The body of the case – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
There is a well-known cliché: in Soviet cinema, sex was banned or almost banned; every frank scene – from Svetlichnaya’s bursting bra in The Diamond Hand to the tenderness of Filatov and Yakovleva in The Crew – is a surprising exception, a breakthrough in the blockade of forced chastity. This, of course, is not true. Late Soviet cinema had its own special language for talking about sexuality. Seeing it as a deviation from a “normal” or “full-fledged” language is a mistake: such a language does not exist.
Sex is not available to speech or image (the absolute flimsiness of porn here is the best evidence). It cannot be told or shown. Any cinematic dialect – whether it be the language of, say, Lelouch, Bergman or Warhol – deals with this impossibility, the resistance of desire. The language of Soviet cinema in this sense is no different, and at the same time it is very special.
When we talk about sex in movies, we don’t think about talking first, but about the bodies on the screen. Cinematography is a voyeuristic art, and the human body is one of its main materials. The gaze (of the director, camera, spectator) wants to get the body at its disposal, to make it completely accessible and defenseless. In the limit – to get him naked. And, feminist critics, starting with Laura Mulvey, tell us, it is usually the look of a man and the body of a woman.
This is where censorship comes into play, censorship in the broadest sense—the entire cultural order. It controls and regulates desire, but does not oppose it at all. On the contrary, as we have known since the time of Michel Foucault, there is a pact between power and sexuality about the measure of what is permitted and the measure of what is necessary in demonstrating desire. Cinema in the twentieth century was one of the main territories of this treaty. It teaches us to desire in the right way and in the right amounts. Watching, for example, Western films, we always feel this norm very well, just as we feel the moments of its violation, transgression.
***
This balance is much more difficult to find in Soviet cinema. The fact is that late Soviet censorship – and here we are talking literally about the film process management system – was not censorship of the law, but of fear. Its main principle is not “it should be so”, but “no matter how it happens”. This censorship was harsh, sometimes ruthless, and at the same time chaotic, insecure – a neurotic institution that did not really understand what its task was.
Tensions with her gave rise to the same neurotic authors. They never knew what was possible and what was not allowed, they walked on the edge of what was permitted, talking about the most innocent things, playing giveaway and just as constantly provoked. The film language of the era was the same – shy and risky, raw, confused. This applies to talking about politics, history, ideals. But, of course, this also applies to sex.
In late Soviet cinema, there were several films that made the problem of sexual relations between a man and a woman their main subject. In the 1960s – the shelf “Boy and Girl”, in the 1970s – the semi-forbidden “Autumn”, in the 1980s – the super-popular, already preparing the restructuring “Winter Cherry”. But, as a rule, sexuality existed in stagnant cinema in a different mode: semi-silence, allusion, reservation (in a completely Freudian sense). This sexuality is elusive and obsessive: it seems to be absent, but it constantly manifests itself in the most inappropriate way. The look of the director of stagnation is, in essence, the look of a child who knows and does not know, who does not fully believe in the existence of “this” and is looking everywhere for signs of it.
The main of these signs, of course, is the female breast – the organ-sign of sex. In stagnant cinema, the female body almost always enters the frame as if by accident, by mistake. Only this mistake is extremely annoying – as if the authors repeat it again and again (and the censors, having hesitated a little, skip it again and again). An open bathrobe, an open bathroom door, a blanket slipping in the morning – in these moments of nudity passing from film to film, there is always a feeling of awkwardness, shame. This body itself is just as awkward. It is certainly eroticized, but eroticized in a strange way – like an illegal glitch, a feigned accident. In such a body, resistance to the gaze is palpable. It is uncomfortable, it slips out, it repels. And at the same time it is defenseless in its absurdity, incompleteness. What happens if you get in touch with him is most likely some kind of nonsense, a desired and futile stupidity.
***
Such folly was the subject of stagnant dramas and comedies, stories of men too weak to possess a woman and women too weak to do without men. “Hello and Farewell”, “Irony of Fate”, “Strange Woman”, “Faryatyev’s Fantasies”, “Flights in a Dream and in Reality” and dozens of other films, beautiful and worthless – they all inhabit this erotic dead end, circles of hysterical absurdity.
These films tell about the problems of adults, older people. It seems that there is no place for a child’s gaze here. In fact, it is here that he triumphs. The hero of stagnant films is a capricious child in the worn body of a middle-aged man. At the very dawn of stagnation, the birth of this character, who has not yet entered the world, is brilliantly shown by Vitaly Melnikov in the film “Mom Got Married”. Its sad zenith is the two heroes of Georgy Danelia: the proletarian version – Afonya, the intelligentsia – Buzykin from the “Autumn Marathon”. This little monster is always a little offended, looking for care and running away from it, demonstrating senseless and bad independence. Such a subject is almost incapable of finding an object of desire for himself. Only fragments, fragments, interchangeable and insufficient copies of an unnamed sample are available to him. As if to the chest seen through the slit of the dressing gown, it is impossible to complete the whole.
As we know from the same feminist critics, mainstream cinema fulfills our fantasies, rids us of sexual anxieties, grants a man an imaginary power over a woman who is always frightening to him – objectifies her, turning her into a complete, seductive and non-terrible image. Some of the great Soviet authors fit into this scheme quite well: Tarkovsky with his sadistic erotica, Solovyov with mild pedophilia. But in general, the Soviet cinematography of a weak male gaze turned out to be incapable of this operation. The woman appeared in him as a being fundamentally non-objectivable – unfinished, painful for herself and for another. That is why this movie was filled with inescapable libidinal anxiety.
How is it that popular, mainstream cinema has been so obsessed with gender misery, intolerance and impossibility of meeting? The point here is not the critical attitude of most of its authors, no matter how talented (Ryazanov is not Fassbinder, and Danelia, with all his adoration, is not Bergman). This not quite planned honesty, the inability to create an ideal picture, was precisely the effect of the union of the Soviet order and Soviet sexuality, or, looking a little from the other side, of a painful symbiosis between a weak state and a weak author.
A metaphor suggests itself: the state, with its financial and administrative resources, on the one hand, and with its censorship apparatus, on the other, was for the infantile subject of Soviet cinema (the director and the hero as his alter ego) something like a parent – patronizing, demanding and eccentric , punishing for random actions, forbidding to speak openly about adult things. In its own way, such a parent finds it convenient for his child to stay in eternal half-childhood, his inability to be independent – above all, political. But, as a result, and sexual.
***
What happened when the frozen time shifted, the power of censorship fell, and the Soviet people were pulled out of their calm, apolitical life? In the second half of the 1980s, directors rushed to explore everything that had recently been under suspicion – satire, violence and, of course, sex. However, in the discovery of “adult” sexuality there was nothing of liberation, of celebration. Sex was either ridiculous (the main master of comic relief was Anatoly Eyramdzhan) or vile and dangerous. This is how he appears both in “Little Vera” and in “Intergirl” – two films that opened up the world of bed for the Soviet audience. Apart from the paintings of Sergei Solovyov, perestroika puberty was colored not by the joy of emancipation, but by disgust.
In this new world, there was no place for that subtle art of non-meetings and non-partings, which was mastered by the heroes of the 1970s. Able, it seemed, to generate endless circles, the anguish dried up and ended in a gap. This is mercilessly captured by Igor Maslennikov in the second part of “Winter Cherry”. The woman finally finds the will to leave, and the man, who has lost all his unsightly charm, rushes on the exercise bike without moving: from the cozy womb of stagnation – straight to the grave.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
