Military cinema

What was the young Letov when he went to war-this is what is most amazing on the black and white grain of films mounted in “great and forever”. Delicate, 20-year-old, with a woman's soft features. Fragile and thin - even in comparison with faithful friends in his wild gang, Kusey UO (Konstantin Ryabinov), Manager (Oleg Sudakov) and Jeff (Igor Zhevtun), not to mention those to whom he declared the battle with his poems and songs, anonymous KGB Mayors on the Black Volga, bored with gopot. Ochkarikov, thick -minded layers in peppers, all this shapeless gray mass. It was a hopeless battle: a small prince against someone else's planet, a fighting fish against the soviet leviathan. However, 30 years after the announcement of the war, we can admit: Yegor Letov won - well, because who will remember the major, gopniks and hats after another 30 years. And the subtle Letov and his ardent songs will remain with us. And when the titles of the first doctrack about the “civil defense” are already creeping along the black screen, you freeze in a chair, unable to get up. Reviewed by his combat feat, perfect in the depths of the frozen Omsk trench. Amazed, as in childhood on his favorite militants, where a bloodied hero, leaving into the distance with an unsteady, but full dignity with a gait, left behind a trace of defeated villains.

From the viewing “Great and Eternal” you do not expect such a trotyl charge of delight, as it was impossible to expect the bestial strength of a voice from a young man in dark glasses, shaking electricity shaking at the microphone, and in the end, like Jelsomino, he measured the country of liars with his songs. “Great and forever” is still a home-made documentary movie about the history of one musical group. Ordinary, modest, poor: there are many, for obvious reasons, poorly recorded and unrestrained documentary chronicle, which looks like a front -line shooting; Talking heads of direct participants in hostilities and eyewitnesses, torn installation, fragmentation thoughts-in places it looks like the film itself came out of the shelling. However, the fact that they “great and forever” did the years and brought to the rental is a combat feat in itself.

The director of the film Natalya Chumakova, the widow of Yegor Letova, did not make any movie before - she boldly and blindly entered this labyrinth of the endless possibilities of the film about the cult group and intuitively came out of it the only right way. She turned out to be perfectly coinciding with the songs “Coffin” according to LO - FI -style and daring spirit a film about the miracle - about the same thing, about which, according to Yegor Letov , the albums “The Unbearable Easy of Being” and “Solporat”: “When a person completely lost, and he sings, as he won and wins.” The same, according to Letov, is the essence of Russian existentialism.

The present time is the best suited to remember this miracle and this victory. The early songs of Letov, ringing from hatred of “scoop”, are now sounding as dangerous as in the mid -eighties. The rifle is again a holiday. The KGB officer loves the KGB. We are the ice under the Major's feet. Soon it will come completely. Etc. But the point is not that the muzzle of Brezhnevsky hospitalism is as ugly as Putinsky - as stated in the film, "there is always the same in power." The spiritual morality is “great and forever” that, no matter how terrible it is to fall in power, become across the throat - get bolder into a fight if you feel right, and one warrior in the field - if, like Yegor Letov, you have access to your own cosmos. And at the most hopeless moment you need to drink or laugh loudly. As Kuzya UO about those fierce times said in “great and forever”: “We always laughed. It's funny because (it was). ”

Schedule “Great and Eternal” in the cities of Russia on the film website