Top secret exhibition – Newspaper Kommersant No. 240 (7441) dated 12/26/2022

The Cinematheque in Paris has opened the exhibition “Top Secret: Cinema and Espionage”, which tells how cinema makes the secret clear and the ugly beautiful. The correspondent of Kommersant in France listened to spy stories on the screens and in life Alexey Tarkhanov.

“Top Secret” combines, like vodka and martini in the famous James Bond cocktail, two inseparable ingredients: a love of spy thrillers in movies and a mystical fear of intelligence agencies in real life. Of course, vodka with a martini is also a symbol of the unity and struggle of the Western and Eastern worlds, two monsters that should not be mixed, shaken or underestimated.

The French Cinematheque is one of the first and main cinematographic museums in the world. Therefore, fragments of the most famous films about the heroes of the invisible front are generously played on the screens: from the pre-war “39 Steps” by Alfred Hitchcock (1935) to the pre-war “Bridge of Spies” by Steven Spielberg (2015). Greta Garbo appears in 1931 as Mata Hari, and Ingrid Bergman exposes the Nazis hiding in Brazil in Hitchcock’s Notorious in 1946.

Spy women are given the most honorable section of the exposition. The authors insist that, in addition to the passive role of the “honey trap”, women have more than once acted not only as actresses, but also as directors of real spy thrillers. In addition to the original diaries of Mata Hari (with pasted postcards and reviews in the spirit of high school girls’ notebooks), there is a plan of the “Atlantic Wall” printed on silk (so similar to a real Hermes square) and miniature books with the inscription “I can cook” on the cover (in which actually contained recipes not for duck legs, but for incendiary mixtures).

Behind the women’s battalion, an entire division of jamesbonds parades, equipped with the most ingenious devices: from Scaramanga’s golden pistol (respectively, from The Man with the Golden Gun, 1974) to the bladed boots that KGB officer Rosa Klebb could have worn in From Russia with Love ( 1963). But next to invented gadgets, real gadgets are also on display: devices for microphotography, coins with hiding places (among them the anniversary ruble with bald Lenin), disguised microphones and the “Bulgarian umbrella” with which dissident Georgy Markov was killed in 1978. The circle closes: the real-life spy gadget returns to cinema as a farce in Prick with the Umbrella with Pierre Richard. Among the deadly inventions in the window, there is even a rat stuffed with explosives, which, however, according to the certificate, did not manage to play its role.

Of course, a place of honor is given to the forerunner of the Bond film – Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” and all subsequent attempts by directors to move away from the standard he created. But there is an interesting parallel: just as the real spy gadgets of the CIA and the GRU are the same, the cinematic representations of the exploits of the intelligence officer are just as routine – a close-up, a close look, an ominous grin of the enemy. And the more talented the film, the more it is noticeable. What difference does it make which side of the front the director is on, depicting the struggle of the free world against the Nazis, the Americans against the Communists, West Germany against the East, the good against the bad. It’s funny to see the moment of trading Rudolf Abel for Gary Powers in Spielberg’s trendy Bridge of Spies, recognizing a mirror paraphrase of our forgotten Dead Season.

For the time being, a spy is a well-deserved Stirlitz behind enemy lines, and directors admire his heroism. But the farther, the more the black-and-white world becomes cloudy, and the native special service becomes the main opponent of the agent. His superiors are ready to destroy him. And not in the name of big goals, but for the sake of a career, money or the desire to hide their own betrayal. From “Three Days of the Condor” by Sidney Pollack, there is a thread to the latest spy series – “Homeland”, “Bureau of Legends”, “Slow Horses”. There is no doubt that the traitor will be betrayed by his own people, and any special service is engaged in the invention of traitors, not to actually catch them.

This is how we are prepared for the last section of the exhibition. This is a story about conspiracy theories and lone rebels who fight against the world of total surveillance. It is represented in the exposition by the curious eye of a spy satellite, or it could be a phone screen that glows in the hands of every second visitor. The heroes here are Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, who became Chelsea Manning. The main exhibit is 24 masks (“Maybe Chelsea 2017”) with his/her image, which were created by the American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg based on the DNA of a former military man.

Here the exhibition returns to the beginning, the great powers themselves begin to act as the world’s villains: Dr. Mabuse, or the head of the “Spectre” Ernst Blofeld, or a similar Doctor Evil. Do not understand who is becoming a traitor here – your country or yourself. You don’t even have to go to the cinema: if our former colleague Ivan Safronov is sent to prison for 22 years, it means that the world is really dancing on its head, and treason is deeply nested in society, from which side of the screen you look at it.