Island of the Dead

(Ostrov myortvykh, Oleg Kovalov, Russia, 1992)

This is a curious 86-minute feature: in its entirety, a found footage work of lyrical montage. But not an essay film, mercifully: there’s no voice-over commentary, just a music selection (including a grab from Ennio Morricone’s Days of Heaven [1978] score!), and some odd, mickey-mouse-ing foley sound effects – almost in parody (it seemed to me) of a certain contemporary TV mode in which silent footage is always egregiously ‘filled out’ with such noises.

Island of the Dead, The Island of the Dead, Isle of the Dead – the translations from the Russian title are, I guess, variable according to taste – is, rather than an essay film, seemingly constructed on a cryptically coded, quasi-Symbolist montage method, somewhat opaque in its unfolding associations, that I identify with a certain strain in Eastern European cinema (from the 1920s to Sergei Parajanov).

The premise: a meditation on (the images of) silent movie diva Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1919), and the passing of her time – in particular (according to Andrei Plakhov), the time of carefree, pre-revolutionary Russian modernism in art, design and fashion. There are many sequences of Kholodnaya looking and acting brazen – refusing (for example) the gaze of a somewhat hysterical-lascivious-burlesque cameraman; or dancing provocatively in front of some uppity High Society guy.

Many ways of treating the silent footage are explored: step printing, coloured filters/washes, isolation and repetition of detail (as in Ken Jacobs’ avant-garde classic Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son [1969]). There are various weird juxtapositions: in particular, of the Human Comedy (luxuriantly bourgeois in this particular ultra-glam/mélo era) and a strange, animated insect film! (These bugs even screen movies for themselves.)

There is also a principle recognisable from Ruizian montage: the deliberately non-seamless (seamful?) construction of imaginary or impossible composite scenes. A typical associative chain goes like this: A guy goes into a building – a picture theatre – a crowd – a film playing on a screen – the bug projectionists – glimpse of a hyper-theatrical spectacle (super weird thing with women popping up, Vera included, a little in the vein of the theatre performance in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire [1994]). And all this from different films, diverse footage sources, with their variable degrees of degradation, filter-treatment, and so on. In this particular imaginary scene, Kholodnaya figures as both spectacle and spectator, mover and moved.

Eventually, we arrive at the bloody end of this era – and here, director Oleg Kovalov (who has made many archival-based projects) cannot resist the wrenching juxtapositions of a Gatsbyesque gaiety with historical atrocities such as corpses in the snow, massed graves of abandoned skeletons, and so on. The next wave of brutal reform/revolution, under Stalin, is announced in an abrupt ending that wields a propaganda motto and the action of the film itself ‘disappearing’.

In my cinephile life and memory, I indelibly associate Island of the Dead with a specific conjuncture: in 1997, effectively before the general rise-to-power of the Internet, the only way I could see a filmic UFO like this, pitched somewhere between compilation documentary and avant-garde experiment, was to travel far from Australia over the seas to Rotterdam, in what constituted one of my earliest, immersive festival experiences ‘abroad’ (although I was already 37!). This was, in fact, the first film I watched at the Rotterdam festival after I landed, skipping Opening Night glamour (was it the Australian Shine [1996] or something equally awful?) for the sake of this curio, followed by my inaugural Dardenne brothers’ jolt, La promesse (1996)!

© Adrian Martin 27 January 1997 (+ 2025 postscript)