#39_1-8

WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA
CULT URE No.39 JUNE 21, 2018 7
By Dmytro DESIATERYK, The Day
We hope that this text by
Dmytro Desiateryk will
launch a thorough discussion
about what exactly can
be considered a product of
Ukrainian culture. For example, is the
“Ukrainianness” of a cultural product
influenced by the language in which it was
created? After all, there is still no
consensus on this matter, just like before.
Even if the answer is available, it is a
multi-layered one... We call on you, dear
readers, to join the conversation.
It is unrealized, since a question that
should not have arisen anymore is appearing
again.
● THE QUESTION
So, it surfaces time and again, even if,
fortunately, not as often as before: is Muratova
a Ukrainian filmmaker?
Overall, if the creator lives on the
territory of Ukraine, shoots films at the expense
of the Ukrainian budget with Ukrainian
actors, there is nothing left to discuss.
But, apparently, this is not enough to
satisfy some of the most enthusiastic
guards of the national culture’s purity.
For example, Muratova is blamed for
making Russian-language films.
Oh well.
When I go to a market near my house,
I pass by an agitation tent of the National
Corps. I have never heard from the
youths standing there (there is a whole
brigade of them) and distributing newspapers
of that organization as much as
one word in Ukrainian.
Language is a means of communication.
A tool. A form. With it, one can get
completely different results, do entirely
different things.
One can, for example, praise the
Russian Empire, promote the Kremlin order,
and lie on the TV.
One can also give combat orders in the
same language as one is fighting separatists
in the Donbas.
Viktor Yanukovych spoke fluent
Ukrainian, and it is no less fluent when
coming from supporters of the approach
“things are not so clearcut” and “stop the
fratricidal war in eastern Ukraine” (yes,
yes, they do exist, and there are not as few
of them as we would like).
Is Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s multiple-award-winning
film The Tribe less
Ukrainian because its characters communicate
in a sign language alone? Why
is Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s silent film trilogy
Zvenigora – Arsenal – Earth called
“Ukrainian”? Should the Russian-language
film Donbass by Serhii Loznytsia,
which voluminously and meticulously
shows how the “Russian World” cripples
the occupied territories, be removed from
our cinema tradition? Does Lars von Trier
stop being a Danish director, and Wim
Wenders a German one, because they
both regularly film in English?
For everyone but civil servants, it is
not the language of communication that is
important, but what people say in that language
and with what consequences.
● AN ANALYTICAL
DIGRESSION
Muratova’s penultimate film,
Melody for a Street Organ (2009), is an
ideal example of Ukrainian content of her
films. Thus, it is worthwhile to cover it
in more detail.
After the death of their mother, Olenka
(Olena Kostiuk) and Mykyta (Roman
Burlaka) set out on Christmas Eve to find
their parents. Evicted and robbed everywhere,
frozen and hungry, they pass
through all levels of urban chaos, from the
railway station through a casino, an auction
house and entrances of apartment
buildings to a supermarket with its festive
atmosphere, only to finally lose each other:
Olenka is detained for stealing bread,
while Mykyta freezes to death in the attic
of a house which is being rebuilt.
Let us start, actually, with the language.
Among other components of the
polyphony of the film, one of the most interesting
is the unprecedented, for Muratova,
emphasis on Ukrainian. At first,
World after Kira:
by 18 films better
Now, when Kira Muratova is gone, one
starts sensing the true scale of this
figure, which seems to be still unrealized
the children observe a mummers’ procession
on a suburban train, with its participants
carrying an octagonal star and
singing Christmas carol “Good Evening to
You.” Then, a station bum (Nina Ruslanova),
just as rejected and persecuted as
Olenka and Mykyta, explodes with a long
monolog: “Our Bethlehem is full of poor,
barefoot people in tattered clothes! Where
are the Magi? They are carrying gold to the
rich...” The foreman of the builders who
found the body of Mykyta had berated his
employer who did not give him a well-deserved
leave and failed to pay the wages on
time, and he tells his story in Ukrainian,
but reproduces replies of the absent miser
in a high disgusting voice speaking Russian.
Finally, after a terrible discovery in the
attic, the credits are accompanied by New
Year carol “The Little Swallow.”
A closer examination reveals that besides
Ukrainian speakers, the film features
Russian speakers of the same class,
and there is neither social nor characteristic
difference between the two groups:
the ornately-speaking madman in a knitted
cap, who watches on as Olenka and
Mykyta are robbed by homeless in a railway
hangar, a veteran who strives to get
into the high comfort room as if he was assaulting
the Reichstag, elderly Zoia,
standing on the snow-covered stairs in the
city at night, who loves “apples, cherries,
sweet cherries, strawberries, grapes,”
and others. All of them sing songs on the
roadsides of a Babylon formed by mixing
Odesa and Kyiv, making up the general
polyphony of the poor who will eventually
enter the promised Kingdom.
There is, however, another element of
Ukrainianness that will help us understand
the structure of the film.
The procession in the train is a simplified
version of the vertep, the folk puppet
theater. In today’s Ukraine, companies
with stars, in simply decorated costumes,
with a minimal repertoire of songs
perform predominantly to earn money
and foodstuffs for celebration (the vagrant
played by Ruslanova complains,
among other things, that “they even do
not let me join a vertep company”). But
now we are talking about a much older
genre, namely the vertep drama.
It necessarily includes two planes of
the narrative: the biblical story of the
birth of Christ and semi-improvised scenes
featuring recognizable types: the Gypsy
Man and Gypsy Woman, the Zaporozhian
Cossack, the Pole, the Muscovite, and the
Jew. Herod, who seeks to kill the newborn
Christ, is the key antihero, but Death
eventually takes away the wicked king. The
architecture of the vertep chest recreated
this duality of sacred and earthly. The secular
life unfolded in the lower part; meanwhile,
the upper level, depicting the Bethlehem
Cave, hosted only canon plots, including
the Adoration of the Shepherds and
the Gifts of the Magi.
The puppets and theatrical performance,
sufferings of children, religious rituals,
and social inequality – all of these
long-standing motifs of Muratova’s cinema
oeuvre – are linked into a single whole
by the vertep. Here all the key elements of
the vertep performance are observed: the
earthy bustle at the bottom, social plane;
characters change in the string of tragicomic
scenes; the large number of characters
also does not contradict the paradigm
of the vertep, which shows primarily
figures of the viewer’s own period; numerous
songs, monologs, sermons; there is
also a superior (literally top) part where the
child calms down on the bed; builders, acting
as shepherds, come to him and freeze
in a mise en scene which resembles the
iconography of adoration because of its
static nature and poses of the participants;
there are even fully matching characters:
the Gypsies at the station (they refuse
to tell Mykyta’s fortune, only saying
“Oh, poor lad!”), the beggars (the vertep’s
Savochka the Beggar), the supermarket
guards, persecutors of children, who push
Mykyta out, to be tormented by underage
criminals, and arrest Olenka. All this suggests
that the procession in the beginning
of the film marks the notional border, on
crossing which Olenka and Mykyta find
themselves, in a sense, inside the vertep,
and bring it into action. At the same time,
the canon scenes are immediately introduced
by a traveling seller of holiday
cards: the Magi and Shepherds, the Holy
Family, and King Herod’s Soldiers Massacring
the Infants. It is the last card that
is picked up by Mykyta, as he chooses his
own story and fate.
Having introduced the vertep structure,
Muratova subjects it to deconstruction
with the same determination as
the linear plot of her anti-fairy-tale. The
lower boundaries of the puppet house
have greatly expanded. Instead of a chorus,
we listen to a collective aphasia of mobile-equipped
banterers at the station. The
sacred part is reduced to verses and inappropriate
sermons. There are “shepherds,”
but they have no words of respect,
only swearing at the miserly employer and
nervously hiccupping in the attic. The
heavens are empty. The upper level is involved
only in the final, where the place
of the living infant Christ is taken by the
dead – in essence, killed – little kid, also
the son of a carpenter. Herod is removed
from the frame (to the auditorium?), as
the massacre of the young and defenseless
will happen just fine without him. God is
absent, but Christmas preparations continue.
What should have become the beginning
of history becomes the end.
The Christian space is timeless, simultaneous:
he who lies in the Bethlehem
Cave, is immediately crucified. The one
who froze to death in the attic is an innocent
victim just as much. This also reflects
the logic of the vertep, which, according to
the observation of the Russian scholar
Olga Freidenberg, is genetically linked to
the temple box, which was a copy of the
tomb and the temple alike: in both cases,
the dead man and the (puppet-like) godhead
were always placed atop of it and/or on a
special raised platform.
Thus, redefining the vertep drama,
Muratova does not “steal Christmas” – she
just reproduces its other side, diametrically
opposed to the festive pathos. Thus, she recovers
its initial tragic nature.
● EUROPE
In view of the above, it seems that the
question of the territorial affiliation of
Muratova’s directing legacy comes from
a wrong context. First one should ask:
what is Ukraine?
The answer has been obvious for the
last four years: Ukraine is Europe.
This answer has been bought with
blood. Vladimir Putin did not forgive us
this answer, and took revenge by occupying
20 percent of our territory. To oppose
it means to endanger our own future.
So, again: Ukraine is Europe. But
Muratova really was a European director.
On the one hand, the Ukrainianness
means joy of life and seeking delight in the
transient (the classic example is the poem
“A Cherry Orchard by the House”). On the
other hand, it also means rejecting any
leaders and having constant doubts in authorities
and authoritative ideas. Love
for a heated discussion (famously described
as “three hetmans out of two
Ukrainians”). Anarchy as a principle of solidarity
and protest. Indestructible sense of
humor. In aesthetics, it includes the rejection
of imperial literature-centrism in
favor of visual richness and looking at the
world with wide-open eyes (it was not for
nothing that in the autonomous Ukraine of
the 17th and 18th centuries, not yet completely
subjugated by Russia, it was the
fine arts that flourished: painting, architecture,
theater).
And all these are characteristic properties
of Muratova’s cinema oeuvre. Her
films are appropriately witty at every degree
of dramatic tension. Her characters
always hold fast to their beliefs. Even
episodic and secondary characters have
colorful, sometimes to the point of eccentricity,
tempers, whether it is a station
employee or a rich criminal; conflicts
and quarrels between them are always
brilliant mini-performances with almost
musical rhythm (Two in One even takes
place in a theater). She did not stage her
performances, because she masterly organized
them in the frame. The frame itself
is always saturated with movement
and at the same time features mass of details,
which seem to have no direct relation
to the plot, but constitute the atmosphere
of what is happening – this is
always a perfect multilevel Baroque composition;
and the Baroque, in turn, is the
basic constant of the Ukrainian cultural
universe.
The main thing, however, is that Muratova
had that skeptical, sober, Cartesian
mind, but it was not cold; no director of her
time exhibited such a deep sympathy for
the weakest and most vulnerable. Moreover,
there is no trace of nagging moralization,
inherent in even the best Soviet or
Russian cinema works. This wonderful
skepticism also colored her personal communication,
and, of course, her films.
So, I will repeat: she made European
cinema here long before Ukraine began to
realize itself as Europe. As often happens
with great artists, Muratova came too early.
Only now we are catching up with her.
So, Ukraine has to do its share of the
work. We have not published a thorough
study of Muratova’s oeuvre, despite the
fact that Russians published two monographs
in her lifetime. This is only the
first step: to publish such a book, well
written and illustrated, which would be
obligatory addition to the bookshelf of
any cultured person. In the future, we also
need to publish her collected works. A
museum doubling as an artistic center.
Possibly a festival named after her. It is
necessary to start now.
Muratova made our world by 18 films
better. We are indebted to her.