The Heart of Russia in Cinema E-Book

Pino Viscusi

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Pino Viscusi, poet and literate lent to cinema, in this fourth essay presents important iconographic material to testimony of his passion for revisiting literary texts, paintings, and movie classics all seen as authentic expression of and recurrent need for the spirituality of the "Russian Soul", since the time of its evangelism.

Leseprobe

Pino Viscusi, poet and literate lent

to cinema, in this fourth essay

presents important iconographic

material to testimony of his passion

for revisiting literary texts, paintings,

and movie classics all seen as

authentic expression of and

recurrent need for the spirituality of

the “Russian Soul”, since the time

of its evangelism.

Copyright © Pino Viscusi, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or image may be used for any purpose other than personal use.

Therefore, reproduction in any form or by any means, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited

without prior written permission.

The author remains at disposal of potential copyright holders

for those images whereas it was not possible to trace the original intellectual property.

Translation from Italian by Giada Garofalo

By Pino Viscusi

ISBN 9788892643857

Graphics and front cover by the author

To little Isabel Shabalin, daughter of Simona Pagano and Dmitry Shabalin,

beautiful, smiley, arrived “from Russia with love”,

Your proud great grandfather Pino

Pino Viscusi

Preface by Elio Zenobi

Introduction by Angelo Signorelli

THE HEART OF RUSSIA

IN CINEMA

PREFACE

by

Elio Zenobbi

This is the fourth book that Pino Viscusi writes about Cinema.

He does so as a curious person, a cinema lover, or better said an

artist who has spent the past four years researching the inviting field

of moving images. He does so with a loving soul and a refined

palate for emotions.

Viscusi avoids focusing on theories or historical facts, because

he is more interested in the game of analogies, in the paths that

lead to painting experiences, in the awe inspired by sudden

enlightenments.

The book is rich of iconographic material and of subtle comments,

probably in an attempt to leave more space for personal interpreta-

tion by the reader, entrusted with finding possible links between the

chapters that the author assembles more because of their

emotional and visual impact than for a real logical-structural need.

Viscusiʼs essay starts with the observation that it was the great

works of Russian literature that became movie subjects or that

inspired the visuals and the mystic and poetic passions in the likes

of Parajanov, Tarkovsky, Kalatozov and Lungin.

But Russian cinema has also nourished thanks to the painting

tradition rooted in the icon, to the conflicting and provocative

Iurodivye (Fools for Christ), and to those who like the Starets were

guiding lights for spirituality and morality.

The apex of this debt to the visual arts is embodied in Sokurov, who

in Russian Ark encapsulates an enchanting journey across history,

art and spirituality in one single long sequence shot.

What emerges from Viscusiʼs work is a Russia with an ancient heart

geared towards contemplation, mysticism, and palingenesis. A heart

tenacious and eternal, that remains substantially untouched by the

most radical historical events, like the October Revolution.

Thus, earth, water, air, fire, manʼs works, and time maintain an

intrinsic sacredness that withstands history shakes, and any

ideologic fascinations. And so, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, and Khutsiev

free themselves from any State materialism and return to talk about

the soul and a certain feel for sacredness.

Moreover, Viscusiʼs taste for the Irrational studded with symbols,

allegories, metaphors, and enlightenments shows through the titles

of all his writings: “I registi raccontano lʼIndia che cambia” (Film-

makers narrate a changing India), “Realtà e sogno - suggestioni

poetiche con Theo Anghelopulos” (Dream and Reality – poetic

suggestions with Theo Anghelopulos), “Il cuore della Russia nelle

immagini del cinema” (The Heart of Russia in Cinema), “Cogito ergo

video – storia illustrata del Cinema dagli inizi ai nostri giorni”(I think

therefore I see – illustrated history of cinema since its incipit to our

days), whereas cogito (I think) does not refer to anything rational; it

does not refer in fact to Descartes but to Godard, a prolific creator

of alchemies, analogies, and strenuous promoter of ideological

passions.

But the most striking aspect of Viscusiʼs work lies in the graphics

that he personally imagines and designs. His books are humbly and

gently “shown” more than “written”. The beauty of the front covers,

the splendour of the fonts (titles, italics, bolds, white and black

pages, spaces...), the glossy finish of the photographs all let us see

the hand of the painter, of the creator of iconic works.

In this sense, his discovery of cinema at a later age is not

surprising, because it feels like in a certain way, deep inside he

wants to make some cinema too, not just show us the work by

others.

Elio Zenobi

INTRODUCTION

by

Angelo Signorelli

THE EMOTION OF AN IMAGE

Images by great artists, painters, sculptors, photographers, or film

directors are like abysses of senses filled with ambiguity. Looking at

them over and over again we never manage to complete their

description, we never end interpreting them. But above all, we never

manage to really see them if we superimpose our prejudiced vision

of the world, looking for a confirmation of our preconceptions, an

explanation of theories originated somewhere else.

To read an image is an act of humbleness, is a sacred act of respect

and reverence, in spite of the immediate content, of the object of

our seeing.

Matter and shape, space and composition, lights and shadows,

visible and invisible, framed and unlimited, surface and depth,

obviousness and turmoil, surface and anguish, immanence and

transcendence, element and universal, happiness and fear, object

and emotion...we could carry on, playing with words and antonyms.

We could try choosing a painting by a great artist and looking at it

with the many eyes we have, which are all part of our persona, our

being, education, formation, of our delirium as men thrown in the

world, all part of a whole, but different, perhaps, in our desperate

and anxious quest for the meaning of our existence.

Cinema flows in front of us and we cannot stop it: product of a

mechanic process, now, thanks to the new digital technologies, we

can “use” it behind closed doors in our homes, like it were a page to

turn, an album to leaf through, incunabulum, manuscript, cipher

language, codex, map.

We can identify the tricks, the passages, and the craft: we can

research the meaning. We can play archaeology, trusting the power

of our tools rather than questioning our preconceptions.

But in the end, when we read an image, or pretend we do, donʼt we

risk talking about something else, departing from a point of origin

that instead asks us to use kindness and caution because it is

charged with mystery and is fundamentally unknowable?

The images that we manipulate to draw sketches, figures, links, and

possible architectures in the end are surrogates that do not

coincide with their projection when using film and light: different

colours, different definition, tone, depth, density, contrast, and

ultimately different perception.

The screen capture is a small remedy but it is useful to pause on

the visual elements, to work from a provisional script that frees

resources for interpretation and critique.

It is important though to be aware: the image needs be seen as a

plot, open and mobile, that can be questioned with no presumption

to fully understand it, to label it.

This book gathers objects, traces, presences, landscapes, visions,

evocations, assonances, memories, metaphors, attitudes, allusions,

quotes, passages, tensions, sensibilities, attentions, legacies, debts,

intermittences, contaminations, refractions, and cross references.

The choice of the opening movie is the most appropriate: Russian

Ark, the superlative work by Alexander Sokurov, allows us to enter

the universe of that infinite land through consecutive stages of

disorientation.

The Hermitage Museum loses its nature of place designated to

being visited; instead it becomes a proper stage, an ever-changing

theatre where history performs its magnificence, where fiction

multiplies like in a game of mirrors, where individuals alienate

themselves in the crowd, social rituals allow the East and West

to meet, and where art takes life and exposes the Sovereignsʼ

megalomania through their collections of whatever artwork was

considered fashionable at their time.

Russia and Europe: united and divided, perhaps one thing, perhaps

separated by an imbalance that is not only territorial but also pertains

to knowledge, barriers, diffidence and fear.

Russia is the great mother to the children that her soil has genera-

ted; but also a great danger, always incumbent, an enormous

extension of land and countries that presses the borders of small

Europe, eternally divided. That land eats her children, suffocates

them with her womb that they have never really left. Tarkovsky

knows it too well, “forced” to that trip to Italy, where the enchantment

and disorientation produced by the great Italian art of the 14th and

15th centuries do not cancel that nostalgia for the homeland, that

religion of the soil and elements that emerge in the gothic architec-

ture, in the flickering of a flame, like in a dream and in a pagan

nativity scene: a challenge that wears you down, that takes your

strengths away longing for the lost motherland, for the soil one no

longer treads on, for the snow and the mud that represent the first

point of contact with this soil.

The icon returns, with its multilayered stratification made of conse-

cutive strata through which you can touch the beauty of the soul,

which unveils itself only in the work, in the dexterity, in the patience

put in coating, till full life is given to the colours, to the lines, to the

figures, to the wood that consecrates the union between matter and

the divine mystery.

Rublev knows it well, the artist who becomes silent of thoughts and

gestures, blocked in front of the white of the walls, opaque and

tragic mirror of manʼs violence. He, who will find an answer, the

answer in the folly of a boy who conversed with death, with ghosts,

with those who could not teach him to recreate the sound,

resurrectional and joyful sound, of bells.

But Russia, continent of mysticisms, invasions, contaminations of

faith, dividing and heroic despotisms, has also given birth to one of

the great revolutions of the twentieth century: the redemption of the

downtrodden, the exploited, the peasant, the salaried worker.

Dream and utopia merge together in the revolt historical and

irreversible against monarchy and aristocracy, against the rising and

aggressive middle-class. The Winter Palace was conquered; the

ornaments, the jewels, and the glitz were swept away with the

iconoclastic strength of those who never took part to the banquet

and suddenly found themselves in the corridors of power, celebra-

ting, the wrong way round, the rituals of carnival and farce.

The masses enter the framing; they fill it almost to the point of

bursting and the architectures take a new life. They take part to the

strikes; they fret and glimpse new, enthusiastic participations.

They crash upon the urgency of change.

New perspectives are born, which invent the plausible with the

freedom derived by the desire of getting rid of the past and of its

ways of representing and justifying the passiveness of the real.

The cine-eye dissolves, accelerates, dilutes, superimposes, and

transports the POV (point of view). It immerses it in the supply chain,

in the rhythms of the cities that design the future; and catches a sight

of great conquests, with the pride of a resurging humanism.

And, what do few still images left from Sergei Eisensteinʼs Bezhin

Meadow really show us? Images that a posthumous almost

miraculous, editing has handed us back as moving images, with

their light and their splendidly bridled modernity? Not so much their

iconoclastic energy that strikes us because part of the narrative, but

their being tangibly possibility, creation, and film: beyond the

censorship that had mortified them.

But dreams will not last long; and Ivanʼs terrible profile will return to

darken the Rising Sun for decades, to kill all that is imagination,

invention, eccentricity, turmoil, and delusion, like never before.

The Earth takes back its space, with its landscapes of light, water,

skies, clouds, woods, cortex, and leaves: moved by the winds,

painted by snow.

Landscapes populated by figures, faces that together tell us infinite

distances and modern solitudes.

The haven, the doorstep, the return to the many islands that are a

projection of our consciousness, like if we always lived in Solarisʼ

universe, made of dismays, exiles, vortexes but also devastating

acts of love.

We turn our eyes to the sky, where this poor and small planet moves,

which we are destroying with our arrogance and idiocy. In that sky,

migrant birds fly loyal to the signs that exhort them to depart and

return; the storks look at us from above, thankful for being part of

stories told to children. From the sky the water falls upon us; it gives

us life, purifies, and disturbs any transparencies. It rains on the

icons, and water drops are like tears.

The horses carry on undisturbed their existence, unaware of the

persecutions of time.

These are the last images by Andrei Rublev. Perhaps it is from here

that Sukurovʼs artistic journey starts, a journey that still continues in

the universe of the arts, on a quest for the meanings hidden in the

visible and in its configurations, intercepting romantic vibrations,

eastern fragilities, primordial musicality, colour variations.

Visual elegies, mirrors that reflect depths lost in the mists of time.

Images changing colour, objects and figures that become ideas,

abstractions, essence of forms, spots of colour, of light and

shadows, glimpses of infinity.

This is the place of sorrow, of leaning towards an afterlife that

remains within material things, deeply rooted in the soil, in the steam

that from it rises, in the silences of nature that unmoved repeats its

births and deaths. The humus, the origin, the mother, the water, the

fire, the tree, the hands, the face: manʼs heart and his miseries,

greed and abuse of power.

Russia is a body covered by wounds: it is like the place, among

ruins, carcasses, wrecks where the stalker feels the tragic and

excruciating limitlessness of his inner being, his insatiable appetites.

And so, we can read images as tools of pietas, as acts of affection,

as painful attempts at knowledge, as an epiphany of the existence,

as plots of the absolute.

If there is any sacredness, this is in manʼs time, in the word that

creates stratified meanings, in the gaze that invents transcendences

and inexhaustible power fields.

The journey of this book takes us through questions, objects, myths,

contemplations, intermittences, suggestions, findings, interferences,

and surprises. And, as readers we have gone along like a bird flight,

like Chagallʼs lovers, with no intention of critiquing, but simply

imagining, picking up random flowers of sensibility, interfering

without presumptions with our subjectivity, between the lines,

simply looking for that communion that arises from the feeling of

beauty.

Angelo Signorelli

15

I N D E X

CHAPTER ONE: RUSSIAN POETRY

THE RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE

3

DOSTOYEVSKY, AN ANTE LITTERAM PROPHET

4

THE PAINTINGS SPEAK

5

PICTORIALISM IN RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHY

7

RUSSIAN CINEMA BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

8

THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

9

THE TURNING POINT OF RUSSIAN CINEMA

10

AVANT-GARDE CINEMA

11

THE ECHO OF EXISTENTIAL THEMES

12

NARRATING THROUGH IMAGES

13

IMOST RECURRENT SUBJECTS AND SYMBOLS

17

IN RUSSIAN FILMMAKERS

CHAPTER TWO: GHOSTS FROM THE PAST

RUSSIAN ARK

21

HERMITAGE

24

THE COLLECTIONS

26

POWER

28

THE TSAR AND HIS FAMILY

30

THE COURT BALL

32

TSARS’ RUSSIA IN COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

34

THE SPLENDOUR OF FAITH

36

CHAPTER TREE: FROM PHOTOGRAPHY TO FILM

PICTORIALISM

41

ELEGY FROM RUSSIA

42

THE SUFFERING

43

PEOPLE’S RELIGIOSITY

44

WORLD WAR I

45

THE CIVIL WAR

46

HEROES OF THE REVOLUTION

47

FILM-EYE

48

RADIO-EAR

49

DISSOLVE

50

THE HANDS

51

THE FACE OF THE PEOPLE

52

THE FACE OF POWER

53

THE TRAITORS

54

THE METAPHOR

55

GAME OF SHADOWS

56

ECSTATIC IMAGE

57

THE LAST GLEAMS OF FAITH

58

CONSECRATION OF THE TEMPLE

59

RUSSIA AS SEEN BY MARC CHAGALL

60

CHAPTER FOUR: CINEMA AT THE TIME OF THE KHRUSHCHEV THAW

KALATOZOV’S VIRTUOSITY

67

THE CRANES ARE FLYING

68

LETTER NEVER SENT

73

I AM CUBA

80

CHAPTER FIVE: THE VGIK INSTITUTE, A DREAMS FACTORY

THE VGIK SCHOOL OF CINEMATOGRAPHY IN MOSCOW

89

ANDRIESH

90

FLYING CHARACTERS

92

THE RAIN

93

THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN

94

INNOCENCE

95

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

96

THE STEAMROLLER

97

DREAMS AND REFLECTIONS

98

WATER IS LIFE

99

THE LONELY VOICE OF MAN

100

HALLUCINATIONS

103

THE FIRST NIGHT

104

THE RIVER POTUDAN

105

MARIA (PEASANT ELEGY)

106

CHAPTER SIX: NOSTALGIA

TARKOVSKY’S TESTAMENT

111

VOYAGE IN TIME

112

COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO CULTURES

115

THE LIGHT OF THE SOUTH

116

EARTH PRIMORDIAL FIRE

117

NOSTALGHIA

118

THE TEMPLE

120

THE ABLUTION

121

MADONNA OF PARTURITION

122

DYNAMIC PHOTOGRAPHY

124

WATER

126

CHAPTER SEVEN: INFINITAS

THE THEOLOGY OF MARTYRDOM

131

INFINITAS

132

THE RETURN

136

CHAPTER EIGHT: ELEGY

SOKUROV’S POETRY

145

ORIENTAL ELEGY

147

“ELEGIYA DOROGI”

155

CHAPTER NINE: SALVATION IN GOD

ONLY FAITH IN CHRIST CAN SAVE MAN

173

ANDREI RUBLEV AND THE SPIRIT OF THE ICON

180

EPITAPHION

184

WINTER

186

LITERATURE, PAINTING, CINEMA

188

FILMOGRAPHY

191

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

201

The eternal land, the great mother, Russia! These are

the recurrent themes of Russian culture, different

from Western culture because in many of her artists

there is a profound need to acknowledge the anguish

of the soul rather than the body. In other words, they

embody the spirit of the icon that is the “vision of the

invisible”, the expression of Russian “pietas”.

The greatest Russian metaphysician, and the most

markedly existential, was Dostoyevsky. He created

the ideological and psychological novel, giving life to

unforgettable characters defined by a surprising

depth that draws from the deep subconscious.

His polyphonic works are characterised by many

interlacing plots, from which the filmmakers of the last

Russian avant-garde still take inspiration today.

Chapter ONE

Russian

Poetry

1

2

3

THE RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE

Russian culture experienced a time of rebirth and splendour with Peter the Great (1699-

1725) and with the foundation of the new capital in 1703: the new, magnificent capital,

Saint Petersburg “window to the West” rose up in very few years along the inhospitable

banks of the Neva river, by the will of the dictator, to give Russia a seaport, the only

possible given that access to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were blocked by the

Ottoman Power.

Saint Petersburg, built upon the “bones” of thousands of peasants, thousands of serfs

who ended their miserable life there, soon became a cosmopolitan city, from the poorest

neighbourhoods like the one near Sennaya Ploschad, or Haymarket Square, populated by

a miserable crowd of drunks and “tramps”, to its canals where the marginalised drifted in

the surreal light of the white nights, in contrast with the magnificent buildings, palaces,

and cathedrals with golden domes, home to the aristocracy, the Military and the Clergy.

To Saint Petersburg is dedicated Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman”, in which the

unhappiness and tragedy of that city’s inhabitants is counterposed to the majesty of the

monuments and granite river banks.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was perhaps the only one among the artists who

benefitted from a life of leisure and luxury at the court of Tsar Alexander the First. He also

suffered, however, the negative consequences of having to accept the inflexible court rules,

like demanding satisfaction for an offence with a duel, thing which led him to death at a

young age.

In the imperial city, Pushkin made friends with another protagonist of Russian

Renaissance, the writer Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852); when in 1836 he founded his own

paper, he published the first short stories by Gogol, who then went on to be recognised as

the initiator of Russian Realism.

Gogol started his literary activity with stories set in Ukraine; he then moved onto

portraying the oppressing environment of the capital Petersburg, with its defeated and

disheartened humanity, buried in a tormented reality, at times illuminated by a deforming

light that made it grotesque.

This was in line with the works of other writers, who around the mid 19th Century started

to look at and write of the proletariat for the first time, writers like: Ivan Goncharov (1812-

1891), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), and Leo Tolstoy (1828-

1910).

They all gave life to a vast gallery of new characters, who in the 20th Century inspired the

newly born art of filmmaking. Lacking any original scripts, cinema brought these

characters to the big screen, contributing to make these works, previously unknown to the

majority of Russian people who were still illiterate, now popular and accessible.

4

DOSTOYEVSKY, AN ANTE LITTERAM PROPHET

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) emerged in this context. He, more than any other, was

able to get to the heart of contemporary problems, weaving his stories between suspense

and nostalgia, between dream and elegy, revealing the most inaccessible values of the

Russian soul.

His debut was the short epistolary novel “Popular Folk” (1844/45), considered Russia’s

first “social novel”; after two more short novels, his interests moved towards Fourier

and Proudhon’s utopian socialism, whose humanitarian principles called for man’s

brotherhood. In the meanwhile, in 1848, Karl Marx published “The Communist

Manifesto” in Brussels, which captured the attention of many, transforming the utopian,

humanistic socialist theories in strict ideologic and structural doctrines, essential to reach

the common good.

In 1849, after joining the Petrashevsky Circle, the first socialist group in Russia regarded

by the central authority as a potentially subversive hideout, Dostoyevsky was reported by

an undercover spy, accused of sedition and sentenced to death.

The death sentence was ultimately revoked by Tsar Nicolas I (who loved this kind of

pranks) and commuted to exile and hard labour in Siberia, where the writer stayed in

absolute segregation from 1849 to 1854, followed by a three years term of compulsory

military service.

Dostoyevsky described his horrible experience in the novel “The House of the Dead”,

1860; then in 1862 he embarked on a long journey across Europe, where between new

encounters and acquaintances he never gave up his incurable gambling vice, accruing

continuous debts. At the age of 46, he finished his first great novel “Crime and Punish-

ment”, which in spite of the huge success did not allow him to settle all his debts. He, then,

took refuge in Germany to elude his creditors. There, he became fascinated with the works

of Renaissance and Romanticism painters, discovered in the great German museums; a

fascination that he revived in his following novels.

1869 was the year of “The Idiot”, in which Dostoyevsky tackled his Christological vision

with great determination, putting himself in sharp opposition to the Roman Church and its

fake values. Ten years later, in “The Brothers Karamazov”, in the parable "The Grand

Inquisitor" he set Christ against the socialist ideal, regarded as a doctrine that leads to the

total subjugation of man’s free will by pursuing the adoration of material goods.

It is with regret that he witnessed the students’ protests, who moving away from the

people’s real problem, manifested their desire to adapt to a European lifestyle, disowning

the spirit and traditions of their forefathers.

In spite of condemning the always more frequent and bloody terrorist attacks, in whose

response the government’s repression became increasingly harsher and more cruel,

Dostoyevsky also denounced the blindness of all those who in the terrorists simply saw

some criminals, ignoring the harsh condition of the population, and the odious taxes to

whom he himself was subjected, like the salt tax.