"I tried to challenge." On July 20, he turns 70 years old to a unique master of domestic cinema, the author of just a few films, each of which became the most important milestone in the history of contemporary art - Alexei Herman. On the eve of the anniversary, the New Times Observer talked with the director
Seventy years-does this figure mean something to you?
Russian physiologists believed that 70 years is the limit of a man’s life. A little boy - here I am running, here I am learning, here I came to the theater institute, to Tovstonogov, here I am at the studio, and it seemed to be last Monday ... And here I am seventy, and I am an old man. The feeling is not pleasant, but I hope you will pass it too.
We lose the art of cinema
In your films, and especially in the materials for the new painting “The History of the Arkanar Republic” based on the Strugatsky’s novel “It is difficult to be a god” - senile fatigue is not felt. Rather - quite young anger. What? On Saturday and Sunday, Svetlana and I are leaving outside the city and there are different paintings there: we never saw some, others, like Amarkord or Tarkovsky, saw a thousand times and know by heart. Just amazed: we lose the art of cinema and do not notice this. We look at a piece with Caydanovsky crying from Stalker - at what level is it the highest level! Our and American cinema cannot reach now. The cinema has turned into a sight for people who are too lazy to read, and therefore literary texts are played out with the help of artists. The artists also die from this.
Your new film is a requiem on a society that is not in Russia and will not be, or for the past cinema?
I, of course, tried to challenge this film. Why did he have been doing so long and painfully, why I lost my comrades on this film ... We also challenged the road check - political, “regret the Russian man”. “Twenty days without war” were a challenge to all the false cinema of Ozerov2 and others like him. And now - a challenge to modern cinema, for which texts are so important. You see, Tolstoy must be read, not watching the cinema. Or look only if you understand that some second sky has risen above the text. Today, “after the ball” will look wonderful, and everything else should be read.
After all, you once wanted to make the film "After the Ball"?
Yes, I dreamed about it. I wanted to inhabit him with all the Tolstoy heroes, starting with Pierre Bezukhov and ending with Anna Karenina. And "Brothers, pardon!" As Russia rushed over, and rushing. Well, how can I do it? It is necessary that a person who will give money is found ... by the way, even though I worked on this film for a long time, I did not shoot an expensive picture. We get much smaller salaries than on series. From how I slowly removed, they made a circus, but in the West a huge number of wonderful directors worked even longer - ten, twelve years each. Who cares, that the “phenomenon of Christ the people” artist Ivanov wrote his whole life? He painted a good picture as a result. And next to the artist Johanson painted many paintings - usually bad. One good one is better.
Lapshin, Ermash, KGB
You are talking about a call that was thrown by his films, but starting with “my friend Ivan Lapshin”, aesthetic was also added to the ethical call ...
The cinema from the very beginning, when moving from silent cinema to sound, lost independence. After all, the silent cinema did not exhaust itself, just the bourgeois was canceled and introduced sound! And the movie began to turn into the Kabuki Theater - conditional art. Once Tovstonogov showed me a note about a man who lived all his life in Africa and, having arrived in England, was educated, but never saw cinema and television. He went to the cinema and did not understand anything at all. I look at the woman, she - at me: then, fell in love? But this can only play the great artist! Or is it a common phrase. Installation: Man/Bread means he is hungry ... I tried to leave it. Why is it necessary to cut plans?
The same plan of Alexei Petrenko in “Twenty Days without War”: after all, my comrades fell upon me for taking off three hundred meters and did not cut nowhere. “Why is this diet? The movie has its own language! " I say: "Yes, you invented this language." Although in this regard there is one incision. It's just that there is a mat, and the word "hob" we cut out.
Raise on a holy hand - on Eisenstein!
I'm not a fan of Eisenstein at all. It’s a little funny to me when I watch it, except for the personnel, when the battleship goes to us. It seems to me that a lot is poorly done with him and the person is lying: there was no execution on the Odessa staircase, no strollers rolled up.
The magic of one name of Eisenstein is undeniable. And you are not afraid that the magic of the name Herman will prevent the audience from watching your paintings? That they will be on duty, and through the radical language of the film "Khrustalev, car!" They will not break through?
I think that time will put everything in its place. Lapshin was also insanely radical, and Izvestia’s newspaper was stigmatized for praising this film. The editors received thousands of letters, they had a box from under a large TV, full of these letters. And I was walking huge packs with a “KGB” stamp. After all, seven copies of the film allowed Andropov to release after the terrible complaint, which we wrote to him at Philip Timofeevich Ermash that we are led by a fool and pest of art. I had no connections, but the letter came. So, the entire Soviet people sent letters to the KGB with a demand to prohibit my picture, and the KGB - what to understand if their boss allowed this film - sent everything to me. I became ill from idiocy: “Nothing is clear, some ears, thermometers, formalism, mockery!” Some kind of huge institute from Novorossiysk collected signatures under the demand that I would never come to their city. Since then I have not been in Novorossiysk. And then I once met a man who said: “Lesha, and what clung to you? I watched the Lapshin on TV - a simple and clear picture! What did we find there? "
Now the situation has changed.
It has become even more complicated. We are littered with Western products, which is not made according to specific laws and art, but it spreads its laws to art. And I can’t make a movie differently than I do. And in Khrustalev and in the new film I tried to convey our era and tell about my childhood. Someone likes this, over time there will be more such people ... They also laughed at the artists, and they finished with them. In our already, Brezhnevskoye, the time of the non -conformers died of hunger and were afraid of their work to show anyone - only to each other. But I do not complain about fate. I somehow lay and thought: it turned out that I met more good people in my life than bad people. A rather rare phenomenon.
Filmography (director)
1967 - seventh satellite (in collaboration with Aronov)
1971–1985 - Verification on the roads (according to Yuri German "Operation Happy New Year!")
1976 - Twenty days without war (according to the story of Konstantin Simonov)
1984 - My friend Ivan Lapshin (according to the story of Yuri Herman)
