Cosmic art

To the anniversary of Kira Muratova

Kira Muratova for today is the most outstanding film director, if not Russian, then, let's say, Russian -speaking cinema. Now she is formally - the Ukrainian director, because she works in Odessa. Alas, you have to make such reservations. However, the art of cinema, along with painting, is most international, because in it the main thing is not a word, but an image, visual image. It does not require translation in its aesthetics itself, but perhaps in dubbing or subtitles. I do not presume to project Muratova’s work for today's world cinema, this is not my specialty, no matter how I claim an adequate analysis of its visual means. But Muratova can be distinguished by extremely significant metaphysical or metapsychological, as you like, problems. You can also put it in modern feminist discourse, but here rather with a minus sign. Muratova is a bright anti -Feminist, I would even say a wife. And I would not interpret this topic of her in sexual terms, here we are dealing with an in -depth development of a certain original myth. For Muratova’s woman is not only - and not so much! - The vital power, how many of the existential abyss. Tyutchev’s words is an all -consuming and peacekeeping abyss. And rather absorbing. This is not Tyutchev, but Tsvetaeva: she could have taken the womb into the caves. The words of the Camille Camille Camille are also recalled: Latent female vampirism is not social aberration, but a continuation of the maternal function. Mother Earth at the same time, in the time of myth, is the grave. (In English there is even a rhyme: Womb-Tomb.) And in Muratova’s films, this mythical deepening of her female heroines gives an unusually strong impression, at the same time distorting, deforming, shifting, ghothly exaggerating her visible household features. Here is the main effect of Muratovsky cinema: mythical figures are in the images of the visible world. That is, one figure actually is a woman. This is the most difficult thing in the cinema, this is such a mythical or symbolic deepening: the movie, the French theorist Andre Bazin said, is the art of integral realism: everything presented on the screen is an adequate life image, and only an outstanding artist can see the abyss after him. Kira Muratova is just that.

From this it is clear why her films caused such an acute rejection of Soviet power, although they did not have any political anti -Soviet subtext. It was the went beyond the communist in the principle of positivist discourse. The censors felt this mythical connotation of her. This did not fit into their superficial consciousness, which means it was subject to a ban.

Well, what would it seem anti -Soviet in the film "Long Smerers"? A divorced woman does not want to let her son go to a naval school. You can, of course, give an interpretation of this plot in an elementary form of the Oedipus complex, although we are talking about the feelings of not a son, but a mother. But this is a wrong, superficial judgment. The main thing is not a son, but a mother who performs in this function of vampirism, who does not want to give her fruit, but in the limit - to take him back, in the very womb - a grave. And the film ends with the words of my son: Mom, I will never leave you. And the fact that the plot is not everyday here is emphasized is given to Muratova in the grotesque displacement of the image of the mother, which appears some kind of metaphysical hysteria. This displacement of Muratov’s images reaches in particular one technique, for many people perplexed: her heroes, or rather the heroine, repeat their replicas all the time, multiplict them, which creates the impression of artificiality, a mechanical factory, but in fact it reveals their mythical self -identity, archetypal.

Or take a film, which, according to Muratova, distorted censorship so much that she removed her name from the credits, replacing it with some kind of joke nickname-Ivan Sidorov. This is "among gray stones." It seems to me, however, that this is a wonderful film that conveyed Muratova’s theme in the visual images that amaze with their strength. The orphan boy is yearning for a dead mother and wants to return to her, but he goes to some underground depths, where he is greeted by the frightening figures of Homerov Aida or mythical foremother from the Getevsky Faust. At the same time, these are ancient parks, measuring the time of human life, or the Norn Northern Myths. Mother at the same time death. I once said about Muratova that the theme of her films is the mother of the Earth that has an abortion.

And Muratova declares the woman a war just because he is afraid of her. This is highly impressive ambivalence. Women are killed in her films - they cut their throat and corpse is burned in a boiler room, or a bit of a stocking, or a mother is lowered into the sea in a stroller - the Eisenstein personnel from Potemkin. In the film "Three Stories" on the wall of the maternity hospital there is a negativity of the Sistine Madonna Raphael. And in the film "Hobbies" a pathologist, having opened the deceased girl-girl, throws the cigarette butt into her insides, ordering to sew it up. And this girl is called Rita Gauthier. This is Margarita Gauthier, the famous lady with camellias. Muratova is a virgin that the prostitute is equally disgusted. At the same time, her beloved actress is Renata Litvinova. She tells the story of a virgin with a cigarette butt and says that the main difficulty of working in the morgue is to take out a bucket with organs, but you will soon get used to it.

Genre Muratova - Makabr, Dance of Death. Her great art speaks of the latest foundations of being, about the cycle of the universe. This is not social and not psychological, but cosmic art. Which is the main sign of genius. Kira Muratova is a genius.