Time and motion... My Grandmother (1929), with Stephen Horne, Klassiki online

 

"Even for viewers with no interest in the history and politics of the film, My Grandmother is a wonderful example of eccentrism and a catalog of the avant-garde’s film techniques during Soviet cinema’s golden age.” Denise J. Youngblood, The Moving Image*

 

This is the second time I’ve watched this film and tried to write about it because the first time I couldn’t quite believe it. Make no mistake, My Grandmother is nothing to do with the business of sucking eggs and everything to do with the Kafkaesque reality of bourgeois spoilers trying to cripple The Revolution through dragging the new freedoms into the ground by excessive bureaucracy. They don’t know or want to know any differently and even the gilded statues of the post-revolution rise up to chastise those who drop litter: is this the point of Art to make the ordinary citizen feel small and, in this case, less than perfectly formed.

 

This was director Kote Mikaberidze’s first film and I wish I knew more about his brief and that of his co-writers, Siko Dolidze, and Giorgi Mdivani. The film was made during the time of Stalin's Cultural Revolution (1928-1932) and creeping bureaucracy was seen as anti-revolutionary and the enemy of progress but the route the film takes to make this point is pure experimentalism conducted in a spirit of wilful entertainment. It is so sharply sardonic, one could almost suspect the filmmakers of trying to smuggle anarchic meaning past the censors – the ultimate bureaucrats after all, organising thoughts and filing away the divergent messaging. And, so it proved with this film which was shelved for decades after the censors had their final say only to be restored and screened in 1976 by the Georgian film studio partly as, "even today, it will be able to combat certain shameful practices still present in our society."

The Accounts Department hard at sleep

 

My Grandmother is easier to look at as an explosion of experimental energy, channelled through every available camera trick and editing technique, than as a coherent film.

Julia Zelman, East European Film Bulletin, Volume 51, March 2015

 

We begin at the offices of the "TORK" trust, a round table of laziness and distracted bureaucrats in the accounts department who pass their time playing with toy cars, staring into space or making paper planes. These planes are made by a sad man who uses them to declare his love for a woman in the typing pool who rebuffs his advances and smiles cruelly as he shoots himself. One man down, the Doorman (Evgeniy Ovanov) is called to drag the body away as the others fight over his place and promotion, Soon a very smart young man with a briefcase (Mikhail Abesadze) takes his place and gathers up the hundreds of overdue letters that have been left to lie around.

 

The office is visited by a workers’ representative (Akaki Khorava) who looks on in disgust as they snooze and ignore their work, he towers over the round table and is furious at the waste of revolutionary opportunity. He demands fifty roubles to aid production and for once the team responds but the new business manager, the Bureaucrat (Aleksandre Takaishvili) is sacked for many obvious reasons.

 

Aleksandre Takaishvili under pressure

The Bureaucrat returns home and we see his state of consciousness represented by a surreal sequence as his daughter’s toys look on in animated shock as he seemingly hangs himself. Mikaberidze uses a fair amount stop-motion in the film and will later show an animation of a cruel cartoon from the local paper about the Bureaucrat. His troubles are only just beginning though as his wife (Bella Chernova) returns home and finding him alive but very much to blame, kicks him around their apartment before throwing him out of the window – another cartoonish device. He rises from the pavement like Road-runner and she pursues him in a fury.

 

1. Find Grandmother 2. Be insistent 3. Be impudent And you will find a new job.

 

The Bureaucrat bumps into the young man with a briefcase and, as his wife looks on, gets the advice he hopes for; if he’s bold and finds the right sponsor, i.e. Grandmother, he can work his way back onto the team. But, like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain, our Bureaucrat is heading into a maze of frustration as he tries to follow the three strands of advice only to be rebuffed time after time…

 

Bella Chernova is not impressed

He goes to see the Superintendent only to be hauled down the stairs by a statue that takes offence at dropped cigarette butt, just inches from a bin. The spray-painted almost nude, is uncredited but is very impressive in a none speaking role and this is an issue that still plagues us today. Here, it’s possibly a reference to the small-mindedness of civic art or maybe just the need to keep the streets tidy. Our hero finally makes it past the endless queue and another door man and brow-beats the Superintendent into writing him a letter to secure his job back. He drives the older man to distraction but he will discover the road to cushy re-employment is paved with bad intent and that you simply can’t put a price on reality…

 

As an example of what would have been said if it could have been said at the time though, My Grandma is hard to beat but as Denise Youngblood has also said*, it was ultimately lacking in sympathetic characters and the exhibition of so much technique meant it was too “formalist” for the powers that were to accept. It’s more anarchic than avant-garde and by the time it’s finished just yells its message at the audience after tying us in knots for the whole run-time: DEATH TO RED TAPE, TO SLOPPINESS AND TO BUREAUCRATS!

 

Mikaberidze aimed a liberating film from the influence of theatre and literature and his use of mixed media underpins this even if the technique does indeed over-ride the message sometimes; it’s still a wild adventurous ride. His set designer Irakli Gamrekeli also contributes some wonderful spaces to the film, from the round table to the door-keepers chair positioned up a flight of steps next to a set of numbered lights responding to the corresponding seat of the slow-working bureaucrats within.

 

Stephen Horne brings musical order to this chaos with his trademark wit and invention; there’s no red tape or sloppiness just a deep musical understanding of film and it’s emotional-political context. The accompaniment is exactly what the film requires to come alive on screen and connect with modern audiences in a world in which the only rational response to events is to seek meaning in the manner of the comedy twice-repeated history is becoming.

 

You can view My Grandmother with Stephen’s accompaniment on the Klassiki site here and, if you’re not already a subscriber, you will find so much bang for your buck or, indeed, reward for your Rouble with a huge range of films old and new from the East!

 

*Denise Youngblood, “My Grandmother (Chemi Bebia) (1929)” In: The Moving Image, Vol. 10 Issue 1. The University of Minnesota Press, 2010

A symphony for wheat… Earth (1930), Klassiki Online with Stephen Horne

“… the expropriation of the kulaks is an integral part of the formation and development of the collective farms. Consequently, it is now ridiculous and foolish to discourse on the expropriation of the kulaks. You do not lament the loss of the hair of one who has been beheaded. …they are sworn enemies of the collective-farm movement …”

Josef Stalin, Problems of Agrarian Policy in the USSR, 27^th December 1929

Even having seen the other two parts of Dovzhenko’s "Ukraine Trilogy", Zvenigora (1928) and Arsenal (1929), Earth comes as a surprise in terms of its sparse approach and almost dreamlike quality. The director is so confident in his use of form that he appeals directly to the watcher and within a few minutes you know this is going to be something of a "conversation" about nuanced visual expression. It’s a mindful experience that calls on the viewer to understand the process of editing specific faces, acting or not, arranging moments and leaving spaces… the meaning is sometimes in the gaps between events and not defined by title cards*. It’s also perfect for the soulful musical interpretation of one our finest film accompanists...

Now, many party members would tend to disagree with what is clearly an "ideologically vicious" waste of public funds which fails to communicate the clear imperatives of collectivisation and de-Kulakization but, as Dovzhenko’s later communications with Stalin would plead: “This is my life, and if I am doing it wrong, then it is due to a shortage of talent or development, not malice.”

It can be hard to second guess The Leader in matters of political sentiment and whilst it's impossible to know how much Dovzhenko was ever looking to "please", with Earth he was judged to have failed in his attempt to walk the line between indivdiual artistic expression and collective objectives. Pravda praised the film’s style yet claimed that its political message was “false” whilst Demyan Bedny called the film "counterrevolutionary" and "defeatist” in a poem decrying the director’s naïve philosophical attitude… he was probably right but Dovzhenko mined more truth than increasingly murderous political reality would allow and even if he was forced to re-cut.

Tractor boy, Semen Svashenko

A few figures. none of which would have been known to the film maker at the time. Stalin’s first Five Year Plan and its policy of dekulakization, the removal of “wealthy” peasants/landholders, may have led to well over half a million deaths between 1929 and 1932 from hunger, disease and mass executions. Some 1,800,000 peasants were also deported to the cities to support collectivization and industrialisation with the aim of making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower and to create a rural communism hence the need to remove all landowners no matter how small their holdings.

Dovzhenko, from Ukrainian peasant stock himself, was one of 14 children born in a small village to uneducated parents. He managed to survive to adulthood, when 12 of his siblings did not, and became a teacher. He then fought for the Red Army in the post-revolutionary Civil War and joined the Borotbist party – one of a number of leftist groups – before becoming a writer and film maker in the mid 1920’s. Here, whilst welcoming the arrival of mechanisation and modernisation, he could not fail to sympathise with those facing change but clearly this was not the time to point that out, no matter how obliquely. Russia was never an easy tale to tell as my endlessly patient tutor, Dr Robert Gildea, had to remind me with every essay.

Contented death, Mykola Nademsky

The film starts with the gentle passing of one of the village elders, Semyon Opanas (Mykola Nademsky) beneath a fruit tree and surrounded by friends and family, old and young, in the midst of the natural life he has loved. It’s an odd death as he briefly rallies in time to eat an apple, before falling gently back and drifting away surrounded by nature and family.

 

Then we see the reactions of various faces distorted first by grief and then by anger as we segue to a party meeting, a member reads of the sabotage undertaken by some Kulaks who we then see in a further meeting with Arkhyp Bilokin (Ivan Franko), and his son Khoma (Petro Masokha) who is intent on doing what he can to hold back process. Thus, Dovzhenko takes us through transitionary close-ups to move from the loss of the old man, and his ways, to the raging debate over the new. Here, as elsewhere, Danylo Demutsky’s cinematography delights in the capture of the grandeur and simplicity of nature and human response.

 

This woman's not from Venus but from Mars... Yuliya Solntseva

Talking of which, whilst I’ve heard Mr Horne accompany so many films, here he is mining a particularly rich seam or, more precisely, ploughing a deep furrow. There’s a stirring Russian march as the overture followed by some rolling lyricism to accompany the old farmer’s gentle death in this bucolic setting, optimistic rising chords counterpoint the last breaths drawn on the accordion which Stephen uses almost as a human “voice”, an earthy sound against the piano’s upper register. Beguiling flute lines float over both piano and accordion… then we return to that opening theme, as the farmers discuss their friend’s life and uncertain legacy.

 

Now Father, the Kulaks are finished… When we have the machines, we’ll take their land away.

 

The debate continues in the house of Opanas (Stepan Shkurat) and his modernising son Vasili (Semen Svashenko, the fresh-faced hero of Dovzhenko’s Arsenal) who is counting on a new tractor to convince his fellow villagers of the need for change. Vasili’s sister, is played by Yuliya Solntseva who was not only Aelita, Queen of Mars, but the director’s long-term partner and wife. A director herself, Solntseva died in 1988 having lived long enough to see Perestroika and Glasnost reforms, the beginning of the end of the USSR.

Foppish young Kulaks, Petro Masokha in the middle

The tractor arrives and as the villagers look on – the director focusing in closeups of locals cast, as per Eisenstein, for their looks, disaster strikes and the vehicle runs out of water. Then, in one of the funniest moments in soviet cinema, two men volunteer to fill up the tank using their own urine, they may strain but the flow eventually comes and the tractor is driven triumphantly into the village by Vasili. He drives the tractor over to his father who is scything the wheat by hand and tells him to throw his “crutches” away and, for possibly the only tine in the film, the older man smiles. Then we see the increased productivity as the tractor ploughs up more fields and allows a far quicker harvest and production. This is a moment of powerful transition and one that is to be celebrated by – nearly the whole village.

Later in the night-time, as the lovers hold each other and the future looks tenderly bright… Stephen’s response to Dovzhenko’s lyricism is a symphonic one, relishing the close-focus humanity and the connections between the land and peace, whether individual or collective.

The last dance. Semen Svashenko

The musical themes are weighted with their own meaning and whilst they perfectly fit the action as you’d expect they also add (an) extra character. As Vasili walks a drunken walk home, reflectively sozzled by the success of the tractor only to take a pause and suddenly start dancing a hopak, accompanied by accordion and a liquid turn of musical pace. There are so many moments of immersed musicality which play with the director’s ultimate joy in human thought. You don’t watch him dance you join in the dancing… irresistible sympathetic syncopation.

And, what a fine dance it is too… but just as it looks like it could carry on for ever, Vasili is struck viciously form behind and falls dead to the ground as his assailant runs away.

In the moment following the murder, Stephen’s thin lines from the top end of the accordion slice through the sadness and provide the most fragile of carriers for the devastation on view. Extraordinary control during the film’s emotional crescendo when the temptation might have been to add thunder not this sad lightning. I also loved the repeated theme that surfaces so prominently during the brief confrontation between Opanas and the priest, the former’s sadness at the hurt he has given is reflected in the music’s almost winsome despair; there is no God… and there are no priests.

Stepan Shkurat's extraordinary energy

And we’ll sing songs about the new life…

Vasyli’s funeral provides the moments of the film’s dynamic and magically real ending as the majority of the village marches behind his opened casket on its way to a committal without priests or religious ceremony. Meanwhile the local priest (Volodymyr Mikhajlov) rages for God to punish the guilty and Vasili’s fiancée Natalya (Yelena Maksimova) strips naked in her house and almost dances her anger and grief. Cutting between those two scenes, Dovzhenko also shows us Vasili’s kulak killer tearing through fields and finally shouting his confession at the funeral cortege… he is ignored as the local party leader tells them that Vasili’s sacrifice will not be in vain.

There’s a lot to unpack in this final sequence and, even though there are a number of different cuts of this most censored of films, the director’s “cut” is always there for us to interpret. What the authorities saw as wrong thinking was Dovzhenko’s ambivalence to the changes being made to his community in “the breadbasket of the Soviet Union”. Yet, he did see a collective solution with the secular unity and the determination to continue Vasili’s work reflected in Natalya’s closing reverie, even if her naked grief was excised from most cuts.

Yelena Maksimova's primal grief

The director’s real issues with Stalin came after the film culminating in his plea quoted above as the Georgian became more and more unpredictable and ruthless in imposing a collective solution for Russia’s agrarian economy. By the end of 1928 just 1% of the farms had voluntarily become collectives and Stalin essentially imposed forced collectivisation not just on rural Russia but also on his own regime with opposition outmanoeuvred or simply removed. That’s a whole other story but here in 1929-1930, the fact that Dovzhenko was able to make a film in which he showed the impact on everyone is proof enough that, even as worse days were coming, there was still optimism and diverse opinion.

 

I watched the film on Klassiki which is the only place in the world where you can stream classic film from Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia! You need to be a member to access the content but at £9.99 a year it is an absolute bargain.

Watch it for one of the greatest of all silent films, for a history primer and for one of the finest musical accompaniments I’ve heard in some time!

*Earth exists in some nine different versions and whilst this copy seems near complete – including the nudity – it’s possible that not all the title cards from Dovzhenko’s original final cut survive.