NOT EVERYTHING IS IN THE TELESHOP

KINOBODKA

I had a dispute with the famous culturologist Pyotr Weil about documentaries, which finally broke through on television. Weill admired the quality of good films, the work with the chronicle, the fundamental nature of numerous historical...

I had a dispute with the famous culturologist Pyotr Weil about documentaries, which finally broke through on television. Weill admired the quality of good films, the work with the chronicle, the fundamental nature of numerous historical studies. I got the impression of the total monotony of the documentary film stream on federal channels (here we should immediately make an exception for the films "Culture").

The sonorous word "format" proudly flies over the documentary screen, dictating the "rules of the game" and themes. Instead of reality - reality shows, instead of "life taken by surprise" - fried facts and "yellow" setups. First of all, numerous versions of suicides (behind which the black machinations of the "office" are visible) and the murders of famous poets, historical figures and their wives, famous Soviet directors are in demand. The intimate relations of eminent people and their "consequences" are relevant. Rating secret vices, illnesses and weaknesses of famous musicians, artists and their death throes. The screen despised both Wilde's "the basis of every gossip is a well-tested immorality", and the wisdom, proven for centuries: "The one who spreads rumors has discarded virtue."

At the same time, the camera is resolutely turned to the past, but if it remembers the “current moment”, then it is mainly in the criminal “section”. God forbid, the Russians of the first decade of this century will be judged by documentary telecinema. The bloody past seeped through the rusty present. And it turns out that we are people - rubbish, superstitious, mercantile. All children of Lieutenant Schmidt, swindlers and racketeers, rapists and victims, and our whole life is the plot of a criminal chronicle.

But it's right here in the middle. In the province, for about a year, modestly, without advertising fanfare, the My Hero project is growing and developing. Weekly competition of documentary films-portraits with the participation of the audience. The initiator of the project is Vladimir Gerchikov, master of documentary films, laureate of the State Prize of Russia, owner of TEFI (author of the series of films Kuchugury and Surroundings and the documentary study Reaction, about Russia's attitude to the trial of Khodorkovsky). For Gerchikov, the word “other” became the key: “Other TV - in terms of tasks, topics, relationships with viewers, methods of distribution. Other heroes - by status, character, attitude to life. Another country - in general, another, more complex, diverse, thinking Russia looms. Other directors and authors are not servile, not denim, not instructive...”.

What is the fundamental difference between "My Hero"? It turned out that normal people, trying to find harmony with the furious world, look unexpectedly fresh and even protest against the backdrop of a lush yellow-surrogate "tele-shop". After all, we call interactive television, which pumps money out of the viewer. "My Hero" maintains "feedback" communication informally. The viewer himself selects the best films via the Internet, suggests heroes for future films, the site discusses difficult social and moral problems raised by film research.

The films of the long-running project were shot by masters and debutants deliberately modestly. Directing and editing do not stick out in them - the technique here is secondary. Each picture is a close-up of a contemporary, an internal monologue. About overcoming. time and yourself. Through a living concrete person. With his mistakes and doubts, an attempt at self-identification, betrayed dreams, lost illusions. I remember Makanin's name "Portraits and Around". What unites the heroes of this collective portrait? The ability to hear the world, listening to yourself, to what is called conscience. As a result, films, like shots, are formed into a lengthy statement or question, capturing an elusive moment of reality. Instant on-line.

In fact, there are no positive-negative characters here, just as there are none in life. There are people who are trying to independently find the boundaries of moral responsibility for what is happening around. People before whom life itself unfolds dilemmas of Shakespearean scope and unpretentious, everyday tasks, by solving which it is easier to resist not only the imperfection of the world, but also one's own weakness.

Here they are - heroes worthy of detailed consideration, comprehending after Faust: the meaning of life in life itself.

This is not only Academician Sakharov, about whom Yuri Rost speaks talentedly, or Valentin Rasputin, whom his fellow villagers, talkative peasants from the banks of the Angara, are waiting for. This is a whimsical pattern of "different destinies", each of which is unique.

A pathologist from Yekaterinburg is a romantic democrat, persistently explaining to children that drunkenness is an image of death (“Scalpel for Democracy”).

10-year-old Mansi girl Natasha. And Lake Kindal. Now the treacherous invaders-oil workers (“Kindal Lake”) are approaching the lake – her homeland with its mushrooms, its fish, its clearing.

Forestry director Gennady Borisov, who cut down the forest, built the village first, then the factory. The scale, fortitude - Siberian, amazing, despite the fact that the disease has already measured out his "deadline" ("Borisov").

The miners of a small town in the Urals, singing in the choir. Sooty faces, clumsy fingers fastening concert butterflies. And the silent question on the faces of the townspeople: why do they need it? ("Bis-15").

An old miller from Udmurtia and his life, ground into flour of memories ("The Last of the Mohicans").

An abstract artist, leader of the Blue Noses group, who gained fame in many countries of the world, but not in his native Novosibirsk (“Art Demands”).

One of the last prisoners of the Magadan camps, rooted to the place of the “settlement”, to the Kolyma highway, living out his last days (“Sunny side of the highway”).

Baby Mitya and his great love - an English bulldog ("Mitya and Mosya").

Collector of old tape recorders and jazz records, sailed away from reality on the airwaves of memory ("My Beautiful Mastodons").

A sitter who feels himself not to be "dead nature" and not a victim - a man-art. He has the gift of transforming into marshals, steelworkers, partisans ("The Body Without a Head").

victim of xenophobia. The police stop him all the time. Is a person with a big nose dangerous? And why does the audience applaud him? ("The face of the Caucasian nationality").

A tragic hero who sacrificed his feelings (conscience?) before duty. Once he was unable to resist the state machine. Becoming her cog, he participated in the flooding of his native village. Now, over and over again, he replays that terrible “film” in his memory: could he then change something? (“The Black Sea is mine. The Ilim story”).

Poet, hunter, reindeer herder, who decided to defend the taiga alone, having come into conflict with the oil corporation ("Man with a gun").

A former defense engineer who is trying her best to somehow acclimatize in her new life (sews fashionable hats), but still hears the "call of the trumpet" ("The trumpet is calling").

Two foster mothers at war with numerous offices that decided to "seize" the children and transfer them to an orphanage ("Good night").

Nizhny Novgorod traffic cop Alyosha Mikheev, who became crippled as a result of torture by his “colleagues”, but did not give up and defended his truth (“Bitter Drops”).

Surgeon Herman Pyatov, who in his spare time from operations organized a movement to help orphans (“Herman, you are right”).

And more… a grocer, a plumber, a wrestler, a blind composer, a millionaire, a hermit, a liquidator of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a geologist, a balalaika player, a war veteran. And further... Izhevsk, Novosibirsk, Magadan, Voronezh, Pskov, Vladikavkaz... The world is immense, not two-tone - multicolored, elusive.

People living in a country with a complex history. Shukshin's eccentrics (like a cheerful plumber reading poetry, or an aunt living in a cemetery writing a novel) - and quite sober, rational people who have dramatically changed the course of their own lives (like the surgeon German Pyatov, who is always expected in an orphanage, or a blind history teacher).

Understand how you want: the normal life of extraordinary people - or, on the contrary, the extraordinary life of typical "heroes of our time." Or simply human cinema, made according to Vertov's behest: "cinema illuminates the darkness." From these “portraits and around” a reverse perspective arises - a portrait of the country against the background of contemporaries ...