Translated material
"ENVIRONMENT" AND INTERMEDIARIES
KINOBDUKA
“So you think our generation is lost?” - Lost? No no. Those whom you saw on the screen will enter our normal life… Juris Podnieks. The answer to a question raised at one of the discussions of the film "Is it easy to be young?" (1986)....
“So you think our generation is lost?”
- Lost? No no. The ones you saw on the screen will enter our normal life...
Juris Podnieks. The answer to a question raised at one of the discussions of the film "Is it easy to be young?" (1986).
The picture of Podnieks was released to the all-Union distribution (although not without difficulties) and became a fact of public life.
Ten years later, the St. Petersburg author Viktor Kosakovsky made the film “Wednesday. 7/19/1961" - a portrait of his generation, a portrait of 36-year-olds. "Wednesday ..." was only in one cinema ("Aurora" in St. Petersburg) and once, late at night, was shown on domestic television.
Here I will not talk about the loss of all non-fiction cinema as a whole for the movie screen: the systemic crisis that has attacked this type of cinema has not yet been overcome. One can only state dejectedly that the system collapsed precisely at the moment when non-fiction cinematography unusually expanded its claims and possibilities, when non-fiction cinema began not only to be understood, but, most importantly, to be used in a wide range and range - from chronicle to animation.
First of all, Alexander Sokurov, and then Viktor Kosakovsky, created their non-fiction works absolutely according to the laws of artistry - mediators between the film and the audience (critics, distributors, distributors, television) turned out to be absolutely unprepared for such a method and level of conversation.
They were not ready for the content, in particular, the film “Wednesday. 19.7.1961". This film was not recognized - because they did not want to recognize it. Life in Moscow (where the aforementioned mediators are concentrated ... how strange this involuntary pun) was swollen with completely different things, and it was a country of the deaf. Money, crime, gloss, everything for sale, advertising, internet, hypocrisy. On the one hand - "The Thief". On the other hand, Brother. Everything is fiction, albeit of a different nature.
And if Kosakovsky came up with something, he would show everyone with whom he was born on the same day in Leningrad. I found seventy people, the rest just ended up far away - in the Republic of Chad, for example. Ordinary people of ordinary professions are in their prime, the true masters of the country.
And it was documented: beaten in the mentura (two per day), the ceiling is stained and the toilet is leaking, scorched vodka, slippery pavement, prostatitis and drug addiction, a madhouse and “I won’t let those who want to get poisoned get poisoned,” says the joyful pharmacist, “because that I am a strong person, so to speak - balanced.
It hurt my eyes. The reaction of the movie bosses was terrible (the film was shown by the Vyborg festival) - prosperous people, collecting honors for past merits in baskets, thought in the past: you can’t show this! It's trendy! Chernukha! Shame on our country!
They didn’t want to see anything else in the film: children play music, the facades of houses are washed in the spring, the sun rises next to the Rostral columns, the “sugar tube” ice cream is eaten with taste, they will have a wealthy rest on this boat, and the main character, the pregnant one, is called Sasha Schastlivaya .
And even more so, they did not want to see what the picture was actually about: Kosakovsky solved “children's questions” in it, which most people safely forget by the fifth or sixth grade of high school: am I me? Why is it me and not him? why am I not him? And he got a very humane, very correct answer, absolutely necessary for the city and the world: there are no grounds for dislike; all people are people.
Of course, this eternal thought was not perceived as an idea in the 90s by the aggressive majority of small souls: competition and re-grading reigned among them.
In addition, the film mercilessly denied the success achieved by the last two generations of the Russian "elite": those born in 1961 had to live under communism - it was assumed that somehow differently than before; in 1987, it was again assumed that everything would be somehow different ... And then a picture comes out that begins in the morning, with childbirth and a little girl; continues with labor and roads, develops with illnesses and poems; ends with old age and death; is comprehended by prison and suicide - it turns out that there is no difference: time is always the same, and life is always the same. "Public opinion" protested.
On the other hand, Kosakovsky’s aesthetics are too complex for those who believe this: “Documentary cinema is when a voice-over reads wooden phrases of a more or less educational and revealing nature, which is illustrated by a more or less suitable chronicle, old photographs, views of the scene and the crowd on street” – and shows such opuses at festivals.
The Soviet-Russian people, unaccustomed to confession, genetically afraid of it (well, except for the dining car...) could not see that the seventy characters of the film are one person, the author, who with unmistakable frankness is naked in front of us (just lies naked in the frame, knowing that without him the people are not complete).
And everything is in this man: a child, and a mother, and a breadwinner, and a new Russian, and a poet, and a suicide, and a beaten in the police - and a policeman. Yes, and the policeman - the one who serves at the Moscow railway station in St. Petersburg and admits that so far everything is fine - because until now he managed to shoot first, and suddenly, suddenly turns his back on us and, to the sounds of the Anthem to the great city, cuts the crowd with the morning " Red Arrow" through and through, and people part in front of him, and the camera does not breathe in the back, following a little at a distance anxiously ... And we see: the policeman suddenly puts his right hand into his pocket, and what he takes out of there - do not understand, and it becomes terribly scary - because that the cop is real, and the film is real and very specific. And, exhaling at the end of this passage - the view of the empty platform is beautiful, who would have thought ... - you realize: if something happened now (in Kosakovsky, something always happens in the frame: the stool breaks, the dog runs in to pee; God is in the details) and the policeman fired - what would be the picture? ..
According to the results of 1997, Viktor Kosakovsky was given the super-elite Triumph award for her.
But the people did not recognize themselves in the film - because they were protected from "Environment ...". He just stayed in the movie. And still reads horoscopes for every day of his life.