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.