A Jewish Wedding

"The wedding ceremony ended, the rabbi sank into a chair, then he left the room and saw tables lined up the whole length of the courtyard. There were so many of them that the end stuck out of the gates onto Gospitalnaya Street. The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed, and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep voices." -- Isaac Babel, "The King"

Babel's images of Jewish life in Odessa may have seduced the Russian reader of the 1920s and 30s, but the carnival of Jewish life that comes out in the Odessa Stories has had at least as great an impact on American Jewish writers. In this montage, set appropriately to Leonid Utesov and beginning with a Babelian image of decapitated poultry, Gregory Freidin notices the uncanny similarity between the wedding scenes in Vladimir Vilner's 1926 Benya Krik (a cinematic interpretation of Babel's Odessa Stories) and Larry Peerce's 1969 film version of Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus. Internalized antisemitism on all sides? A celebration of Jewish culture? Nothing to do with Jews or secular diaspora culture? The comments logged in response to this you-tube posting are almost as entertaining as the films themselves.  

Woody Allen would later mine Russian literature to embellish his own version of American Jewish comedy with his 1975 Love and Death.

Next stop: the moon.

Vladimir Motyl's 1970 "Beloe solntse pustyni" (White Sun of the Desert) may be an artistic failure, but the Okudzhava soundtrack and now-famous one-liners have turned it into a cult classic. Soviet astronauts, rumor has it, used to watch the film before take-off. A curious choice, particularly given the space voyages they had to choose from. Tarkovsky's brooding 1972 "Solaris" may have been inappropriate to the mood, but why not Protazanov's 1924 "Aelita, Queen of Mars"? The heroic exploits of captain Sukhov (Anatoly Kuznetsov), a Red Army officer who must fight counter-Revolutionary warriors and protect a harem in the Central Asian desert, must have evoked, for a superstitious cosmonaut, distance and adventure far more than the familiar martians of science fiction. The cheerful Sukhov, comforted by visions of his blond, red-scarved country wife, cannot bring himself to return home until he has rescued every last peasant he finds buried in the sand. Quite accidentally, the name given to Sukhov's greatest "Eastern" allie, Sayid (Spartak Mishulin), may recall, for more recent viewers, Edward Said's definition of Orientalism as "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (3) Of course, Orientalism, hardly a Soviet invention, was at least as important to literary and cultural self-formation in Russia as it was in Western Europe. Pushkin's 1823 "Bakhchisaraiskii fontan" (The fountain of Bakhchisarai) tells of a Tatar khan who kidnaps a Polish noblewoman, sparking envy in his harem. The poem was adapted into a ballet by Afasev and Zakharov in the 1930s. I am struck by certain similarities between the harem scenes in the ballet and in "Beloe Solntse" (scroll to 1:28 above). Below is a clip from a 1953 performance (danced by Maia Plisetskaia and Galina Ulanova). The Eastern woman's body, seductive and bare-waisted, provides important ornamentation; the Western woman, be she Polish or Russian, is the faithful (and faith-meriting) bride.

52 Seconds

Film is a collaborative art. So is teaching. In an effort to lace my film syllabus with an unexpected challenge or two, I googled "film, syllabus, soviet" and was lucky enough to find a good idea by my colleague Yuri Leving, who teaches at Dalhousie University in Canada, and I quickly plugged it into my own nascent course. (Thanks Yuri -- and feel free to mine mine!) The good idea: a 52-second film, exactly the length of the Lumiere brother's first efforts, to be shot with whatever is on hand -- a cell phone, a macbook, a borrowed camera. I made the assignment optional and gave my students a week to put their projects together, but got a great collection of responses, from eccentric cats to a sunset-disco montage. Here is an especially impressive time-lapse, shot and edited by Tristan Loucks and featuring San Diego's Seaport Village.

Thank you, President Castro!

I'd like to thank Fidel Castro for timing his resignation to fall on precisely the week in which I planned to teach Mikhail Kalatozov's marvelous 1964 film, "I Am Cuba/Soy Cuba/Ya Kuba." The film, which begins with a beauty pageant and ends with the triumph of the guerilla movement, presents the Cuban Revolution through a series of episodes increasing in solidarity and violence and decreasing in shadows that resemble cages.

My friend Roger Levy, upon seeing yesterday's New York Times photo essay, pithily summed up what many hope and others fear may be a disillusioning reversal in Fidel's revolutionary poetics: "He is wearing Adidas."

Image: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/world/americas/20cuba.html

I am fire, you are water.

Just twist! To be sure, the former Soviet Union is crawling with matreshka dolls, be they innocent and scarved or political (Lenin in Stalin in Brezhnev... all in the gullet of a stony-faced Putin; this particular set can be found at www.craftsofrussia.co.uk). In the last decade or two the matreshka has become multicultural: L.A. Laker matreshkas were popular in the 90's; I have a couple of Jewish klezmer matreshkas at home, bought in Odessa (clarinet in fiddle in accordion). But nobody understands the nesting doll better than a Russian, whose tiny babushka has been ever swallowed by greater forces.   

                            

So of course Matreshka should make a guest appearance in folk singer and choreographer Vladimir Devyatov's 2006 music video "Ia ogon, ty voda" (I'm fire, you're water). When opened by American characters of apparently increasing levels of social power, the doll becomes a folk-disco Pandora's box, the ultimate souvenir, offsetting American society from the courtyard janitors to the president. It's worth pointing out that the actors playing African American janitors are as unconvincingly American as the "dvor" in which most of the video takes place. The bizarre narrative is somehow at once complex and formulaic. (For more on the latter, take a look at some of the great work done by my friend Steven Lee.)

I doubt Devyatov had this in mind, but the soul of Russianness (marked here by ethnic music, costume and dance) that disrupts and exposes America's own social nesting dolls might be read as a new Slavic-centered version an old-fashioned Soviet suggestion that Leninism might disrupt the pattern of American racism. Compare this to Ivanov and Amalrik's 1933 Soviet cartoon "Chernoe i beloe" (Black and White), inspired by Mayakovsky. Even the costumes that open Devyatov's video take you back to the final Black-White confrontation in this haunting piece of Soviet animation. While both works are problematic, the older one is at least clear about its social message.