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Passions
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How Strange the
Change (from Major to Minor)
If you want to know
the truth, here it is. If you want me to invent something more complicated, I
can try.
– Kira Muratova,
2002 (1)
In
English, the Russian title Uvlecheniya comes out three ways: as Passions (which sounds melodramatic and grand, which the film is
not), Petty Passions (which sounds
moralistic, which the film is not), and, most charmingly and matter-of-factly, Enthusiasms (which, unfortunately, will
never fly as an English-language movie title).
Maybe Pretty Passions might do the trick,
especially as it echoes the 1960s pre-Badlands story of mad criminal love Pretty
Poison – and that could be the proper title of many Muratova films. Pretty Passion as an antidote to Pretty Poison; the
positive side or shadow of the negative. Aha, a hook! – but a deceptive one.
Surveyors
of Kira Muratova’s career
tend to stumble over this one as a lightweight interlude, a “superficial” film
in her career, reflecting some fleeting post-Glasnost of sustained cheer in Muratova’s (at the time) 60-year-old bosom, and
unpredictably a relatively popular success; she herself, in her usual irritable
and paradoxical way, countered that it was “deeply superficial”. And we must
follow her exasperated, liberating lead.
The
seductive, critical game of extreme points, of dialectics, of binary
oppositions does not get us terribly far into Muratova.
Commentators try in vain to divide her films into opposing groups, like: the plotless and the plotted; or the colour works and the
black-and-white ones. As if this categorising gesture could somehow impose
order on these films in their wild variety, from one to the next and within
each one!
What
is the plot of Passions? Neither plot
nor theme swim into view within the first thirty
minutes (which is the section I will concentrate on here). We dance – sometimes
literally – from one point of interest to another, one enthusiasm to another.
But always on a hinge, an overlap: it’s a cleaner, more minimal version of the
chaos we see in Robert Altman or Emir Kusturica. But hardly a more logical method.
“Free
association” comes to mind as a way to label her creative process, except that
this free association (as free association is wont to do) comes complete with
mind-bending repetitions, loops and metamorphoses. The words go around and
around (a little in the way Pascal Bonitzer writes
dialogues for Chantal Akerman or Raśl Ruiz); the gestures, too … Like Boris Barnet the Master, Muratova is the Mistress of the endlessly renewed, endlessly circulated, endlessly
reinvented gesture.
As
in a Chinese film of strenuously magic realism, The Sun Also Rises (Wen Jiang, 2007) – containing the apotheosis of
another woman director-actor, Joan Chen, fifteen years after her iconic
transformation in Lynch’s Twin Peaks – this means that Muratova is especially fond of
pouty doll-women, impossibly beautiful marionettes (like Svetlana Kolenda and Renata Litvinova here), themselves miraculously hinged at every part of their body, twisting and
turning and thrusting and dividing at the knees, waist, wrists, neck …
The
chaos of Passions, knowingly or not,
evokes Federico Fellini. But Fellini without a centre: without “the crisis of
the artist” or “the loss of time, history and memory” or “the world as it changes
from one era to another”. All enthusiasms in Muratova are small, minute, obsessive – even microscopic. They spin their web
wonderfully, but don’t take up so much space. This is why she uses the
hinge-overlap method: it’s a lapidary style, the webs
join up and combine, extending in every direction. Every
which way and loose.
Manny Farber used to slyly scoff at people who claimed to know what a film is about. Plot and theme are the two
standard ways we corral the energy or ecology or wildness of a film – in the
former, banally (“the film is about a horse-enthusiast colony”), in the second,
either banally or ingeniously (“the film is about the life-force’s resistance
in an oppressive social framework”). Filmmakers sometimes prefer to speak of
the subject of a particular work,
which is neither plot nor theme, exactly, but something more material and
physical, something that can be dug into and explored: for Robert Bresson, the subject of Pickpocket is pickpocketing, which gives him a milieu to study and depict, an action
to render (in all its movements and varieties), and some kind of mysterious
passage to traverse (from the street to the prison cell, via the racetrack, the
train station … ), the meaning of which is, ultimately, secretive and personal,
rather than communicative in a town-hall “storytelling” way.
With Muratova, even the subject is obscure. That is why
her commentators seize on what recurs (from film to film and within each film),
on what fitfully coheres the elements that spin off from an evaporated centre:
murder, depression, animals, children, sudden recitals of song of dance … But
you know that Muratova has gotten right under the
skin of her commentators, sending them mad, when they find themselves writing
very truthful, free-associative things like: “Surface,
paper, and the fictional self emerge as the organising principles of this film” (that’s Nancy Condee on The Tuner [2004]). (2) It is a contagion
we critics must strive to emulate.
Passions proceeds
through endless hair-splitting, impossible comparisons, expounded upon in the
sing-song dialogue and enacted in the choreography of gesticulating and
extravagantly (often idiotically) costumed bodies. And never
a comparison between just two entities, but (thanks to the hinge method) at
least three, and usually many more: in the initial dances through a little wood
and over to a humble stretch of beach (with some possibly medical institution
vaguely glimpsed but never entirely identified in the background), the skills
of horse-riding are combatively compared to the acrobatic skills of the circus
big-top; but then one or other or both are compared (via the introduction of
doll-woman number 2, the Nurse-actress), as a method of healing, with health-care
or psychiatry or medicine.
A
little later, in the course of a wonderfully crammed lateral tracking shot
following a gaggle of people, the concept of “pace” is endlessly posed as a
question, receiving various theoretical and physical accounts: it’s a relative
concept, it seems, a concept of relativity indeed, since it can only be gauged
by the rider in flight, and yet that flight can so easily be interrupted or
distracted. It’s clearly a model of the kind of movement in Muratova’s work itself.
We
never can know the poles or points of Self and Other
in Muratova, because they shift and change before our
eyes – usually thanks to her other favourite device, the “reveal” of a part of
space or a figure/object in space we have not previously viewed before the
mid-scene pan or cut. In the second tableau-in-motion of Passions, set at the mysterious horse colony (are these horses
being trained, collected, exhibited?), we are introduced to a slightly creepy,
neurotic photographer (but then, all microscopic enthusiasms in Muratova are necessarily neurotic, it’s her and their
“aesthetic syndrome”): it seems as if the doll-women are lining up, posing, to
be shot by him, but by steps they pass out of his camera range – really, it’s
the horses (or one special, especially glamorous and luminous horse) he wants
to capture.
So
we pass to the horse, to its magnificent visage. And now we seem to pass into
this horse’s POV (why not? Bresson did it in Balthazar), watching a woman beginning
to strip for him (the “him” is an associative hypothesis here). But the longer
the shot remains in place, the less the POV seems stable or constant: the point
of interest, as ever, is shifting, turning away, transforming – and thus so are
all the point-to-point (human to human, human to animal, child to adult)
relations forever set-up, taken apart and reconstituted. The mood-changes are
just as constant, and just as sudden: from light to dark, gaiety to sadness,
major to minor.
Who
could possibly reconstruct a hierarchy of values from such a perplexing set of
shifts and reversals? To an interviewer’s question about Chekhovian Motifs (2002) – “The film seems very
poetic. How would you characterise its atmosphere?” – Muratova proudly and pre-emptively replies: “Your
question is absolutely incorrect and illegitimate”, bothering to add: “I had no
intention to convey any mood by means of my film ... I can’t define verbally
the thing you call atmosphere. It would be too simple.” Intentions,
definitions, schemas belong to critics and analysts; the work itself is an
organic process of “separated parts” that “melt into something living”. (3)
Muratova follows her
enthusiasms. (Her motto: “What is most important is to please myself” – not any
imaginary collective audience or constituency.) It is strictly impossible to know, at any given point, what shape or
significance they are going to take. They are all in flight, and the path of
that flight can go literally anywhere. Of course, she loves all that is
theatrical, artificial, histrionic. Her cinema is the
cinema of everything you can see,
every ball that can be suspended in the air and passed on to the next player
(or clown).
Nothing hidden from view – except the
underlying logic, the generating principle or matrix of the work (or her whole
work). Like the manifestation of a dream or fantasy or reverie, all in a rush, no
self-questioning or ‘secondary revision’ (Freud’s term). Acting out, as the pop psychologists of American film and TV say.
Kira Muratova acting out and – through her – private life, public life … plus film itself, in all its infinitely divisible, endlessly
traceable, states and moods.
MORE Muratova: The Long Farewell
1.
Dmitry Desyaterik, “Kira Muratova: ‘What is Most Important to Me is to Please Myself’”, Russian Journal (11 September 2002); no longer online.
2. Nancy Condee, “Muratova’s Well-Tempered Scam", KinoKultura, no. 7 (January
2005),
3. Desyaterik, Muratova interview.
© Adrian Martin 13 September 2008 |
