures in which Moe Howard played Hitler and you'll get close to the flavor of this film. Stalin's inner circle are portrayed as thuggish clowns -- which probably is unfair, to the extent to which they were committed ideologues with an ideal of the common good that just happened to be incompatible with liberal democracy, but isn't exactly inconsistent with the way Stalin himself treated them during his long late-night bull sessions. Their sophomoric antics on such an evening are juxtaposed with both a final wave of arrests and the farcical doings at a Radio Moscow studio when the dictator requests a transcript of that evening's concert, forcing the idiot managers to restage it since they'd forgotten to record the performance. The unvarnished brutality of the roundup is intercut with comedy on the level of, "You'd better do as I say, or off with your head!" It reminds you that despotism has always been the stuff of slapstick comedy, tapping into shared destructive fantasies. A thread runs from this scene through the rest of the picture as the featured pianist (Olga Kuryenko in the nearest thing to a sympathetic role), who holds out for a huge bribe before reprising her performance, sends a nasty message to Stalin that becomes part of the later power struggle.

Inevitably the story gets going as Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and spends a fatal night on his office floor marinating in his own pee, because the guards outside are too scared to investigate the loud thump they heard. Finally his henchmen are summoned to the scene, setting up the funniest scene in the picture as they compete to express grief and collaborate to move the still-living leader despite their great disgust at his urine-soaked clothes. It becomes clear that while the dim-witted Gyorgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor, way too old yet ideally expressing the character's lumbering incompetence) is Stalin's heir-apparent, real power will be seized either by longtime security chief Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale) or the Moscow party boss Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi). Beria would seem to have all the advantages, including a vicious streak that has him, on film at least, still personally torturing suspects, but everyone else's fear or hatred of Beria ultimately works to Khrushchev's advantage. The film leaves the impression that the result made little difference, since each man was committed to a degree of liberalization, if only to gain popularity. The film is even more insistent, however, about each man being out only for himself, while their Politburo colleagues are too dumb -- or too damaged in the case of longtime foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) -- to show any initiative.

From one perspective this approach indisputably trivializes history, but Iannucci's perspective and purpose are bluntly iconoclastic. He was disturbed to see Stalin portraits shamelessly on display in Moscow hotels, finding that equivalent to Germans displaying portraits of Hitler. While Russians might answer that Hitler helps explain why they see Stalin as a good guy, Iannucci presumably sees both men as tyrants and gangsters equally deserving of repudiation from their people. His film suffers from his conflicting desires to lampoon and condemn as it swings from the pitch-black comedy of the title event to the more dramatically brutal resolution of the Khrushchev-Beria feud. There's little funny about Beria's end, apart from Jason Isaacs's over-the-top portrayal of Marshal Zhukov as a two-fisted Russian cowboy -- as Khrushchev has his rival shot in the head and burnt in a courtyard -- in a compression of events that played out over several months -- and in fairness to Iannucci's intentions little is meant to be. To reinforce his point that all Stalin's men were gangsters -- hence, presumably, the casting of Buscemi in the first place -- he ends the movie like a gangster picture, apart from an epilogue that uses title cards to skim through future Khrushchev power struggles that might have made for a full-scale sequel. Ultimately The Death of Stalin is grimly entertaining despite some tonal incoherence, and with Russophobia at a new fever pitch in the west, the nebulous attitude of the President of the United States notwithstanding, the picture probably has found an ideal moment to open wide in the U.S. Since Iannucci has next to nothing to say about communism as an economic or political system, Russians today are probably right to guess that his film's ultimate message will be that Russians have always been thugs and always will be. Since they take a tit-for-tat attitude about such slights, perhaps we'll soon see something in Russian about British or American scandals or atrocities, maybe something that makes Churchill or Reagan look like an idiot -- and if we did see such a picture here I suppose that would prove a point.

LETTER NEVER SENT (Neotpravlennoye pismo, 1959)

Mikhail Kalatozov is probably the most renowned Russian film director from the time between the death of Sergei Eisenstein and the emergence of Andrei Tarkovsky. His reputation outside the former Soviet Union is based on a handful of films, arguably no more than two: his war film The Cranes are Flying and his tribute to Castro's island, I Am Cuba. The Criterion Collection recently released the film Kalatozov made between those two highlights, a paradoxical exercise in abstract patriotism that didn't capture the world's imagination quite the same way. The patriotic aspect of Letter Never Sent may have turned some audiences off if they took the film for Communist propaganda. On the other hand, the impressionist effects Kalatozov attempted may have baffled people expecting something different from the land of Socialist Realism. They certainly left me wondering how Kalatozov, who suffered censorship earlier in his career, got away with stuff that I presume would normally get criticized by cultural commissars for "formalism" or worse. Directors of far more conventional films got that treatment, but maybe under "Thaw" conditions Kalatozov, as the star Soviet director abroad, could get away with more, so long as it elevated the prestige of Soviet cinema.
The story concerns a small team of geologists -- two college students, a mentor and a guide -- prospecting for industrial diamonds in Siberia. Theirs is a patriotic mission; should they succeed, they'll reduce the USSR's dependence on imported diamonds. But prospectors have been hunting for diamonds for years with no luck, and our team does no better at first. Our point-of-view character is Konstantin, the author of the titular unsent letter addressed to his beloved Vera, whom we see in his reveries. For a while, I wondered whether Vera was actually dead and that was why the letter goes unsent, but whether she's alive or not soon becomes a secondary matter.

Suffice it to say that the two young geologists and lovers, Vera and Andrei, make the big discovery shortly after Vera fends off unwanted advances from the guide Sergei. They hardly have time to announce their find via radio before a forest fire separates them from most of their supplies. After their radio fails, they're stranded in the taiga with winter coming fast. The government tries to reach them, but there's a lot of territory to cover, and as they search in vain the party dwindles to a final survivor floating downriver on a makeshift frozen raft....

I haven't seen the other Kalatozov films but I know his reputation for daredevil camerawork, particularly in I Am Cuba. Letter Never Sent lives up to that reputation. Kalatozov was a director who worked in three dimensions without special technology apart from a mobile camera and an awareness of the space outside the camera frame. He likes to swing the camera left or right to catch important details or simply to follow action outside the original frame, broadening our perspective of the landscape while doing so. Sometimes he just lets the camera run and run in tracking shots or POV shots that anticipate the camerawork in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies. The persistent effect of this film is the reminder that the taiga is bigger and more dangerous than we first realize. But Kalatozov goes beyond that. He illustrates the fervent effort of the expedition by superimposing fire over montages of the team in motion or in action. At times the movement of the camera and the movements of the people and the elements make the frame an utterly abstract blur, as Nikolay Kryukov's Shostakovichite music churns away to underscore the symbolic industriousness of it all. It's definitely the opposite of Socialist Realism, and you don't have to be a Stalinist commissar to find it somewhat self-indulgent while admiring the visual ambition behind it.

Kalatozov settles down to more naturalistic filmmaking as the struggle for survival takes over the story, though he throws in one abstract attempt to illustrate the dimming of consciousness at the moment of death. In its second half Letter Never Sent transforms from nature adventure with a hint of romance and pathos to a grimly inspiring tale of heroic sacrifice. While our heroes have informed the government of their find, they still need to deliver a map of the diamond field's exact location. They can do without anything else, but someone has to get that map to civilization. The nearest the picture comes to Communist propaganda is its validation of sacrifice for the motherland. Its most mawkish moment comes when Konstantin reminds Vera of her Young Pioneer oath and observes that most people who memorize it never really have to live up to it, but now's the time. Whether you interpret the ending as happy or not, the message seems to be that it was all worth doing, whatever the cost. Whether you agree probably depends less on your opinion of the historical phenomenon of Marxist-Leninism than on whether such a mission, no matter for whose sake, is worth such sacrifice. The Soviets must have thought it was worth it, and that Kalatozov thought so, because the film was released rather than shelved. The impression it leaves today is of camerawork as an end unto itself and characters as expendable as actual people were once presumed to be under Communism. The artistic self-indulgence of Letter Never Sent somewhat subverts its evocation of nature's extremes, but as an exercise in sheer cinematic artistry it's an interesting addition to the Soviet cinema canon.

COMMISSAR (1967-88)

The Soviet Union was a censorious, repressive society, but its leaders and bureaucrats had a curious attitude toward film. Rather than destroy unacceptable movies, the U.S.S.R. tended to shelve them, presumably indefinitely. Even Stalin shelved Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II rather than burn it, and under Khrushchev it saw the light of day. Likewise, the ambitious debut film of director Aleksandr Askoldov was shelved by the Brezhnev regime, ruining Askoldov's career, only to emerge in the days of Gorbachev. It was acclaimed then, but Askoldov, then still only in his fifties, appears never to have resumed his career. One wonders what the censors objected to. It may have been the decision to adapt a story by Vasili Grossman, a writer presumably on the outs with the government since his novel Life and Fate had been suppressed a few years earlier. But if that were the case, Askoldov shouldn't have gotten a green light at all. The real issue seems to have been form rather than content. Askoldov was one of many Soviet directors butting against the aesthetic limits of "socialist realism" in cinema. Like many an ambitious novice, he seems willing to try anything with the camera. That experimentation may have been off-putting to the extent that it expressed directorial individualism rather than an official vision of the civil war that followed the October Revolution. Commissar occasionally spills over from socialist realism into magical realism in a manner that can be stunning to the casual viewer but disconcerting if not offensive to Soviet aesthetic regulators. So-called totalitarian regimes seemed to distrust artistic experimentation, believing that all art had a propaganda function and should be comprehensible by the lowest common denominator. Yet I don't think viewers would have trouble getting Commissar. So some have speculated that the KGB objected to the film's supposed feminism, since the title character is a woman, or to its sympathetic treatment of Jews, though Askoldov's attitude may not be as positive as that speculation implies.  Maybe there just wasn't enough heroic march music; totalitarians dig that sort of thing.

The offending film focuses on Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordyukova), a Red Army officer who arrives in a freshly-taken town and is quartered with the Magazannik family. She's left behind as unfit for duty because she's in the last stage of pregnancy. Yefim Magazannik (Rolan Bykov) is one of those "life-affirming" types, the kind who dances barefoot in his yard as some sort of prayer to God. He kvetches at having to give up his bedroom to the commissar, but he and his family prove friendly, the wife especially showing empathy, having five kids herself, with the pregnant officer. The boys in the family are rambunctious, and the way they're presented may be part of the problem the censors had with the film. For one thing, they like to play at war, pretending to cajole their sister's doll from a hiding place only to torture and execute it. Later, they treat the sister herself with some of the same childish brutality, calling her a "Yid" for extra measure. The offensive insinuation may have been that the Red Army's conduct may have inspired the boys' cruelty. They may have been offensive in another way in one scene when their mother is bathing them, only to be interrupted by troops passing through town. The curious kids rush out to watch, and Askoldov gives us one shot of their three naked penises through the passing wagons that could well have convinced Soviet censors that he was some kind of a pervert and could well give American viewers a little bit of the creeps. But the director may simply have meant them as symbols of innocence; a lot depends on the eye of the beholder.

For a while you think you know the direction the film's going. Klavdia is slowly domesticated, doing her share of household chores and clearly caring for her newborn. But the film takes a late turn when the approaching counterrevolutionary "White" army shells the town. Klavdia and the Magazanniks take shelter in a basement. The kids are panicking and crying, but Yefim calms them and entertains them by launching into one of his Tevye/Zorba-esque dances. In what becomes a dreamlike montage, he, his wife and the kids all dance past Klavdia in the darkness, urging her to join them. Then, in the film's most startling coup, the montage turns into a prophetic vision. Klavdia now sees Yefim doing a more subdued, submissive form of his dance as he and his family, all wearing Stars of David on their garments, are herded into a concentration camp as veteran inmates watch in their iconic striped pyjamas. Everything's there but the Nazi regalia -- though it can't be the 1940s because Yefim's kids are still kids. From there there's one more anxious episode as Klavdia rips apart the boarding covering a door so she can shelter her baby (temporarily left on a sidewalk) from an advancing army, and then the commissar's fate is sealed. She leaves the baby with the Magazanniks to raise as she hastily rejoins the Red Army for what looks like an unpromisingly undermanned assault on the enemy with a minimal orchestration of the Internationale playing as a coda.

So for all Askoldov's alleged philo-Semitism he (and presumably Grossman before him) seems to be saying that for all Yefim's quaint charm his attitude of faithful resignation is simply inadequate to the moment in history. It is not enough for Klavdia to put her faith in a higher power; she can't wait for things to happen, but must rejoin the struggle, even if that means sacrificing her motherhood, not to mention her life. That would seem to make her an exemplary Bolshevik and an ideal hero for a Soviet film. But Commissar seems to have been judged much as a Hollywood film would be under the studio system: the ending with its stark hint of sacrifice for its own sake isn't happy or affirmative enough to satisfy the audience the bosses presumes exist, or wants to exist. In short, a Soviet cultural bureaucrat was just as likely as a Hollywood studio bureaucrat to be a moron.

Visually, Commissar swings for the seats on every pitch, and Askoldov occasionally hits one out of the park. Apart from that stunning flash-forward to the Holocaust, the film's most arresting moment comes when Klavdia flashes back during labor to her wartime adventures and envisions the slaughter of her comrades. This scene climaxes with a host of saddled but riderless horses charging across a bridge and through the countryside, eventually accompanied by an eerie murmur of human voices. It left me wondering whether the scene had influenced Steven Spielberg's more restrained employment of riderless steeds in War Horse. Regardless, Askoldov's imagery has at least as much power as anything Spielberg achieved in his new film. Commissar is often self-indulgent but never in an annoying or pretentious way. Askoldov's show-offery doesn't distract from the forceful yet ambiguous point he wants to make about war. If it was too ambiguous for a 1967 commissar to comprehend, or too forceful for him to accept, those are badges of honor Askoldov and his move can wear with pride today.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE Revisited

When I was a kid the local PBS station regularly ran the then-canonical works of early global cinema: the German Expressionist silent films and the Soviet montage movies. The station occasionally ran sound films, including the talking pictures of Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet montage pioneer of Battleship Potemkin fame. While my memories of his Aleksandr Nevskii are, unsurprisingly, much stronger, I feel certain that I first encountered his Ivan Groznii at this time. I have stronger memories of Part I from frequent showings on A&E, way back when the cable channel took the "Arts" part of its name most seriously. Oddly, I can't remember the channel running Part II, but the sequel always lagged behind the original more than normally. As film historians know, Stalin was a big fan of Part I, but had Part II put on the shelf and halted production on Part III, mainly because the sequel seemed to make Ivan IV ("Groznii" signifies something more like "awe-inspiring" than the modern sense of "terrible") simultaneously weak and vicious while discrediting by analogy the dictator's own project of consolidating absolute power. He famously complained that Eisenstein had made the Orpichniki, Ivan's corps of enforcers, into something like the Ku Klux Klan, the complaint being phrased in a way that proved Stalin no fan of The Birth of a Nation. Curiously, the despot suppressed the film but did not destroy it, and within a few years after Stalin's demise Part II was finally authorized for release. Its world premiere came in 1958, fourteen years after Part I appeared and ten years after Eisenstein's death. Turner Classic Movies recently ran the two parts back to back, and I took advantage of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the original and finally see the sequel in its entirety.

Part I reconfirmed my years-old impression that it was a stylistic step backward for Eisenstein after the epic power of Aleksandr Nevskii.  It's an unsettlingly mixed bag, combining some of the most brilliant and powerful images in cinema with some of the worst. Deepening his collaboration with composer Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein envisaged the Ivan films in operatic rather than epic terms. The performances, especially that of star Nikolai Cherkassov, are far more theatrically stylized than even the bombast of Nevskii, and Part II is very nearly a musical in its reliance on song, dance and performance. At the same time, Eisenstein, filming Part I in 1943, is still thinking like a silent film director. He too often forces gestures and facial expressions to do the work of dialogue when speech could and should have done the work better. My case in point is a painfully extended two-shot of Lyudmila Tselikovskaya as the Tsarina and Mikhail Nazvanov as Prince Kurbsky, Ivan's vacillating vassal and would-be lover of the Tsarina. Ivan himself is on the brink of death from fever, and Kurbsky is making his case for himself as her next husband and Tsar. Into the frame looms Serafima Birman as Euphrosina, Ivan's wicked aunt, who wants her idiot son Vladimir to succeed to the throne. Interminably, the three actors roll their eyes at each other, the two women on either side of Nazvanov leaning closer together to intensify their staredown, while none of them says a word. Instead of Prokofiev, the sort of sound effects you might hear on the Cartoon Network seem more appropriate at this moment. It's unnaturalistic without any real artistic compensation; Eisenstein put too much faith in the ability of facial expressions to tell the story. He might have gotten away with it in an actual silent film -- it would at least have looked less freakishly awkward. Here, however, it marks him as a director who hasn't yet caught up with the times.

Were these actors ever tempted to kill a take by turning a baleful eye on the director?

He certainly deserved it.

Fortunately, the good moments outweigh the awful in Part I, which covers more time in more episodic fashion than the sequel. The main story thread is Ivan's effort to centralize power in his hands and break the traditional power of the boyar nobility, which is shown to have crippled Russia in the face of ambitious enemies to the west and east. The main story in movie terms is Cherkassov's intensely physical performance, an extreme departure from his relatively standard heroics as Aleksandr Nevskii. The influence of two John Barrymore films on Cherkassov's look and manner -- the silent Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and the talkie Svengali, have been widely noted. The Russian actor isn't impersonating Barrymore, however; Eisenstein's inspiration seems to have been purely visual, though you could argue that Cherkassov's gradual transformation from golden youth (he was 40 when he filmed Part I) into goat-bearded, lank-limbed gargoyle echoes Barrymore's degeneration from Jekyll to Hyde. Ivan's theatricality is more justified than that of the other characters, since the Tsar is always "on," so to speak, and always playing to the farthest reaches of any crowd he finds. An absolute medieval monarch is a strangely perfect match for a director more or less committed to Communism throughout his career, but then again, look at what, or more excatly, who Bolshevism resulted in in Russia. Historical context and Hollywood influence aside, Cherkassov's performance still goes down as one of the greatest ever by a movie actor.

Part II, as I hinted, is a more concentrated narrative and more successful as drama. Eisenstein proves himself an effective if slow learner as he proves himself capable of building and sustaining tension through sound and image.  Early fears of anticlimax after Kurbsky abruptly disappears from the story (he was meant to return in Part III) are dispelled as Euphrosina makes her move to destroy Ivan and the Oprichniki in order to make a very unwilling Vladimir a pliant "boyar Tsar." Watching the story play out, I began to suspect that Stalin had been irked by the extent to which Eisenstein turns Vladimir, the Tsar's "worst enemy," into a tragically sympathetic character.

As the fool, Pavel Kadochnikov nearly steals the second half of the film from Cherkassov. As a  guilelessly infantile antagonist, he pitches the part somewhere between Harry Langdon and John Cazale, readily revealing once plied with drink that some folks are out to get rid of his pal the Tsar. "And do you know who they're going to replace you with," he asks in the one truly funny moment in the picture, "You'll never guess!" Meanwhile, the oily Ivan is cooly preparing to send Vlad to his death, dressed in Ivan's own robes to confuse the assassin known to be lying in wait. The slow buildup to Vladimir's inevitable destruction anticipates Coppola's technique in the Godfather films, much as Vlad himself somewhat anticipates Fredo. Eisenstein's use of color heightens the tension as Vladimir trembles at the exit of Ivan's exceptionally colorful Oprichnik party pit while the assassin waits back in the black and white world of the rest of the movie -- the lurid color becomes Vlad's last security at the brink of the abyss.

Better still, Eisenstein knows how to top himself. The climax comes not when Vladimir is whacked, but when his mother, having seen someone in royal robes go down, charges in to declare the country liberated, practically kicking the corpse. The director knows how to milk this for all it's worth, not letting Euphrosina discover her mistake until after the living Ivan shows himself, letting her have a moment to ponder who that might be on the floor before she goes mad from the truth. That last act leaves me leaning toward Part II over Part I as the better film, but it's still a close call. Both films have their false notes but they're probably to be expected from an unorthodox director's unconventional approach to historical drama. While all Stalinist art has been said to really have an audience of one, I think the rest of us can still find something of value in the Ivan films. Even under the thumb of the dictator, Eisenstein made movies that are unmistakably his -- and the dictator even liked one of them. Whether that's a triumph or not, history must judge.

PIRATES OF THE XXTH CENTURY (Piraty XX veka, 1979)

Among the stuff you'll find when you look for free feature films online is a trove of English-subtitled Russian films from the Soviet era and beyond. Mosfilm has its own YouTube channel, while the "PyccoTypucmo" (pronounced "RussoTurismo") channel has even more titles, including Boris Durov's action hit for the Gorky Film Studio (watch it here), a rugged adventure film that compares respectably with grindhouse movies from the capitalist world. Apart from a certain flatness of characters, there's little to mark this as a Communist film, and I'm sure it wasn't made with any propaganda purpose in mind. Brezhnev-era Bolsheviks believed in entertaining folks, and Soviet Man appears to have been entertained by the same stuff that pleased his bourgeois counterparts: violence towards men and women, violence by gun, knife, foot, fist and grappling hook -- the faster paced, the better.

At a few seconds short of 80 minutes, Pirates of the XXth century practices truth in advertsing by showing us modern-day pirates in action. But we start with a Soviet freighter, the Nezhin, picking up a boatload of medicinal opium, bound for Vladivostok and distribution to hospitals. The opening credits promise martial-arts action, as we see a crewmember practicing with his "numbchuks" and breaking boards to entertain his mates. This energetic routine is interrupted when the crew discovers a man adrift in the water. The rescued man, Saleh, speaks no Russian, but some of the crew speak English, and they learn that he jumped a ship whose cargo of cotton caught fire. Next, the Nezhin discovers a disabled ship, the Mercury. Its distress is a deception, as was Saleh's. As he creates havoc on the Nezhin, destroying its radio, pirates from the Mercury -- a crew of terrorists and mercenaries -- storm the ship, slaughter most of the crew, steal the opium and set the vessel ablaze. As the pirates zoom off, a handful of survivors, including two female crewmembers barely saved from drowning, pile into a lifeboat in search of safety.

Fortunately, the survivors find land before long. Unfortunately, they've stumbled upon the Mercury's base of operations. But that actually gives them a chance to recover the opium and bring the pirates to justice. With help from a native girl, the Russians capture weapons and manage to take over the Mercury. But the pirates have mined the bay to deter pursuers, and the Russians can't get out. Worse, their two hapless women -- if anything, the "progressive" Commies were retrograde, on this film's evidence, in their portrayal of women -- have been captured and subject to torture. Happily, the pirates are willing to negotiate and let the Russians leave with their skins intact, though without the opium. The sailors don't trust the offer, since they could obviously lead a navy back to the pirates' lair, but they go along in order to give heroic first mate Sergei (Nikolai Yeryomenko) a chance to take the villains down single-handedly and shirtlessly....

This is undemanding mayhem, impressively staged on locations and on the open sea with real ships. The action is often quite brutal, and the violence against the helpless females is just about as exploitative as anything you might have seen from the "free world," without the compensatory, quasi-empowering revenge. Again, if you think of the USSR as part of a generic global "left," you might expect more female empowerment here, but Pirates is very much an unapologetic "Men's Adventure" type of film, from the modern-piracy theme to the exotic backdrop for torture. It's also indelibly a Seventies film, as the disco-esque score will tell you right away. Wikipedia claims that this was the most popular film of 1980 in the USSR, and I imagine it must be an iconic movie for Russia's Seventies fetishists. It was a great find for me, if not a great film, because I'm always intrigued by what true pop cinema, as opposed to arthouse cinema, looks like in different countries. Pirates of the XXth Century probably isn't the face Soviet cinema meant to show the world, the cinematic commisars probably having something more refined in mind. But it shows us that, even at a low point in the Cold War, the years of the invasion of Afghanistan and the Olympic boycott, moviegoers in the communist and capitalist blocs -- or some of them, at least, spoke a common language.

TO THE STARS BY HARD WAYS (Cheres ternii k zvyozdam, 1980)

Like many a Soviet sci-fi film, Richard Viktorov's two-part picture reached American audiences in compromised form, condensed into something called Humanoid Woman that later became fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was probably never going to get the respectful art-house treatment accorded Tarkovsky's Solaris because it clearly wasn't as ambitious a movie -- though its early focus on rustic family life in future Russia reminded me a little of the more famous film. I'm not sure whether Star Wars influenced the thing at all; if it did, it was in the use of comical robots, but the robots themselves look like the sort of creations you'd have seen decades before the Lucas film. Overall, Viktorov's story (the awkward English title translates a Russian tag that itself derives from the Latin motto per ardua ad astra) feels like a Soviet Star Trek, with a benevolent Earth-based interstellar entity setting things right around the galaxy.

Part One, "Niya:an artificial human" opens with a human exploratory vessel discovering an alien wreck in space. The ship doesn't match anything in their space atlas and doesn't respond to hails. Boarding it, the crew discovers dead bodies, some in pods, and one survivor, a female. She remembers nothing but her name, Niya. The commander, Sergei, takes the sullen, nearly mute Niya to the Council on Contacts, which isn't sure what to make of her. When a member tries to touch the young woman, he's repelled as if by a force field or telekinesis. This moves another member to observe, "This girl has the strength of a robot!" The council decides that Niya should acclimate herself to Earth as a guest at the dacha of Sergei's family, the Lebedevs, while council member Nadezhda Ivanova will observe and perform tests on her.

Niya (Yelena Metyolkina) reportedly set fashions for late-Soviet teenage girls in the 1980s. Below, in the future, it's the aliens who get probed.

The Lebedevs are a modern space-age family. Mother and father are scientists, while younger brother Stepan is a literal space cadet awaiting his first mission. They're serviced by all-purpose robot Glasha, who looks like a cross between Rosie from The Jetsons and a Dalek and, like other robots in the picture, spends a good deal of time kvetching. The film is most fantastic when it tries to convince us that Glasha, among other talents, is a demon on the tennis court. Even cooking looks like it'd be a challenge for the poor thing. It seems best suited for simpler tasks, like vacuuming the remains of a watermelon that Niya accidentally destroys off the kitchen floor.

Glasha (left)

Niya is understandably distressed by her sudden immersion in alien culture. Frightened by grass, she only slowly grows friendly if not entirely comfortable. She'll go out for a run or a tumble only to get freaked out by flowers or something else that triggers a partial memory of her past; then she'll run into the house and hide in a closet. Things get out of hand when Stepan, who is obviously cultivating a crush on Niya, brings home his girlfriend Selena, who is instantly jealous. Embarrassments pile up as Niya confusedly throws her clothes off at the beach, only to be ordered to put them back on by Nadezhda Ivanova, who has found a remote control receptor in Niya's brain. Initially apologetic to Selena, Niya abruptly decides that "you should not be" and is about to "carrie" her off a cliff before Nadezhda Ivanova gives a counter-order. Finding this plight intolerable, Niya throws herself off the cliff, but Stepan fetches her out of the water.

I don't often run nudie shots as blatant as this one of Niya (left), but I include this one with the note that To the Stars actually won an award for children's filmmaking.

Eventually, the arrival of diplomats from the planet Dessa triggers more memories. The planet happens to be her homeworld, and Stepan just happens to be making his maiden flight there. Niya stows away, confusing an old-time service robot, Crocodile, by her ability to teleport and leave Niya-shaped outlines behind. Crocodile looks like an overweight Cylon (original series) and needs to be inflated when he runs low on energy.

Crocodile the robot

Fortunately, the film itself is about to hit its stride in the second part, which takes place on Dessa itself -- a planet ravaged by generations of pollution to the brink of complete ecological collapse. While Dessa has called for help from advanced planets like Earth, a powerful faction actually opposes human intervention. Led by the sinister Turanchoks, this capitalist clique has exploited the air-quality crisis by commodifying oxygen. They're suspicious of the humans, whom they accuse of an imperialist agenda of remaking Dessa in their image. They sow distrust of the humans and Niya among the rabble, many of whom where Beneath the Planet of the Apes-style masks to hide disfigurements and project an air of general happiness. As the humans make progress in cleaning the planet, Turanchoks takes more desperate steps. He's also figured out Niya's weakness -- her susceptibility to remote control -- and he intends to use it to destroy her and the human spaceship.

Unwelcoming committees on Dessa

The film founders on the shoals of Turanchoks's master villainy. When a repentant lackey turns on him and blames him and his clique for the conditions that have caused every other birth to be defective, an enraged Turanchoks leaps from his chair to the table top to confront the traitor with the shocking fact that he's a dwarf! -- presumably a victim of his own pollutions. "You've never seen me before!" he concludes from the lackey's stunned expression. Well, the lackey has seen him in his chair, but couldn't venture a guess of his height from the visible evidence. The lackey learns something else important, however, when he tries to stop Turanchoks from activating Niya's remote control: the evil dwarf is ticklish! Tickling nearly wins the day for the forces of good, but a more loyal minion stabs the turncoat in the back. Poetic justice? You decide.

Turanchoks: The Revelation, featuring Vladimir Fyodorov (tabletop left)

With Niya now under his control, Turanchok seems to have the upper hand. However, he never bothered checking whether his former minion had died. Ignored, the victim crawls through corridors until he reaches the lab where Niya's creator had been working on a biomass project. It had been this noble scientist's hope that the biomass, infused with human intelligence, could clean up the planet on its own. For now, mindless, the biomass is a seething, bubbing mass of blecch that the moribund minion releases to avenge him. Set loose mindlessly, the biomass is not only a nemesis for Turanchoks but a threat to the entire planet and the humans on it. It might smother them all in slop if Niya can't come to her senses and use her amazing abilities when they'd count the most....

I'm willing to cut Viktorov's film some slack, in part because I'm charmed by the naive exoticism of the project and in part because it's at least a stab at sci-fi rather than space opera. It doesn't boil down to battling spaceships or even much in the way of physical combat apart from Turanchoks's struggle with his tickling nemesis. But there's no way I can say that it's a good film, though some may find it entertaining for some of the same reasons I did. It seems to have been considered a children's film by someone, despite Niya's nudity in the beach scene, and its accordingly simplistic, a fable with subtle pro-Soviet propaganda (we learn nothing about the form of the future government or its economic system) in its approval of benevolent intervention in another culture's affairs. It may be ironic to note that Cheres ternii was made at an early point in the USSR's occupation of Afghanistan, and that its advocacy of humanitarian intervention could easily be translated as an American neocon fable for the era of our own occupation of the same country. The propaganda, though, is subtle enough that it may only exist in my inference. To the Stars by Hard Ways is a harmless film that's best enjoyed, as many films are by wild-world-of-cinema tourists, as a document of its time and place in history -- one more amusing in retrospect because of how scary it once seemed.

AGONY: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RASPUTIN (Agoniya, 197?-1985)

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin is one of those 20th century personalities who ascended from history to myth. He might have been remembered only for being the archetypal "mad monk" and for his mysterious influence over the decadent Romanov nobility as Russia descended into war and revolution. The sensational circumstances of his death, as reported by the man who claimed to have killed him and confirmed by autopsy results, transformed him into a kind of real-life monster, his alarming resilience being proof, if not of supernatural power, than at least of superhuman evil. It only added to his appeal as a cinematic subject, whether played as a creepy old man by Lionel Barrymore, as a brutal bumpkin by Christopher Lee, as an ironically genuine visionary by Tom Baker, and so on. In Mike Mignola's Hellboy continuity, Rasputin is a truly satanic figure of arcane might and malignancy. The Rasputin legend echoes on through popular culture, whether in movie villains' generic ability to get up from fatal blows or in more abstract, attenuated form -- as I might argue is the case in There Will Be Blood, in which Eli Sunday plays a kind of Rasputin to Daniel Plainview's tsar and meets a comparably absurd end.

Here and below, Alexei Petrenko as Rasputin

Strangely enough, the Soviet Union seems to have had a hard time figuring out what to make of Rasputin. Either the government, its state-run film industry or director Elem Klimov did, since Agoniya, Klimov's Rasputin film, sat on the Soviet shelf for close to a decade, appearing only on the eve of Gorbachevian glasnost after occasional screenings in the west. Having just watched the film, I have to assume that there were errors of omission in Klimov's account, unless Soviet censors were simply prudes, since I saw nothing I could call even implicitly anti-Soviet in the story, though I did see a few bare breasts. Some people have suggested that Klimov made Nicholas II too sympathetic, even though the film clearly portrays him as an ineffectual wretch who isn't even master of his own household. Others speculate that the director didn't emphasize enough that Lenin and other Bolsheviks were leading the scenes of working-class unrest that are illustrated with newsreel and stock-footage imagery. Nobody can accuse Klimov of neglecting to teach a lesson, since the film is thick with expository narrative and contextualizing history lessons. Of these, the most interesting was the gallery of mad monks, mountebanks, etc who infested late imperial Russia. Rasputin had rivals in his own time, most notably in the film a Tibetan herbalist who teaches breathing exercises to infirm nobles and clearly hopes for greater proximity to the throne.

Perhaps, in an officially atheist country, the Soviets hoped Klimov would clarify Rasputin's role as a representative of religion or proof of its falsehood. Instead, Agoniya is very ambiguous about its subject's sincerity, though that may be because it portrays him pretty clearly as a classic antinomian, someone whose personal relationship with Bog places him beyond conventional morality. Father Grigory is unrepentantly self-indulgent, and the way he impulsively throws himself at women almost qualifies him as an honorary Marx Brother. It certainly made me wonder whether the historical Rasputin wasn't an influence on Groucho's misruling authority figures. While Klimov's Rasputin is clearly cynical with politicians who hope to use him to advance their causes with the tsarina, it also seems unlikely that he's an outright self-conscious charlatan. If Klimov meant to knock religion in general, he did a better job in the scene when a grotesque gaggle of Orthodox clergy ambush and apparently attempt to exorcise Rasputin than he did with the man himself.

I assume that the "Agony" title refers to the death throes of the Romanov dynasty in 1916 rather than any internal torment suffered by Rasputin. The fatal year is portrayed as an ordeal for him, however, with as many individuals or factions gunning for him as were seeking his favor. The mad monk isn't shown as the master of events, but as someone with a target on his back through the whole picture. Klimov's point may have been to say that no one was master in 1916, "agony" being one with chaos. If so, that may have offended Soviet censors who would rather have had Russians believe that Lenin and his pals were already at work behind the scenes to bring things under control. Marxists-Leninists believed in historical inevitability, after all, so Klimov's chaotic scenario may have been a bit too messy for them.

Klimov's Rasputin is a plaything of history rather than a demonic villain, and Alexei Petrenko's performance runs a wider behavioral range than we've seen in Anglo-American portrayals. Because he's never in as much control as folklore would claim, Petrenko's vulnerable, sometimes desperate Rasputin seems less focused than the versions of Barrymore or Lee. On the other hand, he gets opportunities to go wild that were denied to his western counterparts, especially in a family reuinion scene in Rasputin's home village, during which Petrenko gets to go full hillbilly, climaxing dinner by swinging and hurling a live piglet at a guest who calls him a thief but begging forgiveness from everyone afterward. That's one of the best illustrations of the conflicting impulses animating the mad monk, and it shows Petrekno making the best of his acting opportunity. His death scene isn't quite as epic as you might want -- he gets one comeback, not counting his resistance to poison, -- but the scene itself is redeemed by the panicky antics of the actors playing Felix Yusupov and his co-conspirators.

Agoniya works as what I think Klimov meant it to be -- a portrait of a regime and culture on the brink, with Rasputin as a symptom rather than a cause of catastrophe. It's more spectacle than character study, but Rasputin is inevitably a spectacle of a character. I doubt whether it would have hindered fulfillment of the current Five-Year Plan or encouraged unwelcome analogies between the Romanovs and the Brezhnev government. But governments are never more arbitrary than in their dealings with artists, as the fate of Iranian director Jafar Panahi reminds us this very week. Klimov got a kind of revenge by becoming head of the Soviet film board under Gorbachev and releasing many more suppressed films, but it's a shame, on the strength of this film, that he didn't get more opportunities to do his own thing.