Sergey Kuznetsov. Cultural guide. Issue 76

Cultural guide. Issue 76
Sergey Kuznetsov

Publication date: April 18, 2000

Interactive

Which of the actors in the film Cape and Sword do you love the most?

Alain Delon
Jean Marais
Gerard Philippe
Errol Flynn
Dmitry Kharatyan
Mikhail Boyarsky

If I forgot someone, add him.

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Movie

Paul Thomas Anderson's new film leaves me confused. In some places it seems like a masterpiece. In some places the feeling that something is wrong here increases to the point of indecency.

When I left the hall, I was caught by colleague N, who asked my opinion about the film over the recorder. I answered:

- Paul Thomas Anderson has already gained fame with his first two films as one of the most talented American directors of the young generation. However, Hard Eight was too intimate a film, and Boogie Nights was too risqué to be considered a true Hollywood film. With Magnolia, Anderson made his bid to become a Real Hollywood Director, and despite its relative failure (the Academy did not give the film a single Oscar), this bid is very strong and convincing. After Magnolia, it is clear that Paul Thomas Anderson has a very bright future. All.

For some reason, the colleague was offended and left, turning off the recorder. Meanwhile, I still have nothing special to add to what has been said. Perhaps, after watching the film one more time, I’ll go for a longer article - but not today.

April 22-23. "Magnolia", dir. - Paul Thomas Anderson. "American Film House", "Under the Dome", "Arrow" .

Literature

A beloved poet from his youth once remarked that as long as a language like Russian exists, poetry is inevitable. The author of this statement has long since died - somewhat, we agree, tautological or egocentric: one might think that there is a language in which there is no poetry. Poetry, as promised, remains.

The nineties - count them as far as they go - have ended or are about to end. In the memory of my generation, several poetic generations have changed (how, after all, Anglicisms help to avoid repetitions!). First there were the sixties - more precisely, the sixties in two stages: official (like Voznesenko and Yevtushensky) and unofficial, represented at first by Brodsky alone and mythologically present in his interview by Reinaiman and Bobufljadny (this is so that Yevtushenko and Voznesensky would not be offended... I I've never confused them). After perestroika, at least Rhine showed up fully and I even love a dozen of his poems. In short, this was the first generation.

The second was called the seventies (“seventies”) and the eighties (“eighties” - both terms are not mine). They should have been different, but due to the general slowness of the period 1968-1985 they merged into one. They are now the poetic mainstream (which, in fact, does not prevent them from being good poets and pleasant people). I think that all of them have already been awarded a presentation in the “Cultural Guide” (if you like, KG was awarded): Timur Kibirov, Sergey Gandlevsky, Lev Rubinstein, Bakhyt Kenzheev. Well, perhaps we’ll take Prigov there too. They appeared at the turn of the eighties, during the so-called perestroika. The need of my generation to organize a second thaw for themselves led to the fact that they were forced to portray the Polytechnic Museum in various clubs - which, in fact, was not entirely typical for them.

It is clear that this classification is, to put it mildly, approximate. Not to mention the fact that I forgot, say, Lev Losev or Genrikh Sapgir, the same Prigov is considerably older than Kibirov-Gandlevsky in age. You can come up with all sorts of non-chronological landmarks (say, before-Brodsky / after-Brodsky... or something else), but is it worth it? More important, perhaps, is that all of the above-mentioned (and forgotten too) seventies and eighties were the last generation to embrace Russian literary centrism. Those who came for them suddenly found themselves in the position of Western poets - poetry circles, books and collections, publications in magazines and almanacs. No sellout.

Perhaps that is why they did not express themselves as a generation so brightly. But now, when it turned out that many of them have been writing for decades, it is clear that they exist as a kind of generation of the nineties. You can - if you focus on age - look at the list on "Babylon" , you can proceed from the fact that none of them end up on television and few of them end up in reviews in daily newspapers. The previous generation always strived to be “janitors and watchmen,” while the current generation is increasingly journalists, translators and advertisers. The latter, however, is easily explained by social reasons: after all, today both Gandlevsky and Rubinstein are journalists. (By the way, Rubinstein once said to Gandlevsky (or vice versa?): “How strange: all writers usually work as journalists in their youth, but we do the opposite.”)

So, professions. Nikolay Zvyagintsev is an advertising designer. Oddly enough, this can be felt a little in his poems - not so much the nominal style in its purity, but a minimum of verbs, and even those - more and more in the second person and, if possible, without subjects:

Take olives or a skirt with a step,
Try to ride more
Compare a hedgehog to a drainage ball,
Two dogs with one rooster.
Replace the sea with everything bad,
On stumps that are full in the fall, honey mushrooms
To this door in the hunting house -
A sheet of paper on two chains.
Then we will read in modern notes,
We'll take two lines for ourselves
About the fact that it was not the mouse that the pussy caught -
The mouse caught the door visor.

(Fragment.)

The subject disappears, leaving a picture. I would say still life, if what it is composed of could be called “objects”:

Looking at the crumpled sail in August,
Former city and semicircular Rome,
It will be fun from the snow for a couple
With your house by the green mountain.
All bathers are on wet iron,
Pedestrians on the bench,
Captains from the nearby forest
And all that would not happen without them,
A couple of benches, a football field,
Anthills from the Baltic heights,
September coastal support,
Buried in the summer sand.

(And here it is in its entirety.)

If I were a literary critic, I would balance the word “still life” with some epithet - “metaphysical” or, say, “virtual” (I don’t know which option is more vulgar today). However, no matter what you balance, there still remains a frozen picture... that is, moving, but short-lived... lasting forever, as if the movements were frozen forever and the film was forever set to repeat.

The hand fumbles around the neighbor's knee.
Drives bincols in someone else's lane.
Her owner is bored under the net,
He can't wait for it to be served.
Where in the spring there are thick eyelashes,
In the fall you pull an empty ticket.
There are only four pages -
Queen, nine, king, jack.

(Continued here ).

April 20 at 18:30. "Classics of the 21st century" . Evening of the poet Nikolai Zvyagintsev.

Performances/Music

There are such press releases that you don’t even know how to process them. Usually you take facts, add something to them, put them, so to speak, into context - and, like, write an announcement. But the magazine "Kutuzovsky Prospekt" and the Theater Internet Agency "Dom-A" (or perhaps press agent Natalya Seybil personally) sent such a wonderful text that it could not be added or subtracted. The project is called "Bridge of Time, or a city dweller in search of elusive harmony." The allusions are obvious: the river of times, in search of lost time, The Stealing Beauty in Russian translation, Mirabeau Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and so on. However, the authors of the press release happily avoided all these allusions:

On the twenty-first of Friday at 17:30, the Imperial Russian Ballet, the Mark Steinbock Photography School, the New Opera Theater, the Fern Ensemble and the Moscow River meet on the new Bagrationovsky Bridge.

People have settled along the banks of rivers at all times, built cities, bridges and learned to see the creations of their own hands. In big cities, residents warmed up small spaces, entwined them with traditions, legends and customs, and ultimately turned them into the right places. The Seine embankment in Paris, the Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow...

But cities are growing, their areas are turning into new cities with new centers of gravity, and new generations of citizens are looking for other spaces in search of elusive harmony.

They encouraged people to come by private letter, promising that even if the bridge collapsed, it would be fun. I join the call.

April 21 , Friday, at 17:30. New Bagrationovsky Bridge. "The Bridge of Time, or a City Dweller in Search of Elusive Harmony"

TV movie

Jean Marais is known to our audience - that is, in fact, he is known to us. Who else is “our viewer”? The implication is that somewhere in the state of Iowa they know the other side of him? Yes, they don’t know him at all, neither from this side nor from that. So, I remember Jean Marais as the hero of the cloak and - see the current "Interactive" - ​​the sword. D'Artagnan, Rodolphe, Count of Monte Cristo, Captain... In extreme cases - Fantomas and Fandor rolled into one. Meanwhile, he entered the cinema as the hero of the films of the famous poet and director Jean Cocteau - and as his love. It is precisely this retrospective of Jean Marais' early films that the Culture channel offers; which is nice - out of the blue, and not at all for an anniversary or another date.

Tuesday, 12:40. "The Face of Blaze", 1947.

Wednesday, 12:40 p.m. Beauty and the Beast, 1946, directed by Jean Cocteau.

Thursday, 12:40. "Eternal Return", 1943.

Friday, 12:40 p.m. "Orpheus", 1949, directed by Jean Cocteau.

Interactive

Did you celebrate Fools Day this year?

I never mark it: 32.

This year - no: 21.

I always mark it: 6.

Yes, noted: 5.

Unlike the majority of respondents, I fully respect this day - at the very least, it is an ancient holiday that can be interpreted in different ways (according to Bakhtin, according to Fraser, according to Tarot, according to Pynchon, in the end)... But its unenviable fate in Russia, which turned April Fool's Day into April Fool's Day and, as a result, made it a continuous KVN, shows that with the departure of the sacred content, ancient holidays are rapidly degenerating.

And now - a word to the readers. Ermolai Shakuta writes:

On April 1, International Fool's Day, state flags were hung on many houses in the Belarusian capital.

This is probably a joke after all. But maxxx seems to be telling a real-life incident:

My daughter meets me in the hallway in the morning - I just drove the car out of the garage under the windows - and in a crying voice she tells me that she got a bad grade in German and is being kicked out of school. But I just saw a picture on the street: a neighbor runs headlong to the garage, cannot get the key into the lock, swears, kicks open the gate, starts the Lada with a roar, jumps out of the car, kicks the wind-swept gate, restarts the stalled Lada, revs the gas... .. and then the eight jumps up to him, from two of its doors “those who celebrate April Fool’s Day every year” fall out and writhe with laughter... so I was quite ready for the prank and answered in tone that I was kicked out of work yesterday, so let him go to his room and teaches “We ourselves are not locals...” in German - let’s go to work. I feel my wife’s anxious gaze, and she understands that there is no one to fire me, but still... And the next day I find out that my most profitable project was closed and pulled a couple of less profitable ones with it, the tax office is sorting it out, the prosecutor’s office is sluggishly fussing, “business partners” are turning away at the meeting, the money was messed up... In general, the foulish day was celebrated well. Now I wonder if my daughter will be kicked out.

That's what I'm thinking: why did the NASDAQ fall this Friday... Again, someone was probably joking.

Past

The film reviews seem to continue. Owl talks about Buena Vista Social Club, once again making me regret that I haven’t seen it:

Buena Vista Social Club Wenders of all trades Wenders. It’s somehow a shame that one of the best documentaries of the year is passing by Russian screens. There is a funny story with the film and music - it’s as if the “soundtrack” appeared much earlier than the film itself. The album of the same name was released in 97 at the instigation of Ry Cooder - in this case, a musician and producer. The album became a bestseller and won a Grammy. Wenders was involved in the promotion a little later - and the film appeared in 99 - as if it were a video track. For example, before it was released on the big screen and nominated for an Oscar 2000, the film was shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April-May last year. Wenders, along with cinematographers Jorg Widmer and Robby Muller, are simply superb. Amazing video quality. (It’s time to blame Trier for “The Idiots.”) The Cuban music itself, performed by old men beyond their age, is heard so pure from the vanity of youth, so timeless, that one recalls the phrase from “Andrei Rublev” - “Simplicity without variegation.” Just as a Persian carpet acquired its true value only after the colors were subdued by the Asian sun, so in Buena Vista Social Club the sounds of music acquire the deepest overtones performed by people who have already decided everything for themselves in life. And from this point, the “island socialism” surrounding them looks on the screen not so much as obvious poverty and squalor, but as a life absolutely free from the hysteria of Western and Russian life.

I hope that the readers' impressions are not limited to cinema...

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