A premonition of the Great War

Three films from the Cinema Paramonov

Alexander Genis: The 100th anniversary of the First World War is celebrated not only by countries and museums. For many, this gloomy anniversary is personal in nature - an occasion to recall the largest catastrophe of the West, which has forever changed us the world.

Today, Boris Paramonov suggested telling our listeners about three films, which, in his opinion, tell about the foreboding of the Great War.

Boris Paramonov: Yes, I want to talk about three films, which, strictly speaking, do not concern the topics of the First World War, but seem to me internally organized by the thought of the upcoming war. It is necessary to write not about the war, you need to write a war, the young Mayakovsky said just in that ominous 1914.

Chronologically the first - “big maneuvers”, shot by the luminet of French cinema Rene Clear. Starring the then French stars - Michelle Morgan and Gerard Philip. This film was shown in the Soviet Union, a very beautiful film, first of all, the visual series is very expressive. Despite the fact that Paris was not shot at all, but a small provincial city in which there is a certain cavalry regiment. So, this is the other 60s, when we watched this film and was still alive Gerard Philip.

Alexander Genis :: The film was shot in 1955, he was 33 years old - in the prime of beauty and career. But only four years later he died of liver cancer. His role in the picture was remembered forever: a brilliant officer promises to seduce any woman in the city, but instead falls in love with his potential sacrifice.

Boris Paramonov :: The second chronologically in this series is the Australian film “Picnic on the hanging rock”, 1975 Picture, director Peter Wir, then working a lot in Hollywood. This film made a strong impression primarily on cinema professionals, then they started talking about the birth of a new international phenomenon - Australian cinema.

Alexander Genis: He still makes a magical impression. The film is not unraveled in which realism is thinner to the symbol.

Boris Paramonov: the third film - English, 1985 “On the Hunt” - so you can, somewhat truncated, translate the original name Shooting Party; Director Alain Borges, of the well -known actors - James Mason (Humbert Humbert in Lolita Kubrika), Dorothy Tutin (the famous theater actress) and Edward Fox, whom I have forever loved in the film "Jackal Day". This is a thriller about a certain international terrorist, who was preparing an attempt on de Gaulle. As you know, the sympathies of the audience are always on the side of the character who is given a larger amount of screen time. So in this cool guy you just fall in love - even, forgive me, I want his enterprise to be able to.

Alexander Genis: So, but what does the war have to do with it? So far, it is clear that there are cavalrymen in “big maneuvers”, and in “Shakal” General de Gaulle. Well, what does this have to do with the First World War? Unless de Gaulle was wounded in the head on her and was captured by the Germans.

Boris Paramonov: Let's start with the cavalrymen. There are just these large maneuvers, and tear off the leaves from the calendar, moving closer from July to August. And the viewer, a little remembering the chronology, knows that the war began in August of the 14th, and Rene Claire knew for sure, and built the film, this was a technique. So everything that happens on the screen is put in this terrible perspective: we seem to say goodbye to a calm, beautiful life, and not only in this provincial city, but we say goodbye to the whole era. This is felt, this is a technique.

And against this background, a love story, playing in the film, becomes not only a story about an intrigue that has turned into love, but again emphasizes the transition from a provincial bugolics to world tragedy.

And then I must admit: I do not remember that the picture in the Soviet Union shown, ended like it ends at the cloth, that I saw only recently revised this film. The heroine Michelle Morgan, it turns out, ends with suicide, she was poisoned. By golly, this was not in the Soviet box office. This scene is made very skillfully, without pressure, even without words, in a purely visual row. Gerard Philip, who achieved the heroine’s love, wants to assure her that he loves her for real, and not just to win a bet. The heroine does not believe him. He says: tomorrow the regiment goes to maneuvers, and when we pass by your house, open the window as a sign that you forgave me. The window is really open, Gerard Philip smiles, but the device goes deep into the room, we see how the maid approaches the heroine’s bed, takes her hand and the hand falls powerlessly; The maid in fear runs out of the room. This death of the heroine is the sign of the tragedy. The hero will also leave near his combat horse, he will have to dismount and sit in trenches.

So not only the submission of calendar leaves, but also the death of the heroine translates the film into another register - not the story of the adultery, which has become love, but also repeat, the collapse of a peaceful, established life, which has turned into a chaos of war, and the subsequent, that is, our troubled world.

But how it is done! - In passing, without pressure - almost not done, so you can not notice. But in fact, this good old world has finished suicide - in this very great war, as the First World War was called in the West.

So you need to understand that film by Rene Clera: this is an elegy about another, and better, era - until that war.

Alexander Genis: The second in line in the chronological order is “a picnic on a hanging rock”.

Boris Paramonov: With your permission, I will be distracted from the chronology of films, first I will say about the film "On the Hunt". Here the war is already explicitly mentioned - at the very end of the film, when they are listed, who was killed from the characters we have seen. That is, the Congress of the Lady and Gentlemen for hunting appears to be allegory of the future, and ambulance, war. The film is the autumn of 1913. That is, this hunt is like a prediction, a certain miniature embodiment of the coming big war.

At first, it seems-a fluent, but expressive, in some way even a satirical description of the mores and lifestyle of the old upper class. Sympathy and antipathy among the guests who spent on the weekend on the estate of a certain Lord (James Mason). Someone does not like someone, others have friendly, or even love sympathies. One married couple is clearly not in the fret, the husband is this very “jackal”, Edward Fox, rightly suspects that his wife is incorrect to him. In general, his hero is notorious, he wants to distinguish himself at all costs on the hunt, to be the best shooter, thereby compensating for his family troubles.

Alexander Genis: That is, not at all the same as his cool guy jackal, who, however, also did not hit de Gaulle.

Boris Paramonov: Yes, Edward Foc has a wide range, unlike his brother Michael, who everywhere only plays noble aristocrats. So, guests shoot some pretty birds. By the way, the inhumanity of this lesson is unobtrusively indicated by the fact that the youngest son of the owner, a boy of about ten years old, no more, loves ducks and almost friends with those that swim in the castle pond. So hunting is also given in this turn as a cruel occupation, the allegory of the future war.

The hero of Edward Fox, as I said, wants to be better than anyone and violates the rules of hunting: it shoots birds not at the highest point of their flight, but relatively close to the ground - and inadvertently kills one of the servants on the hunt - the permanent, or something, I do not know what it is called. There is no longer allegory, but as if the first victim of the war.

In general, I put this film in the same context as “big maneuvers”: a break of an old, centuries of an established life, willingness to kill and be killed. Among the guests, by the way, is one Austrian baron, which will also be killed, as reported in the final credits. So far, these people are friends and visit each other. Tomorrow they will become enemies.

Alexander Genis: Me,. B.M., one scene impressed in the picture: James Mason, returning with a dog from a walk, thoroughly wipes her paws with his handkerchief so that she does not inherit, and he does it, and not tells the servant.

Boris Paramonov: Well, this cult of animals in the British in the blood has not gone anywhere. And in general, the hunt continues, in this sense, the current life of the English higher class is unlikely to be very different from the previous one.

Alexander Genis: Do not tell me: remember how several years ago the struggle of animal defenders with the English “Gentry” flared up: they protested against hunting with dogs. Life is changing, at least slowly, even in England.

Well, how can you linen the Australian film “Picnic on the hanging rock” with the world of the world war? It is very difficult to find the connection of the story told in the film with the history of the political and military: the girls from a private school on a picnic on the notorious rock were exposed to some mystical forces, and three of them disappeared. Although the action, indeed, is attributed to the eve of the First World War, to the beginning of the century. This is the so -called Edwardian era. The action takes place in Valentin's Day of 1900, it seems, this is a real story.

Boris Paramonov: A teacher who was with them also disappeared there. One of the girls, by the way, was found, but could not explain what happened to them. Detail: The girl found, as it turned out during the examination, was without a corset, but she had no bodily violations of a fundamental, so to speak, order. This corset seems to me a very expressive detail. Life is clamped, in every possible way adjusted, the order seems indestructible - but it turns out that dark irrational forces act in depth, so to speak, not Apollo, but Dionysus.

Alexander Genis: But again, this is an element, not culture, not history, ancient Greece, and not Edwardian England or even more Australia (as you know in the colonies, the British observed the rules more zealously than in the metropolis). The plot is untimely, as it seems to me.

Boris Paramonov: The fact is that the First World War itself was a Dionysian sacrifice. It was a technogenic war, but all this machinery, all these previously not seen machine guns and long -range guns, such as the German Big Berta, firing Paris from a distance of 30 kilometers, is only a disguise of ancient chaos, which is inevitable in the life of mankind. In man and in humanity, that is, not in individual, but in the collective unconscious, there will be no attraction to death. Freud spoke about this precisely in connection with the First World War, formerly a deafening confirmation of this bitter truth, we can say its discovery: if such a breakdown is possible at such a high civilizational level - in the world war - then the person is the same, and no external culture, no corsets and strict schools for girls changed anything here. So, Apollo Dionysus did not defeat, still not alien to the person’s call to the destructive elements. Why, according to Jung already, and not according to Freud, this cannot be, and most importantly, it should not be: the victory of the rational principle is not only impoverishing life, but simply threatens it - this is in such a violent reaction of the Dionysian principle.

This film is not about the mysticism of nature, but about the end of the civilizational order. Please note: a strict and in every possible way a repressive director of the school - a secret alcoholic. And at the end of the film, either a sunbeam, or in the credits reports, I no longer remember that she rose to the same rock and disappeared there. We will all be lost - both ordinary people and bosses, no guarantees. Remember at least the death of Kadafi.

Alexander Genis :: Well, these are other times and other wars.

Boris Paramonov: There is always one war. Here is the lesson of the First World War, which the goodness called the war for the fact that all wars ended. The war never ends, this is included in the conditions of human existence.