New Left Review 100, July-August 2016
tony wood
DARK MIRRORS
The Films of Andrei Zvyagintsev
In a rocky, unpeopled landscape in the far northwest of Russia, where the Kola Peninsula juts into the Arctic Circle, a small group is celebrating a friend’s birthday by taking drunken potshots at a row of empty bottles. After one of the group machine-guns the bottles away, someone produces a new set of targets: a bundle of portraits of the country’s former leaders. We see framed photographs of Brezhnev, Lenin, Gorbachev (though not Stalin), and hear giggles off-screen. ‘Got anyone more current?’, asks Kolya, the film’s main character. ‘It’s too early for the current ones’, replies Stepanych, a local traffic cop: ‘Not enough of a historical perspective. Let them ripen up on the wall a bit.’ The exchange occurs halfway through Leviafan (Leviathan, 2014), Andrei Zvyagintsev’s fourth film. An unsparing condemnation of the everyday corruption and brutality of power in provincial Russia, it follows Kolya Sergeev’s attempts to resist eviction from his house on the orders of the local mayor, pitting an isolated individual against a state system geared mainly to protecting its own. There is a deliberate, perhaps tactical, ambiguity in the dialogue about the portraits, which on the one hand avoids putting Russia’s current rulers before the symbolic firing squad; on the other hand, it doesn’t guarantee them immunity: their time will eventually come.
|
Subscribe for just £40 and get free access to the archive Please login on the left to read more or buy the article for £3 |
’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’
Related articles:
- Zhang Xudong: Poetics of Vanishing Cinematic portraits of China’s breakneck social and economic transformation, as seen from street level at its provincial margins. Zhang Xudong on motifs of disappearance, demolition and mobility in the films of Jia Zhangke.
- Efrain Kristal: Screening Peru Contradictions of his country’s breakneck urbanization in the cinema of Francisco Lombardi. Film’s rival media—tele-reportage, newspapers, radio, videotaped corruption—brought into play to create new cinematic forms.
- Leo Chanjen Chen: Cinema, Dream, Existence With City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster, Hou Hsiao-Hsien established the landmarks of Taiwan’s New Cinema—distinguished by aesthetic distance and break with political taboo. Chen traces the origins of Hou’s achievement to a mixture of an apprenticeship in commercial film, a unique synthesis of islander and high-modern culture, and impartial sympathy for those caught up in history’s storm.
- Michael Witt: Shapeshifter Formal rigour, social interrogation, poetic intensity: Jean-Luc Godard stands in the premier rank of contemporary artists. In this striking reconceptualization of his work, the movies take their place among sound compositions, TV, texts, videotape and graphic art, as elements of an ongoing multimedia installation.
- David Murphy: An African Brecht An aesthetic of discrepancy—epic sweep, domestic naturalism, social satire, expressionist set-piece—marks the complex cinema of Ousmane Sembene. Themes of contestation and corruption played out in pre- and post-Independence Senegal.
- Leo Chanjen Chen: The Frustrated Architect: The Cinema of Edward Yang The Taiwanese New Wave has been described by Fredric Jameson as offering the finest cycle of any national cinema since the French. Leo Chanjen Chen explores the achievement of Edward Yang, one of its two greatest masters.
- Silvana Silvestri: A Skein of Reversals Italian cinema has an heir to its greatest days: Gianni Amelio, whose films—rarely seen abroad—transform legacies from Rossellini and Antonioni, twisting personal and political themes into a distinctive high-tension cord of their own.
- Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German Virtually unknown in the West, Aleksei German is regarded by Russians as their most radical and original film director. Tony Wood considers his techniques of disorientation, and the craft of induced paranoia in his latest movie about the Doctors’ Plot of 1953—its title taken from Beria’s triumphant shout to his chauffeur.