Russia
in Transition: I to IV
by Sergei Loznitsa
The Cinema Guild, New York, 2006
4 DVD-R, one for each part, 30,
79, 28, 24
Cinema Guild 2230-2231-2232-2233
Distributors website: http://www.cinemaguild.com/.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
Russia in Transition is a series
of four documentary films of different
length, each illustrating one or the other
of the many faces of post-soviet Russia.
Loznitsa, who recently produced the widely
acclaimed Blockade, a movie
collage on the siege of Leningrad, shot
these films in a a single typical style,
using wide angle lenses, unmoving cameras,
in black and white or very subdued colours
and refraining from even the least trace
of commentary or contextualisation. The
subject of each of the four parts, Factory,
The Settlement, Portrait,
and The Train Station, is
a single environment somewhere in an anonymous
backwater of the vast Russian empire.
Anonymous people stare straightly into
the lens, doing whatever is expected of
them: moving blocks of clay, waiting for
a train, haying fields, eating cabbage
soup, or simply being themselves and going
about their business. Together, the films
portray one aspect of what Loznitsa himself
calls the reluctance of Russia to
change. And together they convey
the impression that this is a country
where peasants are still tilling the fields
by hand, where communication technology
is unheard of and where everyone dresses
in drab, torn and formless clothes.
There are, however, some very unsettling
things about this quartet of documentaries.
For one, we know that this is not Russia.
This is an extremely biased selection
of images of rural parts of a country
in transition. But I imagine one could
make just as easily a documentary of French,
American, Chinese or Peruvian peasants
waiting for a train with the one
probable difference that the Americans
would be eating something fast and drinking
something soft. One could just as easily
shoot the daily chores of the inmates
of La Borde psychiatric clinic in France
(The Settlement is about a
rural ward for the mentally retarded)
or the repetitive movements of Mexican
illegal labourers in Arizona. Loznitsa
acknowleges to concentrate on only a few
aspects of the transition, but in doing
so turns his documentary in a political
statement, a manifesto in disguise. The
lack of commentary leaves the viewer at
a loss for information: where does all
this happen? How common or uncommon is
this? In what respect does this represent
an exceptional situation? Are urban, moneymaking,
trendy, gasoline-guzzling Russians driving
their Lexuses and BMWs aware of
what happens there? And what do authorities
do about it?
Secondly, why do European juries of Film
Festivals seem to think these films are
such a big deal? Each single one of them
has won at least three awards at competitions
from Krakow to Manchester and from Trieste
to Paris. Surely they are not that exceptional?
In each case, one is tempted to press
the fast forward button more than once
because of the slow pace, the rather unsurprising
editing and the lack of development. This
is not Tarkovsky. This is not Sokurov.
A three-minute still doesnt necessarily
make one think or philosophise about the
nature of space and time or the importance
of being
whatever. So, why are these
juries applauding Loznitsa? Being mischievous,
I could wonder if this is some post-Cold-War
Russia-bashing, in the anti-Tsarist and
anti-Soviet tradition. Or is this just
another prelude to the long longed for
colonisation of Siberia after all
the biggest reserves of coal, gas, gold,
oil and uranium that are not (yet) under
American control are there! So what are
we, civilised Western Europeans, waiting
for? Lets colonise this picturesque,
backward, uncivilised space! Admittedly,
this might not be the conscious aim of
those brave intellectuals who had a hard
time sieving hundreds of movies, but the
fact is that Russia in Transition
adds to an image of Russia that Edward
Saïd would gladly label as orientalising
and of which Sam Huntington would say:
See? I told you!
The Cinema Guild has chosen to release
the movies in their original Russian version,
without even translating the titles, each
in a separate box.