Ночь, улица, фонарь

I found this ad for Russia's MTS cell phone company on a search for Aleksandr Blok's 1912 "Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека," and it warmed my Russophile heart. Here is the full poem:

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века-
Все будет так. Исхода нет.


Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

I have taken much license with my translation:

A night, a street, a streetlamp, drugstore,
Unthinkable and fading light.
Live but a quarter century more:
Nothing will change. There's no way out.


You'll die then start from the beginning,
All the old patterns will repeat:
The night, the canal's icy rippling,
The drugstore, streetlamp, and the street.

The ad wouldn't work if 99% of it's viewers hadn't once been made to memorize this poem. A man is dictating Blok's famous words into his mobile phone, and the words float out into the night, finding their reflections in posters and ads around the city. But the resolution is tragic: the addressee is a student with a casually hidden ear bud. Instead of memorizing the poem, he has the technology to find it on the same streets that inspired Blok. Blok's poem will probably disappear from the storehouses of his readers' minds; but the lonely quotidian of a winter city night will remain. A night... a street... a cellphone... drugstore.

eyes on eyes

St. Jerome called the face the "mirror of the mind." But Lev Kuleshov taught us that the mind being mirrored isn't necessarily the one attached to the face, but rather the one attached to the person observing and interpreting that particular face's expressions. In a short sequence from 1917-18, Kuleshov spliced close-ups of the popular character actor Ivan Mozzhukhin staring intently into the camera with alternating images of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a beautiful woman. The audience was thrilled by his portrayals of hunger, sadness, and lust: they didn't notice that the same footage of Mozzhukhin was repeated over and over. (The only version of this on the internet includes Spanish subtitles -- gracias to those who made it available!)

A few years earlier Mozzhukhin had played the devil in Starevich's 1913 adaptation of Gogol's "Night Before Christmas." Here is a Kuleshov test you can take at home: in this frame, is he:
a. hungry for a bowl of soup?
b. terrified that he will be beaten by an upstanding blacksmith?
c. craftily plotting to snatch the moon from the sky?
or d. with some careful montage, any of the above?

When I taught my Soviet film class in 2010, one of my students, Amanda Goodman, created her own Kuleshov experiment to successful effect. Rather than alternating between hunger, sadness, and lust, Amanda's protagonist is pictured observing a strip tease with apparently increasing interest. Her films have already screened at in the Sixth College UCSD Film Festival. Keep an eye out for this creative eye.

New Year's Furry Things

Youtube videos probably say at least as much about the late-night viewer as they do about the producer. This particular viewer is not quite ready to embrace her own strange fascination with Chai Vdvoem's New Year's furry things, the slender woman-with-a-key who rises like a yolochka toward her flat-screen TV, or the gogolian pig-demon the woman's lover for some reason sees fit to present her with. (Notice how the poor pig sniffs around the presents as if looking for a lost sleeve.) But I am posting this anyway, a placeholder for deeper thoughts on overturn... or at least a warm, fuzzy tribute to mandarin oranges and desire.

Netflix Files: The Man Who Cried

As far as I’m concerned there are 3 reasons one might spend a regrettable evening watching this movie. The first is Golijov's rather nice original score. The second is a brief sound cameo featuring my friend Jeremy exclaiming something in Yiddish from off-screen. The third is Cate Blanchett's wonderful, if somewhat anachronistic, portrayal of a Russian émigré. Blanchett's character is a masterful combination of desperate seductress, anti-Semite, and faithful friend. All of the other characters in the film are stiff, frankly offensive, caricatures. Christina Ricci who, miraculously rescued from a pogrom must sing her way to America to find her father (Oleg Yankovsky), plays a less human version of Feivel the Mouse from "An American Tale." Ms. Ricci, whose childhood alter ego is played by an undeniably cute Claudia Lander-Duke, utters a handful of lines throughout the entire film; what she does say is spoken without the least hint of expression. The doe-eyed gazes that the actress employed so brilliantly in Buffalo’66 simply do not work for this character. Johnny Depp's role as a gypsy horse-trainer is the stuff of bad porn. For a film with the word "cried" in the title, with the exception of Blanchett's aging Russian ballerina and the diva-breakdowns of John Turturro's fascist opera singer, any attempts at emotion are either misplaced, or simply unconvincing.

From the Netflix files: Russian Ark

Don't watch The Russian Ark [Russkii Kovcheg] (2002) for the plot (there isn’t a plot), or for the costumes (some appear to have been stolen from tourist-photo-op-actors on Nevsky). But Aleksandr Sokurov’s virtuosic single shot is pleasantly dizzying, and marks an important innovation in the cinematic portrayal of time and space. The entire film can be boiled down to the following: a whispering Marquis de Custine (Sergei Dreiden) with an unidentifiable European accent guides the viewer in an hour-and-a-half-long polonaise through various chapters of Russian history. By setting the entire film in St. Petersburg’s splendid Hermitage (the permission for which marks a heroic achievement in its own right), Sokurov likens his contemporary audience’s distant perception of history to a tourist’s first picturesque walk through a winter garden in bloom.