Blade Runner 2049.

Milla Fedorova reviews Blade Runner 2049 for Tetradki. 

Milla Fedorova
Photo: Olga Meerson.

The new Blade Runner became a pleasant surprise for me. I am a fan of the original one and had some fears regarding the sequel made by a different director (Denis Villeneuve), but was not disappointed. Blade Runner 2049 does not posit itself as the original's clone; some ideas are pronounced much more directly where the original only hints, and the pace is different — it would have been unthinkable to have such an indulgently slow movie nowadays playing in the theatres — but their cells are interlinked, to use Nabokov’s quote from the new film.

However, it is still stylish, bleak, retro-fitted, and the famous rain sometimes turns into snow. It studies what it means to be human at different new levels, and deals with various forms of doubles and simulacra. The question you might have had after the first one — whether the replicants are made as adults and whether they are capable of having children is in the center of this one.

If the first Blade Runner movie (film, 1982, wiki) was centered around a Christ-like figure, and it was oriented towards accepting death as criterion of humanity (trampling death by death: Roy Batty transcends his replicant nature when he saves Deckard and accepts his own death), while in the center of the second one there is a Mary-like figure, and it is oriented towards birth (trampling impossibility of life by a miraculous birth).

The new definition of humanity — the replicants’ innermost desire — is "I was born, therefore I am a human." For replicants, the miracle is to be conceived and born in a natural way, it is the opposite of immaculate conception. However, this definition does not exhaust the question of who is human in the film: even the simulacra are able to demonstrate human qualities.

The mystery of who Deckard is, a human or a replicant, is still unsolved. Alas, the authors of both films did not consider Aristotle’s characteristic of humanity: none of the characters laughs.

The world is even more post-apocalyptic, demonstrating the effects of an ecological catastrophe, so there are even less people than before: it seems that the world is mostly populated by the replicants. The Russian presence in LA has become rather prominent: we hear police conversations on the radio in Russian, and the protein farm is ironically named “Целина”.*

The erotic scene where a hologram tries to fit the body of a real woman is a masterpiece, however, frightening: it is literally a dream of sleeping with one person, while imagining another.

The idea "to love someone sometimes means to be strangers" applied to the children-parents relations seems very problematic to me.

But in general — it is quite a gripping and beautiful film with several layers, including the references to Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Milla Fedorova is a Russian academic working at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Her Georgetown page is here.

• Целина, or Virgin Lands, refers to the vast area of undeveloped steppes between the Southern tip of the Urals and the Caspian sea that was targeted for rapid boosting of grain crops by Nikita Khruschev in the late 1950s. Nobel prize-winning Mikhail Sholokhov wrote an epic novel "Поднятая целина" ('Virgin Soil Upturned', wiki about the 1958 film) depicting the collectivisation of Russian individual farms at the end of 1920s - beginning of 1930s.  

Official trailer for the Blade Runner 2049 —

War and Peace. The music.

As though answering my complaint about the lack of music in the new BBC TV adaptation of 'War and Peace', they've just put up a playlist of contemporary music and music inspired by 'War and Peace' all the way from Beethoven's 'Eroica' number 3 to Prokofiev's opera 'War and Peace' and his cantata 'Alexander Nevsky.'

If one goes that wide, one should certainly embrace the musical numbers from the play, the musical and the film 'The Hussars' Ballad' (1962, wikipeida article)

Here is 'The Hussars' Ballad' with all its glorious music -



And here they trumpet away the Marseillaise in Tchaikovsky's '1812', first in subdued tones at 4 min, then in triumphant let-it-all-hang-out with cannons and fireworks at 13 min with a culmination at 14:20 that includes the tsarist anthem 'God Save the Tsar (King)' -

War and Peace.

BBC 2016 series reviewed in New Yorker

Louis Menand in New Yorker compares the BBC 1972 adaptation with the currently running one.

It is a good review, and a very good comparison with the 1972 version. 

It also explains why secondary characters are so prominent, to the detriment of the main ones. He put a finger on Tolstoy's snobbishness bur missed Tolstoy's mysogyny. Didn't fit in his picture, probably. (photo: an oak tree in winter, here in France. In the film, they've chosen to show a tree with a completely rotten inside.)

Here is a quote:

"Does the new series get the novel? Not really. It’s a costume drama, “Downton Abbey” goes to Moscow, one of those “Masterpiece Theatre”-type shows that, despite the toniness and the high-end production values, is basically about the trials and tribulations of getting exceptionally attractive and ridiculously rich people properly paired off. Within the confines of that slightly soapy ambition, the series is credible and, at moments, quite moving. But it’s much more interested in Anatole flirting at the opera than in Pierre eating the potato. It gives Tolstoy’s big existential question—if we are only tiny bits of life being blown around in a great cosmic storm, and have no control over what happens to us, what can it possibly mean to live in the right way?—a pass."

I can't agree more. Some nitpicking on the article. 

"War and Peace" is not the longest novel, Richardson's "Clarissa", for example, is longer in word count in English. 

Serfs were emancipated in Russia in 1861, not in 1862 as mentioned in the article.

The hunt scene was not omitted, it was in Episode 4 just now, and beautifully done.

Re. Chaikovsky's "1812" vs "La Marseillaise", Menand writes: "If we want to hear music on the Fourth of July that is actually about liberty and democracy, we should play “La Marseillaise,” not the “1812 Overture.” (I don’t see this happening, somehow.)" Good point, but "La Marseillaise" is included in 1812. You listen to both, the French national anthem and the Russian version of "God, Save the King." Chaikovsky used La Marseillaise as a theme for the advancing French. Towards the end it's drowned by God Save the King (Tsar) and then come the famous bells chimes, cannonade and the triumphal march.

This last musical quote also explains, partly, why they chose to play it at the height of the Cold War in 1974 (in fact, it was the height of Brezhnev-Nixon's detente): it was hardly ever played in the Soviet Union for the simple reason that this great piece of patriotic umpapah includes the tsarist anthem. Popular in the West, it was a no-no for the ruling communists.

12 Years a Slave.

Just watched '12 Years a Slave', Best Picture according to the US Academy, three Oscars total.

Never has a film disappointed me as much as '12 Years' had, not for a very long time. It's simply bad. 

Poor, cliched acting, unconvincing characters, hardly any character development and too many characters to make the story coherent, and the story is disjointed, it just falls apart. Benedict Cumberbatch appears as a 'good slave owner' for a short part at the beginning of the film and soon disappears never to come back. Instead, Brad Pitt briefly pops up towards the end, makes a stilted speech against slavery to the face of a slave-owner for whom he is building a strange three-level structure which is later shown finished as a one-level summerhouse-pavilion. Brad Pitt then forever goes off-screen, to arrange Solomon Northup (main character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) release.

As for the message, racism remains unexplained, unabhorrent and the notions of freedom and equality nearly spurious. 

Complete disappointment. 

A Russian New Year Favourite. (The Irony of Fate.)

Memorial plaque at 125, Vernadsky Prospekt.

Happy New Year!

The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! is a two-part TV film that has been a New Year's must in Russia for over thirty years since it was first broadcast on New Year's Day in 1976. 

"The comedy born by the director Eldar Ryazanov is the most loved film of all Russia, — writes Lurkmore.—It is also an object of unbridled adoration (~) of all who are nostalgic for everything Soviet and the Soviet way of life. Every New Year from the time of its release the film is shown on at least one and sometimes several TV channels [in Russia]. Anonimus remembers an occasion when the film was on on three main TV channels at the same time (but staggered, not synchronised.) On New Year's night, it has become a good tradition in true Russian families to contemplate this example of the art of cinema with vodka-heavy eyes and a mouthfuls of festive olivier salad (because it will be off the next day.) A whole generation of citizens has grown and matured who have been watching The Irony of Fate from age two. They can imagine the holiday without the film no more as without the chimes of the Kremlin clock tower, olivier and hellish hangover on the morning of the 1 January. And they successfully instill the beautiful tradition in their children."

Dialogues in the film are in a perfectly correct Russian, to the point of being bland. This makes it a good aid for language lessons.

The songs, all of which have become national hits, are to the poems by Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, Marina Tsvetayeva (two), Bella Akhmadulina, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Aronov, Vladimir Kirshon and Mikhail Lvovsky. They are sung by Alla Pugachyova and Sergei Nikitin. 

Here is the film in full with English subtitles.
(Episode 1, from the official Mosfilm YouTube channel)



(Episode 2, embedding disabled, link only)

Photo: Felixgor. Memorial plaque on the entrance to the apartment building where the film was shot in 1975.

Grossman's Life and Fate comes to Russian TV.

Russian version of this post is here and a review of the film is here (in Russian)

The Russian TV series based on Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, the greatest Russian novel of XX century, begins today at 21:25 Moscow time (GMT+3). 

Rossiya 1 channel online is here, click on the red button Прямой эфир to switch to online TV.

This is the first screen version of the novel that was 'arrested' by the KGB in 1961 — all copies were confiscated, carbon paper and type-writer ribbons too. A communist party boss promised that the book will not be published for another 200 years. 

A friend of Grossman saved one copy and hid it in a shoulder bag at his dacha. In the 70s it was smuggled out on microfilm. The English translation of the novel by Robert Chandler's was published in 1985. A few years later it came out in Russia during Gorbachev's glasnost.

But it was only in 2000s when Grossman's incredible epic started slowly gaining recognition. A year ago the BBC ran a week-long radio play based on Life and Fate.

The film is available on YouTube — 

#BBC Trending in Russia.

BBC insignia

A BBC correspondent has just tweeted from Russia, with alarm, that the #BBC hashtag has entered the top-trending list for the country. As it turns out, it's not for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The acronym BBC is in Cyrilic and reads VVS – veh-veh-ehss – voenno-vozdushnye sily, or Russian Air Force.

Tomorrow, 12 August, the centenary of the force will be widely marked in Russia. On this day in 1912 tsar Nicolas II signed a decree forming the first Imperial Air Force unit.

Among journalists, and sometimes among listeners as well, the BBC is often jokingly referred to as Veh-Veh-Ehss. In Soviet times the rule was to cyrillize Western acronyms, either with or without translating the name. BBC was transcribed phonetically without translating its name as Би-би-си and, for example, the CIA as ЦРУ - Центральное разведывательное управление.

In the Russian media these days the old-style Cyrillic transliteration of foreign names competes with direct Latin script. Rules are often defined in-house, different publications have different styles.

This new trend is hugely influenced by the ease of switching scripts and the Internet. In two ways. First, the use of Latin transcription of famous brand names, commercial or public, is a way of increasing global traffic to a website. It is more likely that your content will be picked up by the net spiders if they stumble on the more familiar Latin transcription than on a Cyrillic one. Secondly, many Russians use Latin letters on the Internet as though they were Cyrillic where possible. They do it for convenience, but with the resulting back-influence on the spoken language. BBC=VVS is one such example.

Here is a clip from the iconic 1980s film 'ACCA', pronounced 'AHss-ah'. The singer is Afrika, a famous 80s rocker. The man dressed in the uniform of a Soviet BBC major is in fact a member of a gang of criminals who are planning a heist in Yalta, Crimea.



And this is the official Soviet march of the Air Force, 'We are born to make the fairy-tale true'.

The Noughties. A Russian wrap-up.

Mikhail Yefremov in Citizen Poet.

The Noughties ("Нулевые") is a 70-minute documentary about Russia in the 2000s that is quickly becoming a hit on the internet. It was made by Vadim Vostrov for Krasnoyarsk, East Siberia, regional television company TVK-6 (producer Xenia Cherepanova).

It paints a bleak picture of modern Russia controlled by corrupt bureaucracy who act with complete impunity knowing that Putin will never let them down.

Vostrov follows the rise of the opposition protests since September last year. The collection of politicians, historians, activists, journalists (including The New Yorker's Moscow writer Julia Ioffe), writers and actors who are interviewed in the film seems haphazard at first but towards the end grows into a multi-dimensional picture of vibrant  Russian debate.

Bykov

The film includes extensive interview with one of the top modern writers Zakhar Prilepin and footage of Boris Akunin speaking at protest rallies in Moscow.

One subplot in the film describes the extraordinary success of a Moscow theatre production called Citizen Poet ("Гражданин поэт"). It is, essentially, a reading of poetry, or rather paraphrases of well-known poems by Russian classics written by Dmitry Bykov, a popular journalist and TV presenter. They are all blistering satirical takes on Putin and Medvedev and their publicity stunts. Packed hall bursts out laughing at each new joke, and the performer, Mikhail Yefremov, can't help cracking up himself at times. The production has been seen in theatre by more than 300 thousand people. Citizen Poet was released as series on Echo Moskvy  radio and Dozhd TV channel. YouTube clips of Citizen Poet have been viewed more than 15 million times.

The phrase 'When poets rocked the stadiums' has long become commonplace to describe the phenomenal renaissance of Russian poetry during Khrushchyov's thaw in the late 50s - early 60s. Could it be that now, 50 years later, we may see a new wave?

(The film is in Russian, the subplot about Citizen Poet starts at 1:07:45 into the film, Prilepin's interview is split into short takes throughout the film. Read more about Citizen Poet in this Russian Wikipedia article. Photo of Bykov by Rodrigo Fernandez).

Swan Lake. Why the Anti-Gorbachev Coup Failed. (1991-2011).

Russian version of this post is here.

Swan Lake is imprinted on the mass consciousness of Russians for many different reasons. One of them is that it was played continuously on national Soviet television on that fateful day twenty years ago today, 19 August 1991. And because it helped to defeat the hard-line coup.

This was when a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt, putting Gorbachev under house arrest at his summer retreat in the Crimea and declaring a state of emergency in Moscow.

Tanks rolled in, but the soldiers weren't provided with portaloos or hot food. Yeltsin defied the 'state emergency committee', GKChP, or the 'junta' as it was quickly called. The American ambassador publicly warned world leaders not to rush to recognise the new rulers as events were unlikely to work out the way the junta was planning.  Liberal newspapers and radio stations were shut down. And national television played Swan Lake, again and again.

Later that day we saw the infamous press-conference of the GKChP with the acting president mumbling and his hands obviously shaking. Alexander Bovin, the prominent political commentator and former advisor to Khruschev, Brezhnev and Andropov, stood up and asked a question, which many who watched the press-conference, including myself, have since thought of as the moment of truth, the moment when the bubble burst. Ignoring the heavies on the praesidium, Bovin addressed a junior member of the committee, Vassily Starodubtsev, chairman of the peasants' union of the USSR. 'Vasya,'  he asked, 'tell me, how did you end up with this lot?' Laughter rolled through the hall – and it became clear that there was nothing to fear, this was a hopeless bunch, an operetta junta. (Video of the press-conference is at the end of this post, Bovin's question is at 37 min.)

The coup quickly collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated five months later.

It wasn't just Bovin's courageous wit, but, of course, the courage and defiance of the Russian people that lead to the coup's failure.  This is where Swan Lake comes in.

Those who ordered it to replace normal programmes must have thought that the stern music and the ordered dance patterns of the classic Bolshoi production would instill an obedient frame of mind in the nation. They must have forgotten that Swan Lake had by then acquired different, sometimes farcical, associations. One of these is from Leonid Gaidai's 1966 comedy 'Kidnapping, Caucasian Style'. A young student is kidnapped to be married to a local big-wig somewhere in the Caucasus. Her boyfriend comes to the rescue with the help of a local man and his pet hooded crow, Hamlet. In the final episode the friends sneak into the 'dictator's' house pretending to want to kill him according to the custom of blood revenge, but in fact only scaring him into giving himself up to the authorities. They ignore the authority to establish a new authority. The scene has Swan Lake on TV as the background.

Those who lived through the August coup in Moscow often complain that the Monday, 19 August, spoiled the music forever. I do too, sometimes. And as soon as I do, I remember the other Swan Lake, the comedy that helped to defeat the coup.

Here is the episode (the gun is loaded with rock salt): 


Кавказская пленница

This is The Swan Lake finale performed by an American company:



And here is the Emergency Committee (GKChP press-conference) on 19 August 1991. The Bovin question is at 37 min. into the clip: