Film critic Olga Surkova on the death of director Abdrashitov: “He felt the first jolts of coming changes”

Director dies at 79

A rare person and a unique film director Vadim Abdrashitov has passed away. A film critic from Amsterdam, Olga Surkova, wrote a large and serious study about him a few years ago called Time as Destiny in Abdrashitov’s Films. They became friends and became close friends. Olga said parting words about her friend.

It is impossible to imagine that Vadim Abdrashitov suddenly died.

Vadim Abdrashitov was not just an outstanding director. He was a chronicler of the former at the end of the Soviet era. In his films, he talked about what even most of us did not suspect. He felt those first jolts of coming changes that were spreading through everyday life in imperceptible circles, involving an increasing number of people in the whirlpool of history that was indicated. It is no coincidence that Maya Turovskaya called the Abdrashitov’s cinema seismographic.

We saw Vadim in early December. He talked about his six-month illness and said that he had just got out. He was a little haggard and thinner. But in the same military way collected, concentrated, crafty, witty and mocking. He was full of life and hurried to his students. Before I left, he offered to take a joint photo, a selfie. She is in front of me! Tears don’t even shed… I can’t believe it. .. Is there really no truly outstanding artist, my close friend and endless companion in this world?

On January 19th, I congratulated him on his birthday. He was born in Baptism, and God marked him with great talent and the highest human qualities. The noblest, most intelligent chronicler of the late Soviet era and the gloomy beginning of historical changes, which he not only understood, but foresaw. He was accurate in his feelings

The years 1976-2003 were marked by eleven films by Abdrashitov: “Word for Protection”, “Turn”, “Fox Hunting”, “Train Stopped”, “Parade of Planets”, “Plumbum”, “Servant”, “Armavir”, “A Play for Passenger”, “Dancer’s Time” and “Magnetic Storms”. In these films, time was reflected in amazing characters who always refract historical time in their fate. From the time-changing intellectuals of the sixties in “Turn” to the new generation of worker-leaders confused from misunderstanding in “Fox Hunt”. Plumbum, who turned out to be Pavlik Morozov, completely alien to the new “underground” changes in the country, and the Servant of the people of Shakespearean proportions, reborn at any time. The tragic death of “Armavir”, which lost all its passengers in the restructuring, was indicated by the director at the beginning of the 90s, and “A Play for a Passenger” demonstrated the changing masks of citizens of the new time. “The Time of the Dancer” still remains the most unique picture, depicting never-ending wars on the territory of the former USSR, and “Magnetic Storms” with extraordinary power demonstrated the workers’ re-awareness of their unenviable place in the designated new world, torn apart by new owners.

Vadim Abdrashitov, according to the sequence of his analysis of time, was the one and only artist, in each of his next films he mastered a new film language, always unlike anyone else. The language was not invented by the director, but arose as the only way to comprehend this or that phenomenon, which he noticed, experienced and mastered with the help of this language. I would call tragic such a long silence of the director after his last work. And not because he had nothing to say, but because he did not fit into the new way of getting money for his work. I did not fit into a new, different system of business relations, I did not find the strength in myself for this, and then, as it seems to me, desires. But now it is especially clear what a huge loss this silence marked for art.