I should flag a festival happening in Paris' Cite de la Musique, under the banner Lenine, Staline et la Musique.
A whole series of fascinating events will entertain Parisians from now until the middle of January. Apart from the big names: Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian etc, there'll be chances to catch undeservedly lesser-known talents like Artur Lourie (who turns up in a veiled reference in Akhmatova's Poem without a Hero), Vladimir Deshevov, Nikolai Roslavets and Alexander Mosolov. Some of them are seen as 'one-work' composers (e.g. Deshevov, for Rails), so this will hopefully be a chance to correct that impression.
Also worth noting is the very impressive (256-page) accompanying catalogue (the cover is illustrated above). I had the pleasure of penning the cinema essay - the first page of which is on the left.
It seems a good moment to mention a forthcoming screening of Benya Krik at the Purcell Room on 29 November 2009. Among other things, it's a fascinating view of early 20th-century Jewish life, apparently shot partly on location in Odessa.
Made in 1926, it was directed by Vladimir Vilner, while Isaac Babel based the script on his own short stories The King and How It Was Done in Odessa. The Russian texts and the 'kino-povest' (illustrated, left) are here, and Jeff Glodblum - that's Goldblum - reads The King (in English) here.
But Krik, the leader of a bunch of criminals, is hardly admirable and the film had something to offend everyone.
For starters, Krik's gang seems to be first precursors of, and then profiteers from the Revolution. Even though they're ultimately foiled by the Bolsheviks, the regime, obviously, was not impressed.
Meanwhile, Jewish groups were alarmed that it might inflame anti-Semitism.
The Soviet Union spent 1921-22 struggling economically in the face of what Lenin called "the elemental forces of the petty-bourgeois environment", before initiating a limited return to capitalism, even de-nationalising some enterprises - excluding, of course, the 'commanding heights' of heavy industry, banking etc. This 'New Economic Policy' became increasingly divisive: on one hand it made available luxuries - and even some essentials - that state and collective organisations were so signally failing to provide, but NEP-men were despised as spiv-like semi-gangsters and, plugging into Russian anti-Semitism, were often seen as Jewish.
In such an environment, Krik couldn't do right for doing wrong. Not only did it upset the authorities, but it was accused of ignoring the proletariat and concentrating on Jews (as if they were inimical!). But of course, it 'concentrates' on them only to criticise them as cynical petty thieves who are happy to trash tradition and their Jewishness in the pursuit of profit.
A few months later Babel's astonishing play Sunset opened, in which Krik, fearing disinheritance, beats his father up then arranges an abortion for his gentile girlfriend, and forces his sister into marriage to obtain the dowry. After all this, he is praised by the local rabbi.
Ethnically even more confusing is that Babel based Krik on the well-known Odessa gangster Mishka 'Yaponchik' (Mike the Little Jap) Vinnitsky, though I'm not sure why - he was Jewish and born in Odessa. Allegedly this is a portrait.
He's also the subject of Juliusz Machulski's Polish film Déjà vu (1988), which takes the action to Chicago: I suppose the archetypal US gangster city - it's where Balabanov's Brother II goes. Babel, perhaps seeing that he had created a potentially long-running franchise, didn't kill Krik in the books but he does die in Vilner's film, suffering a fate based on Mishka's death. Maybe Babel felt (or was advised) that the more popular medium needed to show retribution.
Krik is still a popular hero, largely thanks to the panache which Babel gave him - the Russian movie Мишка Япончик (Mishka Yaponchik, 2007) is part of the series Great Russian Adventurers! You can see a silent movie style trailer here.
Vilner's film was released in January 1927 but pleased nobody. It was almost immediately banned in Ukraine and never shown in Moscow. It has since fallen into that huge well of forgotten curiosities. After a couple more films, Vilner returned to the theatre, from when he had come.
Nevertheless Eisenstein recommended the script to Ivor Montagu, whose English translation was published by Collett's in 1935 in a numbered edition of 500. That sold well enough to go to another numbered 500. I've never seen this tome but I suspect it's the 1925 script that Babel wrote with Eisenstein, who later remembered the author observing that "writing a script is like calling the midwife out on your wedding night".
Eisenstein, whilst eating stewed apples, sharing vodkas with Malevich, and corresponding with Stefan Zweig, was dividing his time between Krik, 1905 (aka The Battleship Potemkin) and a wartime front-line brothel comedy called The Bazaar of Lust. In 1932 he praised the 'laconicism' of 'the vastly underestimated play Sunset', though it had been heavily criticised and dropped from the repertoire five years previously. Babel got permission to go to Paris for a year and on his return he and Eisenstein would work on the banned and destroyed Bezhin Meadow. In 1939 he was arrested for being an 'anti-Soviet Trotskyite spy' (recruited during his time in Paris) and 'a member of a terrorist conspiracy'. He was shot in 1940 and dumped in a mass grave.
A very quick post after an absence in Russia - of which more in due course - pointing to the Moscow Film Festival. Though it's international, obviously here I'm looking mostly at the Russian/Soviet stuff. There are a couple of potentially interesting strands.
The opening film is Pavel Lungin's The Tsar (Царь) starring, as Metropolitan Philip, Oleg Yankovsky, who died about a month ago.
Last year's Socialist avant-gardism continues with part 2, including a couple of things I'll be sad to miss, notably Kozintsev's quite rare wartime propaganda shorts. Medvedkin's Miracle Woman (Чудесница, 1936) I remember as a typically enjoyable bit of knockabout. Sadly the MIFF blurbs generally give little indication of what is avant-garde about the films but I'd be interested to see an early foray into that territory by Ivan Pyriev, director of the notorious Cossacks of the Kuban (1949), a musical comedy that celebrated the way that Soviet farmers regularly exceeded their wheat quotas, or Sergei Yutkevich who, after his early wildness, interleaved most workaday productions with under-the-radar criticisms. They've chosen his last film, Lenin in Paris (Ленин в Париже, 1981), which, from the still seems a bit more promising though the published script that I have gives no indications of it being anything other than you would expect. Last year there was a rather odd collection of films marking the centenary of the first film showing in Russia (Stenka Razin an obvious choice but, for all its popularity, Vainshtok's 1938 Treasure Island?!) This year three films mark the seventieth anniversary of the start of the war - interesting that they take it as 1939, rather then 1941, when the USSR was invaded. Given how massive a subject it is for Soviet cinema it would have been a good opportunity to do an archival retrospective (there was something similar in Berlin a few years ago) but they chose a very partial view with three contemporary looks back.
The Georgian strand reminds us just how strong that country's cinema is. There's a neat circularity in From The Vow to Repentance - the first, directed by Mikhail Chiaureli, is an early highpoint in Soviet cinema's hagiography of Stalin, while Abuladze's Repentance (1984) shatteringly dismantles the myth. Sadly, The Vow is the earliest film being shown, so we don't get to see any Georgian silents (the country was a late starter but strong).
The Chiaurelis (Mikhail, wife Veriko Andzhaparidze and daughter Sofiko) were important in cinema in the Causasus, but even more so were the Shengelayas. Nikoloz (1903-43) was a pioneer (Elisso, 1928 is extraordinarily beautiful), and his two sons Eldar (b.1933) and Georgi (b.1937) respectively directed the hilarious comedy Blue Mountains, or an Unbelievable Story (1983) and the blissful portrait of the naive painter Pirosmani (1969). When
Sofiko C and Georgi S married, the two dynasties were linked and had a massive impact on Soviet cinema, with a welter of relations, including their director-son, another Nikoloz. Andzhaparidze was also aunt to Georgi Daneliya, linking to another whole strand. I tried working out a family tree but ran out of paper. Apart from returning to the Stalin myth, Repentance neatly brings things full circle as Andzhaparidze (whose family, despite the Chiaureli connection, were not immune from the Terror) appears in it. In fact, it's a bit of a family affair as various clan members were involved.
Elsewhere, there's documentary about Prokofiev (which I'll be reviewing at greater length later in the year) as well as tributes to Pavel Lungin, Armenian documentarian Harutyun Khachatryan, some of Karen Shakhnazarov's favourite films (good to see Some Like it Hot in there) and a massive animation programme
Beyond Russia and the former USSR, as Britain finally gets the release of Wajda's Katyn Moscow is showing his new film Sweet Rush (Tatarak), dedicated to the cinematographer Edward Kłosiński and narrated in parts by his widow Krystyna Janda.
Finally, it's worth noting that the Skolimowski tribute includes both Le Départ and Deep End. Skolimowski's first western film has been available on DVD in the past (though he thinks another, more widely available one may be in the offing) but hopefully this is a sign that Deep End's long unavailability in some infuriating rights nightmare has been resolved.
Stage plays have always provided material for the cinema, but recently there has been a series of productions going the other way (in fact, with The Fly, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Lost Highway amongst others, you could argue that the preferred ultimate destination is opera). And so the National Theatre is showing Peter Flannery’s adaptation 1994 Foreign Film Oscar-winner Burnt by the Sun, scripted by Rustam Ibragimbekov and director Nikita Mikhalkov.
SPOILER ALERT (throughout)
June, 1936. Colonel Sergei Kotov is at his dacha with his daughter Nadezhda (Nadia), his wife Marusia and her family. An old friend (and Marusia’s former lover) Mitya arrives unexpectedly. Some years previously, Kotov had ‘invited’ Mitya to join the NKVD (predecessors of the KGB) where, under cover of being an émigré musician, he betrayed several White officers. He has received orders to take Kotov to the Kremlin to be questioned about alleged spying. Mitya finds his duty coinciding with his desire for revenge.
Though it’s obviously a Chekhovian dacha-drama, the film occasionally breaks out into the countryside, but here, apart from the swimming trip (with the dacha in the backgound), it all takes place at home, which works surprisingly well.
The film achieved a remarkable success in working well for western audiences, while embedding dialogue, music and references that added additional layers for Russian viewers. In fact the English version was slightly cut to remove some of the more Russocentric elements, and Flannery has followed that, while making some additional cuts and introducing new things, notably a subplot involving the middle-aged maid Mokhova, a virgin who flirts with a passing van-driver.
Why a reference to Hamlet was replaced by Escalus I'm not sure: a nation of Bardophiles like Russia would be completely unfazed. One minor but definite improvement is cutting the film’s destructive burning orbs, though oddly there’s still a vestigial reference to them that could disappear without losing anything apart from a few seconds of stage time. The 'Holiday of the Stalinist Balloon-Makers’ subplot is also a bit troublesome. Though it leads to the film’s impressive climax and a dreadful moment for Mitya, it's hard to imagine how it could be staged: better simply cut it altogether, as the semi-symbolism here (looking and sounding like an off-stage asthmatic dragon) probably only confuses anyone who hasn’t seen the film.
There's also a clear missed opportunity: the film starts with Mitya receiving his orders and making a desultory attempt at Russian roulette to avoid the job. At the end he slits his wrists in his Moscow bath, ironically echoing the titular song’s line about crimson waters (in the sunset) and the suicide attempt that Marusia made when he left (enforcedly) without explanation. In the play Flannery cuts the opening scene and finishes with Mitya shooting himself at the dacha: surely including the prologue would have made a neat book-ending.
But the major change is to Kotov’s daughter, Nadezhda (Russian for ‘hope’). In the film she’s irreplaceably played by Mikhalkov’s own similarly-named six year-old daughter, but here she's about ten. Practicalities (including child-actor laws) probably forced the change but it’s sad to lose the innocence that is so overwhelming in the film: the dark end of the play’s first act makes Nadia aware of how the state is overwhelming private life, whereas in the film she remains cheeky and charming to the very end, making her fate all the more distressing.
Her role is also cut back in two of the film’s tent-pole scenes: her dialogue with Kotov on the boat is given to Marusia, though he still invokes the spirit of Chapayev and conveys his intense faith in the Soviet future. But more serious is the decision to restage Mitya’s crucial story-confession. In the film it's a long scene framed by a window in which he tells Nadia a ‘fairy story’, reversing and anagramaticising the family’s names to allude to his dark mission, while the rest of the family listen uncomfortably in the next room. The complex layering of audiences (Nadia; the family; and us) is simplified on stage and his motivation flattened as it he is less torn between a sense of duty and a desire to be challenged. Here it is lesss nuanced: Nadia sleeps on Kotov's breast while Mitya's story, a semi-overt confession, is to Marusia and the whole family.
One of the film’s most evocative elements is the music, though there’s relatively little by Mikhalkov’s regular composer Eduard Artemyev. It’s more of a patchwork of popular songs from the 1930s including the almost-titular tango (the film changes it from The Weary Sun to Wearied by the Sun), which runs throughout the film as a bittersweet refrain. Originally Polish, its lyric about parting lovers meant it acquired the nickname “suicide tango”, another dramatic irony. Later, it was adapted and made a hit by Soviet jazz luminaries including Leonid Utyosov and Alexander Tsfasman. It also became enough of a symbol to pop up in Norshtein’s Tale of Tales, Kieslowski’s Three Colours: White and even (in its Polish form) Schindler’s List. I could have done with hearing it a few more times, as you do in the film.
This is the original (not, I think, the performance that's in the film).
And this is what Artyemev does with it for the trailer
Wisely they’ve kept the disturbingly manic performance of Offenbach’s Can-can, also used by Shostakovich as a symbol of a corrupt regime in New Babylon. In fact Shostakovich pops up a couple more times: on the way to the Kremlin Kotov breaks into a tune that any Russian would recognise: The Song of the Counterplan, indissolubly linked to the 1930s and a tune to which Shostakovich returned more than once, as explained in this book. At the National, Kotov simply suggests singing some folk songs (a few bars wouldn’t have come amiss, though they’d have to pay Booseys!) And there’s a brief reference to the ever-popular Aviators' March ("We Were Born to Make Fairy Tales Come True"). Finally, I wonder if the film's fragment of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth String Quartet is a little Artemyevan joke: the quartet was dedicated to the cellist Sergei Shirinsky: Kotov’s first name is, of course, Sergei. But the staging dispenses with much of the music, making the texture a bit thinner.
Burnt by the Sun is an intensely patriotic piece: Mikhalkov-Kotov saves “the people’s wheat” and fights for the Motherland and defends the future he envisages for it. Whatever Bolshevism later became, he cleaves to its initial stated aims and the play, if anything, strengthens that, with Kotov more forcefully reminding us of his peasant beginnings and the cowardice of the bourgeoisie who ran before him rather than defending their beloved lifestyle. That also slightly changes the dynamic with the rest of the family as he more openly despises them for that.
But none of these changes reduce the power of the piece and, as I said, Flannery has made it work brilliantly for a Western audience.
Meanwhile, Mikhalkov is currently producing Burnt by the Sun 2, a blockbuster two-part epic. Part one is set to open on 9 May 2010, the 65th anniversary of Victory Day, and the film will then be expanded as a 12-part mini-series.
For this he has reanimated Kotov, Marusia and Mitya who all died or were reported dead in the first film! Mikhalkov's father Sergei, of course wrote the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem and reworked them for a new audience when Putin revived it, and Nikita’s actions sometimes bring him to the edge of being an apologist for a cult of personality. Hence a visit to the set from Vladimir Putin, with his newly imposed official view of Stalinism, might raise an eyebrow but the director assures us the film will denounce the tyrant.
Finally, a small plug for Birgit Beumers' excellent guide to the film, published by Tauris.
The Soviet regime was always wary of nationalist feelings in the republics but, for Estonians, music was a buttress against Russification and Sovietisation. In the four years before gaining independence in 1991 more than a fifth of the population would regularly join the so-called Singing Revolution (laulev revolutsioon), defiantly congregating in the streets to perform forbidden songs.
By then Veljo Tormis had been composing for over thirty years, concentrating on choral music and creating monumental cycles as well as smaller one-off songs.
Tormis was born in 1930, the eldest son of a farmer who was musically active in the local church in Vigala, Estonia, At 12 he entered Tallinn Conservatory but two years later the Soviets arrived and stopped the too-religiously-inflected organ class, so Tormis transferred to choral conducting, though the lack of churches restricted opportunities there as well. In 1951 he moved to Moscow to study with Vissarion Shebalin – to whom no doubt I’ll return – graduating in 1956.
The Soviets attitude to the Republics was always ambivalent: on one hand encouraging nationalism but at the same time taking care that it should not grow too strong. Tormis’ interest in Estonian folk music had been supported by Shebalin and, supporting himself by teaching in Tallinn, he went on to study the music of Orff and, after a visit to Hungary in 1962, Kodaly.
This climaxed with his first great cycle, Estonian Calendar Songs (Eesti kalendrilaulud) for mixed chorus (1967) and by 1969 was able to support himself, composing film scores, an opera and, overwhelmingly, choral music. Estonian national identity is closely bound to its choral traditions – amateur singing is endemic - hence Tormis’ importance and popularity.
Tormis himself said it best in setting the exiled Gustav Suits’ poem I’d Like to Sing a Song (Ühte laulu tahaks laulda)
I’d like to sing a song, Just this only one: That would rise a huge wave of sea From the heart
Titles like Bridges of Song (Laulusild) and Forgotten Peoples (Unustad rahvad) imply attempts to bind together misbegotten populations through music. The latter (formed of six sub-cycles) is particularly poignant as an epic memorial to endangered civilisations, such as the Izhorians and Votes. The Soviets responded by banning some of his works.
Tormis develops ancient Estonian regilaul, ‘runic’ songs, which might include imitations of natural sounds and something close to rhythmic speaking or shouting, with proto-minimalist rhythms. But Tormis avoids pared down Pärt-ishness: his musical roots are less religious than folk-pagan and very specifically Baltic-Finno-Ugrian: “It is not I who makes use of folk music: it is folk music that makes use of me.” As well as settings of modern Estonian poets, there are spells and incantations from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and the Estonian equivalent, the Kalevipoeg.
Tormis creates a vast range of colours and textures and a huge dynamic range: the epic Curse Upon Iron (Ruaa needmine) is the highlight of the disc, running the gamut from whispering to shouting, by way of uncanny choral glissandos. You’ll have to turn up the volume for the quiet bits, but prepare to be blasted out of your chair a few minutes later. The Bishop and the Pagan (Piispa ja pakana) sets chant-like sections against, freer, more irregular music to tell both sides of the story of a 12th-century British missionary martyr. Beside these 10-minute mini-epics are catchy, witty and thrilling little pieces like An Aboriginal Song (Pärimaalase lauluke) and Incantation for a Stormy Sea (Incantatio maris aestuosi).
Tormis’ music is simultaneously ancient and newly minted, and the Svanholm Singers under Sofia Söderberg Eberhard hurl themselves into it with fantastic gusto. Tormis himself joins in, playing the shaman drum in two songs and the anvil in another, while counter-tenor Stefan Engström also does a turn on log drums. Along with some whistling, these sounds make the disc even more atmospheric.
Tormis isn’t a new name (for those in the know) but, though there have been several CDs of his music, he isn’t as widely known as his compatriot Pärt. Toccata Classics’ excellent selection, including premieres of a couple of revised pieces, is a welcome push in that direction.
Fans of choral music, and anyone with a taste for Kodaly, Orff (the insistent Musica Poetica from his Schulwerk was used in Malick’s film Badlands) or Bartók’s Mikrokosmos shouldn’t wait.
Concentrating on music, film and music, I write, teach, broadcast and curate.
Publications include "Dmitri Shostakovich: a Life in Film" (IB Tauris) and "Discover Film Music" (Naxos, 2008).
I regularly front "I'm Ready for My Close-Up", Resonance 104.4FM's film show.
I wrote, directed and produced the evening-long show "Shostakovich - My Life at the Movies" for the South Bank Centre. It was premiered by the CBSO with Simon Russell Beale and was then produced at the Komische Oper, Berlin, with Ulrich Matthes.
or Sergei Yutkevich who, after his early wildness, interleaved most workaday productions with under-the-radar criticisms. They've chosen his last film, 
Sofiko C and Georgi S married, the two dynasties were linked and had a massive impact on Soviet cinema, with a welter of relations, including their director-son, another Nikoloz. Andzhaparidze was also aunt to Georgi Daneliya, linking to another whole strand. I tried working out a family tree but ran out of paper. Apart from returning to the Stalin myth, 
