While season one of Muub Tube is over, here’s a final broadside—to tide you over—from Owen. A fleshy glance at the mad, bad, and difficult bodies of post-war Soviet film.
“There I am at the border of my condition as a living being”
— Julie Kristeva
From the film’s completion (1974) to its delayed and eventual release (1981), Agony—a baroque retelling of the death of Rasputin—would be a “film without an audience”. These words belong to Elim Klimov, its director. A man better known for 1985’s Come and See; a film (partly, but not wholly) about Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe. I saw it, for the first time, in a somewhat sombre and malevolent student flat in Acton. 2009. A stork, picking its way through an obliterated forest. A man’s soiled body, scarred with melting skin. Here, the erotic abjection of Agony is convulsed and tightened into an unblinking physical agony. Bodies made both radiant and disgusting, adoring and destructed. A young woman basks, smilingly, beneath a shower of summer rain. Later she is witnessed. Soaked from head to toe in mud and blood, her face distorted by a category of violence beyond recognition. It is unspeakable. But it speaks.
It’s hard to nail my feelings about this exactly. And as a friend recently put it, there’s a tendency—from this side of the “iron curtain”—to essentialise the “Soviet” or (worse yet) “Slavic” experience as one that just hits different. It doesn’t, at least not like that. But this was a pretty extraordinary period of filmmaking. Filmmaking done under peculiarly pierced and compressed conditions. It’s really about how filmmakers nipped and tucked what they could from the world wider, from their own “Soviet” lives, and from the mass of legacies which (angel of history-like) had piled up behind them. So it’s only natural that the moody, absurdist, and often carnivalesque history of the Russian “skaz” might work its way into these huge, physically dominating ensemble films with often very dark underbellies. Nothing clean now. We’ve gone from “how to steel was tempered” to “how to steal was fucked”.
Klimov’s bodies
And what you take away from somebody like Klimov is really a kind of physical sensation. Of the inalterable fact that bodies did this to other bodies. All this gore and jostling and chaos. And the desire is to squirm and look away. But Come and See isn’t about “looking away”. It’s about getting an unblinking eye-full of abjection. It is an ethical demand. Witness this. Or flinch. Feel this. Following Kristeva (she’s quoted at the head of this essay), such a making-apparent of wounding is not a ‘flat’ emblem of death, but rather a reminder of those things we sublimate and push aside in our daily lives. Puss, secreted fluids, blood, the “sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay”. These things “show me” (and us) what “I [we] permanently thrust aside in order to live”. There’s just so much flesh. And it’s weak and boring and brutal at the same time. Just as life can be weak and boring and brutal. Ok.
Like Come and See, Agony, the ‘film without an audience’, contained multitudes. Its inventive resuscitation of archive footage, some of it new (reshot and sprinkled in), impossible to tell, either way. Orgies, wagon loads of war dead, wounded workers, theatre crowds. History weighed heavily on Klimov, as did the bodies who made (and unmade) it. A butler (crawling) trips another, whose tray of champagne flutes shatter down a flight of deep mahogany stairs. A surging carnival of a cast, the backs of heads, shoulders. Riots, breaking out. The body among bodies becomes the locus of their (and our) anxiety. And it was (of course) Rasputin’s darkly eroticied body—his preserved penis, his unwashed skin—which has come to define our understanding of him as an imaginary as much as a historical figure. The emblem of late-imperial rot. A filthy hound rutting amongst the once inviolate aristocracy; a bit of clotted blood mixed into all that powder and white.
Apropos of what, exactly? And here’s the point of this essay, that Soviet post-war film took a peculiarly prolonged glance at the human body. Not as an inviolate and distinct entity (a body), but as an anthropology of absurd (and often violent) intimacy which took place between bodies. Of bodies together. Often sickeningly - an aesthetics of flesh against flesh. Pressed tight. Problematised, if you want use that term.
Ok. It’s not controversial to suggest that the Soviet experiment had the body politic (taken as a whole) as its subject. How to live, and live well, among others - or to die well for them. For Eisenstein, it was the riotous populism of Battleship Potemkin. For Vertov, the symphony of the Revolutionary city - the director being only the eye (however large and in charge) that lets them in. Dovzhenko, across his ‘silent trilogy’, likewise. But in the years following Khrushchev’s thaw (Stalin’s reputation pushed away like so many plates of once-appetising food), cinema opened itself up to the crises of individual subjects and isolated bodies, but never with the individualistic (and arguably capitalist) bravura of the Italian or French New Wave. The inviolate, shining, homogeneous bodies of Gerasimov and the Vasilyev brothers was to be replaced with the body-as question-mark, the wounded body, the punctured surface. In Come and See, the film’s protagonist returns, after many trials, to his family’s native village. It’s quiet, the house empty - the streets empty, too. He shares a meal from the family stove (still warm). But the unease builds. Stumbling away from this place, his subconscious mind gestures and shrieks. Something quite terrible has happened here. He runs, and stumbles. His compatriot—a young woman—urges him not to look back. And he doesn’t. He cannot. But we can see what he cannot. Over his shoulder. The entire village, machine-gunned—dead—against a wall. It is his staring, open, slack-jawed face which symbolizes this film. It is his terror that codifies it. Bodies are here.
These, of course, are Nazi crimes. But Klimov and directors like him were not necessarily interested in critiquing the Soviet experiment as an isolated problem, but rather set out to re-populate - to ‘re-body’ - post-war cinema in a way that better reflected the intense (and frequently evaded) embodiment of the age in which they lived. And they just happened to be Soviet citizens, and so this body politic would become their canvas.
Hmm. Ok. Tl;dr: Bodies are problems. Bodies are trouble. Living, and dying, and doing violence, together, against each other, is a thing - a fact of modernity. And — for the very first time — this (smallish) coterie of filmmakers refused to abstract these bodies into the stuff of Stakhanovite stock photos. They made messy collages instead.
Some asides, points. I’m not saying that this tendency dominated post-war film. No. It was a flicker of a suggestion, an urge to undo the orderly anthropology of pre-war Stalinism. Flies in the ointment, as it were. A little bit of untidy discolouration.
German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!
And there are a handful of filmmakers we’re talking about here, and a certain number who, while being interesting, didn’t take much truck with this ‘problematics of the collective’. Larisa Sheptiko, in her 1977 film The Ascent, sets the stage for a deeply anxious critique of violence and war, but does so with a meagre cast. Much of it is about two men, alone. Parajanov, from the empire’s periphery (first Ukraine, then Armenia, then Georgia) took as his concern the bodies of ghosts. His cinema was a cinema of godly haunting. Where German Sr. let the bodies back into the silo of Soviet visual culture, Parajanov made space for their shadows and shades. It’s a similar thing, but very different. Markedly so.
Kalatazov came close (The Cranes of Flying is, after all, a chamber piece, an (on the surface) romantic melodrama. But it is not afraid of woundings, jostlings, penetrated bodies. Of course, wounding can itself be “holy”, a locus for sublime martyrdom. But there’s a fizzing little undercurrent to Kalatazov’s film. Veronika’s rape by Mark (her fiance’s cousin) coincides with a dark cloud, a funereal pall, falling over the film. An ash-stained face. Broken glass. Billowing curtains. And while Veronika will find hope and reconciliation in the film’s final crowd scene, the reintegration with the body politic is not entirely seamless. There’s a crack, scar tissue.
For Khutsiev, works such as I am Twenty depict a coterie of fretful, anxious twenty-somethings, gathering under bridges to dance, leaping from joy to abjection, a sense of difficult displacement in a Soviet culture whose veterans and parades (old boys and girls with their sun-cracked smiles) are not really theirs. The revolution had been reduced to a murky and distant symbol, something that happened “over there”. Sergei, the film’s protagonist, pursues his love interest, Anya, through a surging, roiling crowd. He doesn’t have eyes for 1917 and its mysteries, or for the “world that was”. He has eyes only for her. Later, his moody diffidence will further push him away from his friends and his family. Tortured by the ghost of his dead father - a victim of the Great Patriotic War - leads to an eerie and (difficultly) transcendent moment of confrontation. In his darkly lit apartment, he meets this man - really, a boy, and younger than him. “I can’t help you”. It’s an emotional meeting, but an unresolved one - ambiguous. In the earlier cut of this languorous and lonely film, Illich’s Gate, the meeting is even thornier and more strained. The changes demanded of Khutsiev would blunt this moment, resolving it more tidily. A shame. But bodies still mattered. Lots of them.
What else? That the absurd reigns supreme. Is resplendent. Acts of baseness are delivered with high severity, and a certain ironic detachment. Acts of horror, with casual indifference. In German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, a toilet seat is worn around the neck - promenaded - like a holy tonsure. In the same film, a man is sexually assaulted as if it were the preparation of a meal. And then smiles. And riotous laughter. This is a cinema of de-centring. The inside scooped out and smeared upon the face of the outside, the shell. Ritual and parade and “rite” are thrown down from their thrones and made a laughing stock of. That which is supposed to be treated with high solemnity is camped, deranged. Even destruction - the easiest thing in the world - is rendered absurd. For Klimov and his Farewell (1983), the villagers strain and strain against a tree they seek to cut down. An unnecessary act of violence against a mighty and beautiful thing. Despite their efforts, it cannot be torn down - by axe or chainsaw or digger. So it is burned. If there is sacrifice, it must be tempered with pathos - but ultimately, it must also be a riot of obliteration. And it must remain kinda’ funny.
True to form, this means we’re not always dallying in the horrors of Klimov. A prosthetic arm used to smuggle diamonds into the USSR is the ‘dumb’ protagonist of Gaidai’s The Golden Arm. Here is an already disembodied lump of fleshless flesh (which, in turn, presumes a waiting and anonymous subject - the arm’s recipient). An organ without a body. Humour (however dark) also abounds in Bortko’s Heart of a Dog (1985), giving a uniquely black twang to the Soviet-era body horror. Transplants, missing organs, lost flesh, waiting-to-be-filled holes. Gogol’s Nose rears its bulbous body at this particular juncture; the body-horror as existential psychodrama, but make it funny.
Or unsettling. For Pelesyhian, working from the Armenian ‘periphery’, the pressing and togetherness of flesh - even when serving to celebrate the natural world and the October Revolution - always carried with it a hint of the disturbed. Inhabitants (1969) - a kaleidoscopic piece of “montage by distance” - pounds the viewer with streaming, crashing, galloping creatures. Its score (bellowing, screeching, hollering) grows into a cataclysmic and atonal roar. This is really about man vs beast. In the film’s third segment, bulbous lumps of human-shaped light swagger toward the camera, blotting and merging. These are the faceless humans, the “ash people”. Accompanied by roiling drums and the whip and snarl of rifle shots, their approach is followed by animals captured behind bars. Imprisoned, but barely contained. Without blood or gore or wound, this is “Man” as a marauder; a doer of violence. But they are disfigured, faceless, clotting together into a single, seamless lump. It is not dissimilar from his 1969 film We. The name, of course, signifies a story of a “people”, a body politic (again, that inescapable phrase). The “distance montage” leans in through mountains and soil, raising faces and hands and mountains and buildings out of the earth. Crowds surge, anonymous, faceless bodies lift stone, pound metal, chisel, work. And yes, this is celebratory stuff; but Peleshyan (in his own theoretical writing) spoke of it as a percussive and rhythmic process whose aim was to achieve the effect of the “decomposition of sound by image, and a decomposition of image by sound”. Contrapuntal, bodied. It celebrates the collective, but it leaves a funny and unsettling taste.
Put it this way. Unlike the easy narratives of Stalinist cinema, post-war film began to distance (uncouple?) itself - awkwardly, uncomfortably - from the Manichean worldview of heroes and devils. Now, an evacuated morality took hold, filthy in its muddy hues. Men, and technology, are not always good. The dominion over nature is bitterly won. So much for the idea that Goskino was absolutely absolute. There was room for manoeuvre. There is no ‘hero’ (geroi), only what Greg Dolgopolov calls a “broader society of debased, hungry and terrified wolves”. And the cinema of this era began to needle and prod at what it really meant to share the grand Soviet experiment, together; as collectives, bodies, flesh. The existential became cool again, and the collective became if not suspect, necessarily, then less than coherent. Cracks, ripples, punctures.
After all, Klimov spoke of Stalingrad — the city — as an “intestine” stretched out along the Volga. Why an intestine - something corporeal, gloopy, slimy? This is the body politic with its guts on the outside; something primeval and cramped, yet swollen and animal.
But these belong to a category of collapsed intimacy, a closeness which gains the quality of (first) the abhorrent and (then) the humane. It is the cloying rot of Platonov’s pre-war fiction; the gangrenous wound of Moscow (a person, a city) in Happy Moscow (1934~), the frail, failing excavators of The Foundation Pit (1929). “Let the future be alien and empty, and let the past find peace in graves, in the cramped closeness of bones that had once embraced, in the dust of loved and forgotten bodies that had rotted together”. These, of course, are narratives in which there is no easy redeeming of the soul; bodies cling to other bodies for a modicum of warmth, for spiritual comfort. They receive none. They perish. They sense a flicker of it, but we must be careful. Later, Platonov wrote what might cautiously be called his ‘manifesto’. In this work, he called for the “patient” work of socialism; that it would be slow, and must absolutely be generous toward our weak and fragile bodies. Quite a different vibe from the often crushing obliteration of the Soviet experiment, and its lofty proclamation of a New Soviet Man - of redolent, muscular bodies, doughy and unwounded. Parades, shock workers, strength. Throughout the 1930s, the Stakhanovite movement championed the pushing of the body to unassailable heights; flesh as machine, subjectivity flattened beneath the hammers of industry.
Abuladze’s undisciplined burials
For Platonov, this fly in the ointment was very real; and it would lay its noxious little eggs in a filthy and accelerating wound. No, there was no marching, glorious anthropology of socialism (he said). Rather, there are limbs, “trousers without bodies”, amputees. For Kristeva, the wound is the site of the abject; and like Klimov, Platonov (years earlier) was not shy about the correlations between bodies and cities, wounds and landscapes. By the 1980s, these parallels are much more overt, much more deranged. Gone are the bright, bountiful fields of Dovzhenko, replaced with the mouldering, rotting hinterlands of Lopuchansky’s A Visitor to a Museum (1989), its human-ish subjects eeking out their lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland savaged by ecological disaster and an altogether dangerous anthropology. Togetherness can happen, but it is in refuge. Wounded. And the world is decaying.
Broadly, these collapsed intimacies take Platonov’s perishing and fragile hope and deflect it into the bawdyhouse of crowds, queues, communal apartments, corridors, train carriages, hospital wards, streets. It is a new and rotten world; human in its inhumanity. Intimate in its publicity. Platonov demanded - well, asked for - “patient work” to restore this quaking and refuged soul. The “patient” slowness of socialism built. Don’t be bold, and hubristic, when what we need is to care for the leaf, and to tend to the fragile seed. It’s a demand for humanity, for care. Years later (Platonov died a janitor), writers such as Yerofeev took up the mantle of the deranged sublime. The lyrical unease of Moska v Pethushkii makes it a kind of deranged exclamation upon the sublime that is buried within the mundane. History’s weight. The severity of living. And it comes out - necessarily, it must - as laughter and pathos, abjection and silliness. The mire is being stirred with the mitre.
Together, it tells a history of bodies, of masses, a deluge that is outrageous and incomprehensible, even while individual limbs are crushed beneath it. Rasputin, charing - wild eyed - through his filthy rooms, he howls, and breaks an icon upon his body. We cut, and that same archive footage shows a torrent of accelerating bodies, crowds, spiralling legs, bodies without faces. When Rasputin looks out of a window, he sees - we cut - more crowds, incoherent and running. Running where? Yelling, yelling
Simpler now, more direct. These films seem to make other bodies a problem.
This reminds me of an essay by Craig Raine, recounting a visit to Moscow in 1990 or 1991; an event which coincides, intentionally, with the centenary of Pasternak’s birth. Pushing, overlapping bodies; flesh against flesh. A quote:
“My brother-in-law discusses the difficulty of sex in shared accommodation, the built-in constraint of your mother only an inch of plaster away – or even only the width of a curtain.”
As a problem, it was shared; and the sharedness became a source of organic comradeship (we are ‘in this together’ - quite literally), as well as filthy embarrassment. It is not dissimilar from Brodsky’s lamentations, tinged with nostalgia, of shared apartments and collective living (he’s speaking of the 1950s and 60s and after), or, before him, of Platonov’s Happy Moscow, whose apartments (sour and shabby) blur into a single odious organism, connected by pipes that pump sewage and detritus from room to room. The collective is linked not by its glorious, ‘together’ project, but by their bowl movements. This is 1932, 1933.
Long years have passed, and Platonov is a fragile memory. The meteor who became a janitor. But for Erofeev (with his sordid beautiful fictions), Klimov, German, we encounter cinematic worlds of ruin and detritus. Bodies pressed against bodies, toilets erupting into living rooms. It’s thrilling, and horrible. It’s chaotic and absurd. Even Tarkovsky, that great and sombre spiritualist, fabricated worlds of rot and spoil; the smashed photographs, coiled metal, bullet casings, and jewellery that rots on the flooded floor in Stalker’s now mythologised tracking shot. By the 1960s and 70s, the wheels of the Soviet machine had begun to come off. And one way or another, its filmmakers - at least, some of them - began to prod and probe into these gaping holes.
Pelechian’s blurred collectives
Bodies are filthy, and the body is most certainly back. Nowhere is this more obvious than Abuladze’s Repentance (1987), a black comedy of absurdist proportions and unsubtly allegorical flavour. Here, the body of a town’s recently deceased mayor (read: he is Stalin, Communism, and the Soviet state) continues to be disinterred from its grave. On each reburial, this obstinate body appears again - a terror of silent zombism which plagues the local residents and triggers accusations, intrigue, and convictions to swallow those involved. Spat back from the earth, this disobedient body is a raw and odious fact that cannot be suppressed. On first learning of the death of the mayor, a local sycophant - loudly, gleefully pressing cream cakes into his mouth, staining his beard - breaks into histrionic tears. Cake and salt. Sugary confection and bodily mortification. Things, Abuladze suggests, are about to get very physical. And very quickly indeed.
And it is not, perhaps, dissimilar from the raucous, obstinate, bathing bodies of Klimov’s Farewell (1983), of those - in that case, joyfully - who refuse to relent in the face of history’s absolute flood. A swamp-bound village whose residents (mostly old, impoverished, and nervous) are notified that they will be kicked from their homes in order for a dam to flood their valley. Veering from pathos to bathos, Klimov’s film celebrates their defiance while exploring the tragic depths of its madness. Scenes of laughing joy (the whole village singing as they make their final harvest) and of bitter torment (the women who silently dig the last, sad potatoes from the languishing earth). The film’s centrepiece concerns an ancient tree and the men who attempt to drag it from the earth. It cannot, of course, be moved - not by saw or even heavy excavator. Driven to cruel insanity, the village joker - its holy fool? - crashes the digger into its thick trunk again and again, glass cutting a deep groove into his head, blood coursing down his cheeks. It cannot be moved. So it is burnt. But we’ve talked about this already, haven’t we? Nothing will remain. The obstinacy of bodies. The undeniable violence of the material realm.
So. For good or ill, the geriatric miasma of the late Soviet period became obsessed with bodies that will not obey, giving rise to an undeniable carnival of unrelenting corporeality. The crack where the filthy water gets in.
Of course, you couldn’t just come out and say it (this, this, what is this?). The rot and spoil and clamour was always sublimated to some other monstrosity. For German, it meant a kind of gentle, social satire. He waited until 1998 to unveil Khrustalyov, My Car!, a carnivalesque and grossly disordered critique of Soviet excess, historic horror. A rape in a train carriage. A disordered hospital. The dead body of a faceless tyrant. Dogs and men running in the street. Meanwhile, Klimov aimed his sights on the decadent and disorderly last days of the Romanovs - the ogre of Rasputin. Even then, the film bosses at the studio wanted more obvious criticisms of Tsar Nicholas II. For Klimov, he was just “a man”, weak and dithering; but no monster, barely a master. Even Rasputin (vile and cruel) is given a richly textured portrait, a psychological portrayal.
Toward abundance, massing, accumulation. For Klimov’s Agony (1974), these bodies - thronged and devastating - are both implied (the filmmaker’s preamble dissimulates through statistics of deaths, acts of torture, the missing of the Russo-Japanese war) and pantingly, screamingly ‘real’. Rasputin, leering and lecherous, clambers over a balcony’s pallid lip to force his grimacing body onto a noblewoman. The ensuing fight (the husband seizes and then forces Rasputin away - literally, out of the camera’s tight angle; leaving only a small pelt of the priest’s hair remaining) leads to a pounding, gyrating deluge of people - screaming, shoving, flooding. Ears bitten, hair pulled. Klimov effectively chases Rasputin as he flees from the scene and into a waiting car. The lens tilts. We join him. Now, quiet. This is Bondarchuk, but revved up; sordid with lines, wretched with shots (the cinematic, the substantive). This is Alexei German, Eisenstein, Dovchenko. The mob (deranged and disordered), its awful and petulant horror. And there is something deliberate here; a particularly Russian problematization of the crowd, and of the individual’s often fraught place within that crowd. For German, it is the absurd intimacies and spatial Matrioshka of soviet communal spaces - apartments, hospitals, train stations, cells. In My Friend Ivan Lapshin (9184), the town is a character. Its population is mucked into each other's business. Together they cart bodies to its frozen mortuary. Together they clap and sing and dance. Glasses are knocked over, bodies tumble from room to room. Human, spilling over. And again, this is certainly not German’s attempt to say that “Soviet is bad”. Not at all (how lazy). Rather, he’s just giving us life! Messy and broiling as it is. Here, this tang of the Soviet cinematic experiment tended toward the populous, where its uncertain and latterly rejected sons (Tarkovsky, Parajanov) sloughed the populace away, refining, simplifying (and finding a greater bottomless depth therein). Now, we have only one man - walking alone in a space station, the pounding on a door (his wife - a ghost, but not; un-ghost), the fleeting and wretched figure of his colleague. But even here there’s a body trying to come back.
What began with an interrogation of the Slavic ‘soul’, the destiny of the Russian people, would bump its head against the gossamer-bright carapace of a star-ship - the ‘New Soviet Man’ of Trotsky’s (curiously monotonous) thesis in the early 1920s. Later, that soul (a little dog-eared, worn down) was sublimated entirely into the body, and disappeared like a stone falling into a filthy and lacklustre pond. Now, it was the mass - the massif of the Soviet collective, an uncounting of bodies - which drew the attention of the camera’s lens. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and, later, Dovzhenko’s Earth, made necessary the formalist incandescence of collectivised filmmaking and the arrival of montage, were also really (when you get down to it) a cinema of bodies, collectives, crowds, and - by extension - the copulation (non-sexual, as it were) of those bodies through space and time. Together, for Eisenstein, the sailors’ mutiny - a splay of faces, shoulders, mouths. For Dovzhenko, the flowing together of bodies and crowds with the earth (an experience that, in the post-war patch, would be inverted, ironicised, made absurd) No one is really more important or narratively essential than any other, the ‘hero’ (geroi) is them all.
Of course, this tendency didn’t simply disappear after Khruschev’s Thaw, and it’d be ponderously whiggish to suggest otherwise. While struggling to get his 1976 film Twenty Days Without War approved through the party’s ideological channels, German still faced the age-old difficulties of these dyed-in habits. If you must show soldiers, then they ought to be “beautiful”, and clean. Why are there holes in their jackets? Why are they unshaved, and their eyes sunk? By the middle of the 1970s, the party was more accommodating, for sure. It wanted German to finish his film, but much still needed cutting away. He wouldn’t die for this, or face arrest. German volunteered that it should be put on the shelf. When it was eventually released, in 1985, his wrist was slapped with a 20% reduction in his fee (later rescinded to 5% after much bitter toing-and-froing).
Earlier, at the very beginning of this essay, I invoked Kristeva. The “power” of wounds to remind us of the things that “I [we] permanently thrust aside in order to live”. Abjection is a bringing-forth of the “thrust aside”. And it can derange us. But these films, glimpsed above, don’t seem to reconcile us (necessarily) to a world of pain (even if they have that power). We don’t necessarily end up slipping the doom pill. Rather, they might inveigh upon us a demand (ethical) to look, to feel, to become embodied, making the awareness of pus and wounds and the “acrid smell of sweat” actually quite essential to our living. We just don’t know it yet. The tumultuous, packed-in, chaotic bodies of, say, Khrustalyov, My Car! are an invitation to live. Khutsiev (though hardly the most “embodied” post-war filmmaker) spoke of the necessity of hope, even after his dreams were tanked by the premature ending of the Thaw (he thought so even in 1962, after fewer than ten years of openness). It’s like this: recoil, or reach out and touch.
What we read from all of this is a sardonic, carnivalesque inversion of the founding myths of Soviet society; a debased anthropology of derangement, decadence, and sublime unease. Bodies come together (sometimes sexually, sometimes not). The previously untarnished and victorious anthropology of Soviet Man is given a few dings and dents. Collective living is shown for what it is. Often a bit degrading, a bit much, a bit too physical. Often, it’s also a source of raucous solidarity and joy. Think of the smiling, happy-go-lucky residents of German Sr’s Ivan Lapshin. These are, broadly, happy men (and women). Collective living isn’t all bad, German seems to suggest. But it’s far from perfect. It’s human. And that means, yes, it’s a bit chthonic, a bit profane. Of course, by the 1980s these bodies became more anxious still. While the Soviet Union accelerated toward its collapse, the tarnishings became more tarnished than ever. The rot had finally set in.
While Season one of Muub Tube is over, we’ll be back—soon enough—with yet more takes, guests, and conversations on the world’s greatest films.