by Mark Cousins
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Richard Harris strikes a similar pose to Burton (opposite) in Lindsay Anderson’s portrait of an angry young rugby player, This Sporting Life. UK, 1963.
EASTERN EUROPEAN AND SOVIET NEW WAVES.
Many of the filmmakers we have considered so far were against the state in some way, but none had as much reason to be so as Eastern European and Soviet directors. Foremost among these was Roman Polanksi, the most important Polish director since Andrej Wajda in the late 1950s. Polanski was born to Jewish parents in Paris in 1933. They moved to Poland in 1936. During the war he saw six old women shot dead and watched Poles defecate on German soldiers at the end of the war. His mother was killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a child he was not attracted to colour films or escapist musicals, but to two British ones, Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948). Both were filmed on sets and each was very claustrophobic. He liked their spatial control and replicated it in his own work.
Polanski’s own first feature film, Knife in the Water (Poland, 1962), set and shot almost entirely on a small sailing boat, is one of the most claustrophobic films ever made (223). Like his subsequent films Cul-de-Sac (UK, 1966), Frantic (USA, 1988), Bitter Moon (UK, France, 1992) and Death and the Maiden (UK, 1994), it is about the strained geometry of a sexual triangle and the humiliation of getting too close to people. It was called “cosmopolitan” in Poland where Polanski’s interest in jazz, style, decadence and art for art’s sake did not go down well. His subject was not the society approved of by socialist realism, but reality itself, and what lay beyond the social – fantasy, fear and desire.
The director arrived in London as the city was starting to swing. In 1966 he filmed Cul-de-Sac in the north of England, the first of many of his films to echo Hamlet’s castle setting. The atmosphere on location was so tense that actor Donald Pleasence lodged a formal complaint and the crew threatened strike action. The story started to absorb some of the tension of the circumstances surrounding its making. Polanski had already taken the aesthetics of triangles, of strain, of isolation, further than any other director. This was very different indeed to the wind-in-your-hair freedom of Truffaut and Godard or the japery of The Beatles.
The following year, Polanski made one of his best films, a technically dazzling horror spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers (USA, 1967). Again set in a castle somewhere in Jewish middle-Europe, this was cinema as a painting by Marc Chagall. Polanski himself played the lead. Opposite him his producer cast a beautiful young actress called Sharon Tate. She and Polanski dined and took LSD together, fell in love, got married and conceived a child. They set up home in the Hollywood hills. After Alfred Hitchcock turned down the script of Rosemary’s Baby (USA, 1968), about a New York woman impregnated by the devil, Polanski took it on, filming with 18mm and 25mm lenses. Such was his technical knowledge that, according to cinematographer Bill Fraker, even Hollywood’s famously skilled crew members learnt much from him. They were amazed at his devotion to detail and truth, for the first time using video to see the shots exactly, making the vegetarian actress Mia Farrow eat raw liver. But his human theme – the discomfort of closeness – has been as consistent as his technical brilliance. As we shall see later, his work increasingly sailed close to the story of his own life. The unease and claustrophobia in his films, which surpass either Hamlet or Odd Man Out, surely, in part at least, derive from this.
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Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, which featured the first of many triangular relationships in his work. Poland, 1962.
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Rosemary’s Baby was typical of Polanski’s later work: technically brilliant, mostly confined to a single location and laced with black humour. USA, 1968.
Another Eastern-European director made exactitude of camera moves central to his work. Miklós Jancsó was born in Hungary in 1921, twelve years before Polanski. Like the Polish director he was deeply affected by the war and later studied at film school. After starting in documentary cinema he developed a keen interested in the controlling power of long sinuous camera moves. Like Mizoguchi, Ophüls, Minnelli, Hitchcock and Polanski he was interested in the tension they engendered. The Red and The White (Hungary, 1967), Jancsó’s follow up to The Round-Up (Hungary, 1965), demonstates this most clearly. Set in Russia in 1918, it depicts a series of clashes between brutal revolutionary soldiers – Reds – and counter-revolutionaries resisting them – Whites. In an early sequence, a Red soldier hides as another is interrogated, then shot by a White guard. Jancsó depicts this in a single, roving three-minute shot incorporating ten camera moves. Like Mizoguchi he never gets close to his characters’ faces, presenting them coolly. The detached control of his camera is related to the detached control of, in this case, the White infantry-men. There are echoes of Polanski throughout Jancsó’s films. The Red and the White can be seen as a whole series of humiliating undressings, for example. At the end, the Red combatants march into a massive line of the enemy singing the Marseillaise. This gigantic widescreen shot, which lasts well over four minutes would nowadays be computer-generated but, like D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (USA, 1915), Jancsó dotted men across a vast plain (225 bottom). At the end, one of the soldiers looks directly into camera, saluting with his sword to his face as the bugle sounds. Humanity crashes into Jancsó’s icy universe of control and despair. No one in the history of cinema used long takes better to evoke suffering and helplessness. The influence of Jancsó on the 1990s Hungarian director Béla Tarr was profound.
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Humiliation and aesthetic rigor in Miklós Jancsó’s The Red and The White. Below: The film’s panoramic ending, filmed in a single shot, lasting more than four minutes. Hungary, 1967.
Despite the achievements of Polanski and Jancsó, Czechoslovakia was the most dynamic filmmaking culture in Eastern Europe in the 1960s. This is, in part, because politics in the country liberalized between 1963 and 1968, stimulating a New Wave in Czech cinema. Before this things were difficult and puppeteers and animators like Jirí Trnka were amongst the filmmakers to flourish. As in Britain, writing was central to the 1960s revival. The fable-like novels of the country’s surreal satirist Franz Kafka were rediscovered at the beginning of the decade, while the contemporary novelist Milan Kundera and screenwriter Jaroslav Papousek inspired the new directors as much as Kafka. Three in particular emerged: Milos Forman, Vérá Chytilová and Jirí Menzel.
Forman’s start in life was similar to Polanski’s. They were the same age, Jewish, had parents killed by the Nazis and, like many other Eastern European directors in the 1960s, were film school graduates. Where the Pole was interested in the tense humiliations of intimacy, Forman represents another strand in Eastern block counter cinema – satire. Again like his British colleagues, whose Free Cinema he much admired, Foreman’s first films drew on documentary roots. Cerny Petr/Peter and Pavla (Czechoslovakia, 1964) (378) used the techniques of Cassavetes – improvization, non-professional actors, etc – to tell a story about a young man who cannot manage his relationships with his father, his employers or his girl. Its observations about youth and love were as fresh as Truffaut’s, more pointed than Oshima’s. Forman’s Horí, má Panenko/The Fireman’s Ball (Czechoslovakia, 1967) did so well abroad that, disillusioned by the re-invasion of his country by the Russians in 1968, he, like Polanski, went to America, becoming, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (USA, 1975), Hair (USA, 1979), Amadeus (USA, 1984) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (USA, 1996), one of that country’s most prestigious directors.
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Milos Forman’s semi-improvised Peter and Pavla. Czechoslovakia, 1964.
The most innovative director in Czechoslovakia at the time was Vérá Chytilová. In the year that Forman made Peter and Pavla, she released a unique first feature; the appropriately titled O necem jinem/Something New (Czechoslovakia, 1963) intercut the lives of a housewife and a gymnast. Nothing unusual in that. Agnès Varda had intercut parallel storylines in La pointe courte (Franc
e, 1954). Chytilovà’s innovation was that while the housewife’s story was fiction, the gymnast’s was documentary. She wasn’t merging non-acted film and fictional film style as so many previous directors had from the time of neo-realism and before. Instead she was pointing up the differences. Three years later she made Sedmikrásky/Daisies (Czechoslovakia, 1966) (227) which was again about two women, Marie 1 and Marie 2. This time each character occupied the same fictitious world, but Chytilová told the story of their rampage as an experimental montage with distortions and superimpositions. The authorities hated it and, after the Soviet re-invasion of 1968, Chytilová was banned from working for six years. Jean-Luc Godard detested Daisies too, calling it cartoonish and apolitical, misunderstanding how Eastern block filmmakers sought to subvert Socialist Realism. His own growing Marxism might have produced hollow laughter in Chytilová who took, instead of some political theory, the surrealism of Dalí and Buñuel as her model. Daisies became the most important Eastern European absurdist film of its time.
Jirí Menzel started as Chytilová’s assistant and extended her comic tendencies in a less abrasive direction, making films that were the gentlest of these three Czech directors. The best known is Ostre Sledovné Vlaky/Closely Observed Trains (Czecholslovakia, 1966) which, like Forman’s early films, looks at the delicacy of love as an escape from duty. In this case the situation was a young railwayman distracted from the rigours of the Nazi occupying force by his attempts to lose his virginity.
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Vérá Chytilová’s experimental and absurdist Daisies. Czechoslovakia, 1966.
While the impetus behind the explosion of style in Western cinema in the 1960s was youth culture and anti-consumerism, the changes in film in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in these years represent an attempt to move away from a top-down, leftist view of society.15 While this might sound like the respective filmmakers were moving in opposite political directions, what unified their outlook was an interest in autobiography and the vicissitudes of love. As we move further east into the Soviet Union itself, the Socialist Realist fortress, we find that there too filmmakers attempted to personalize what they put on screen. There were comedy directors in the Soviet Union in these years but the most distinctive filmmakers found limited freedom away from the authorities by exploring the inner lives of people or by looking to the past.
Take Andrei Tarkovsky for example. The same age as Truffaut, Oshima and Polanski (twenty-six in 1959) he was, like Bertolucci, an intellectual and the son of a poet. He called the great Russian novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy his “art school”. He studied Arabic and, like all the East Block directors, attended film school. His second film, Andrei Rublev (Soviet Union, 1966) so departed from the official style of filmmaking that it was banned for six years. Like Pasolini, he believed that, “Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls.16 Like Douglas Sirk in the US in the 1950s, Tarkovsky was inspired by Thoreau’s book Walden and like Bergman in Sweden he was interested in theology and the role of god in human relations.
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“Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite”: Andrei Tarkovsky’s majestic Andrei Rublev. Soviet Union, 1971.
Despite all these connections, however, Andrei Rublev was startlingly original. Set in the fifteenth century it depicts incidents in the life of a Russian monk who leaves the seclusion of his religious order and finds, beyond its walls, a chaotic world ruled by Tartars (228). His belief in love, community and brotherhood is shaken by this revelation but slowly, through experience, he accepts once more their transcendent importance. Stylistically, Tarkovsky, who knew the work of Bresson, Bergman and Buñuel, attempted in the film to create scenes which in his own words were “detector(s) of the absolute”17. Interested in Zen Buddhism he creates scenes which, like Ozu’s intermediate spaces, are detached from the literal story time of his situations. In his later film Zerkalo/Mirror (Soviet Union, 1975) for example, a bird flies from the hand of a dying man in a split second and elsewhere gusts of wind animate landscapes. In the first of these Tarkovsky is depicting the flight of the human soul, while the wind stands for the pervasive Holy Ghost, in Christian belief the third person of the Trinity alongside Jesus and God. He was the first director in our story who could write, “Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite; the eternal within the infinite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form.”18 Dreyer and Bresson might have agreed with this but neither produced imagery like that of Andrei Rublev or Mirror.
Tarkovsky’s work alone would have been enough to establish the Soviet Union as a major force in the evolution of 1960s film schema, but three other directors released key works. The best and least known of these was Kira Muratova. The first feature she directed alone was Korotkie vstrechi/Short Encounters (Soviet Union, 1967), a portrait of a love triangle as fresh as Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. In this case two women, one a village girl and the other head of the water supply in Odessa (Muratova herself) are in love with a hippy, guitar-playing geologist. If there was a touch of Milos Forman in this, Muratova’s next film Dolgie provody/Long Goodbyes (Soviet Union, 1971) saw her moving into her own distinctive style. Using repeated dialogue and an acute interest in speech and sound, she captured life in the Soviet Union and the way the state cheapened language and rendered human beings puppets. Their insights led to both these films being banned. When they were finally released in 1986, they were acclaimed around the world.
The Soviet director who suffered most at the hand of the authorities was, ironically, from a part of the Union far from Moscow. Sergei Paradjanov was born in Georgia in 1924, of Armenian descent, and worked in the Ukraine. Like the other Soviet directors he studied at the Moscow film school, VGIK. Where Tarkovsky’s films were about spirituality and Muratova’s about violations of speech and women’s lives, Sergei Paradjanov was interested in the music, painting, poetry and folklore of his native lands. His ninth film, Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors (Soviet Union, 1964) was his first to benefit from these non-realist influences. In cinema he admired most the masterly Dovzhenko from the 1920s, who also worked in the Ukraine, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Pasolini is like a God to me”, said Paradjanov, “a god of aesthetic, majestic style”.19 Although their interest in the roots of cultural traditions unites the two directors, Paradjanov in other ways departed radically from Pasolini’s schema. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors begins with a breathtaking point-of-view shot of a falling tree, for example. His characters are framed like Russian icons (229). The theme is that of Romeo and Juliet; a love story set against the backgroud of warring families, in nineteenth-century Carpathia. The tensions in the culture of the time derive from the fact that the dominant religion is Christianity, yet pagan practices remain. Eleven minutes into the film, a shot is photographed from underneath a daisy looking up; Paradjanov’s camera is seldom at eye level and no filmmaker since Welles uses foreground more. Images of deer, scarves and forests recur. After the girl dies we see her and her lover touch in a dream. Not since Fellini or perhaps even Jean Cocteau has such a magical and personal visual world been created in cinema.
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Maverick Georgian director Sergei Paradjanov incorporated elements of folklore into richly visual films such as Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors. Soviet Union, 1964.
“After I made this film, tragedy struck”, said Paradjanov. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was everything the social realists hated: personal, regional, celebratory of pre-Soviet culture, sexual in their word, “decadent”. In this he was following, to some extent, the aesthetic ideas of Sergei Eisenstein. He supported political nationalists, made another beautiful film, Sayat Nova/The Colour of Pomegranates (Soviet Union, 1969), was arrested on charges of black marketeering, incitement to suicide and homosexuality and, in 1974, imprisoned. Filmmakers around the world protested and he was released four years later. He was imprisoned again in the early 1980s, made three more films, then die
d of cancer aged sixty-six in 1990.
Another Georgian, Mikhail Kalatozov, had been making films since 1930. His Letyat Zhuravli/The Cranes Are Flying (Soviet Union, 1957) was a brilliantly performed lyrical story about a young girl who marries the man who rapes her but remains in love with her former fiancé, who goes to war. Six years later he directed one of the most technically dazzling films of the era, a Soviet Union–Cuba co-production I am Cuba. Using four stories to illustrate the inequalities of Cuba and the build-up to its revolution, Kalatazov and his cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky filmed in a style that rivalled Orson Welles and Greg Toland in Hollywood more than two decades earlier. After the opening widescreen landscape scenes on a barge, for example, they take us to a swinging middle-class pre-revolutionary party in Havana. In a single take the camera starts at the top of a building, descends in what must have been an open air lift, traverses sunbathers and then dives, without a cut, under the water of a swimming pool. The film was re-released in the 1990s to astonishment and acclaim.
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Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates was even more arresting than Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors. Soviet Union, 1969.
In the Soviet Union’s Communist neighbour, China, few filmmakers openly challenged the cinematic norms. Xie Jin, the most important director of the period, was born in 1923 into a family so wealthy that his mother’s dowry was delivered on twenty boats. He left China in the 1930s when Japan invaded but went back after their defeat and became one of the Third Generation of directors to study at the Beijing Film Academy. In the 1960s, he directed classics such as Hongse niangzijun/The Red Detachment of Women (China, 1960) and Wutai Jiemei/Two Stage Sisters (China, 1964), sometimes called “revolutionary model operas”. The latter is about two girls who join an opera troupe (231), go to Shanghai and become stars. One is seduced by the trappings of fame while the other becomes a revolutionary and forms a women’s co-operative. These were studio films of the calibre of Douglas Sirk, wedded to socialist ideas about fame and collectivity, with no hint of the New Wave. But Two Stage Sisters is a great, expansive melodrama and would make a wonderful double bill with Sirk’s more hidden social critique.