JonathanRosenbaum.com

Hearing Voices [JUNGLE FEVER]

From the Chicago Reader (June 21, 1991). — J.R.

JUNGLE FEVER

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Spike Lee

With Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Lonette McKee, John Turturro, Frank Vincent, and Anthony Quinn.

Trusting to luck means listening to voices.  — Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s

Compared to Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever is inspired overreaching, an exciting mess — and conceivably even more important. If the earlier movie somehow marshaled its sprawling elements into a single story in a single setting with a single theme, this one has two settings (Harlem and Bensonhurst), three plot lines, and at least four themes (interracial romance, breaking away from one’s family, crack addiction, and corporate advancement for blacks), all of which are crammed together more willfully than logically, yielding a misshapen story that is neither singular nor plural in focus, but somewhere obscurely in between.

First plot: Flipper (Wesley Snipes), an upscale Afro-American architect with a wife and daughter living in Harlem, starts an affair with his new temp secretary, Angie (Annabella Sciorra), a single Italian American who lives with her working-class father and brothers in Bensonhurst. Flipper tells his best friend Cyrus (Spike Lee), who tells his wife (Veronica Webb), who tells Flipper’s wife, Drew (Lonette McKee), who responds by throwing Flipper out. He goes to stay with his parents (Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee), and after Angie is brutally beaten by her father (Frank Vincent), she and Flipper move into a loft. Eventually he decides to call it quits with her, and she doesn’t object. Meanwhile, Angie’s former boyfriend, Paulie (a lovely performance by John Turturro), who lives in Bensonhurst with his father (Anthony Quinn) and runs his candy store, develops a crush on a black woman (Tyra Ferrell) in the neighborhood and persuades her to go out with him, despite the violent objections of his father and other Italian Americans in the neighborhood.

Second plot: Flipper’s older brother, Gator (Samuel L. Jackson), is a Harlem crackhead who keeps asking his mother and Flipper for handouts to support his habit and hangs out with another crackhead named Vivian (Halle Berry). His father, a rigid Baptist preacher who has lost his pulpit, has already banished and disowned him, but Gator manages to sneak in periodically to see his mother . . .

Third plot: Before he leaves his wife and daughter, Flipper asks his white bosses to make him a partner in their firm. He resigns when they refuse and announces that he’ll start a company of his own.

The various themes overlap in these plots and settings, but they never can be said to converge. The theme of corporate advancement for blacks is also never fully articulated — we aren’t given enough information to evaluate either Flipper’s request to become a partner or his bosses’ refusal — and it appears to be discarded halfway through the film; we never hear anything more about Flipper starting his own business.

A few stray details help link some of the plots and themes, at least by implication. Flipper’s last name is Purify, and connections certainly can be made between his notions of racial purity and his father’s. (One might also note a connection between the rigid — i.e., “pure” — stances of Flipper and his father, and deduce that the Good Reverend Doctor Purify may have lost his church for reasons comparable to the reasons Flipper lost his job.) But it’s harder to link Gator Purify with his brother and father on the basis of this shared name, unless one sees his self-acknowledged identity as a crackhead as either a reaction to his father and brother or as an existentially “pure” form of self-negation. Otherwise, the plots and themes simply coexist without merging.

Most irritating of all, Lee has shamelessly echoed the symmetrical framing devices used in Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues to begin and end this movie — with matching crane shots to establish a neighborhood, and matching lines and behavior to establish the situation of the characters — which brings a false sense of unity and closure to a movie that actively resists both. It’s the equivalent of a veteran jazz musician summoning up an old riff to round off a daring chorus when he suddenly runs out of gas, and even though it performs the expedient function of winding things up, it can’t disguise the fact that a lot of plot strands are still hanging.

Why, then, do I regard Jungle Fever as a major step forward — not only for Spike Lee, but also for American movies in general? Because he may be creating a new kind of commercial American movie in the process of trying to cram everything in — a kind of “living newspaper” where front-page stories exist in proximity to one another without necessarily linking up, and where it’s left to the audience to make some of the vital connections (or not, as the case may be). Lee’s outsized ambitions and impatience, which lead to all the problems cited above, are straining the limits of conventional story telling and moviemaking — forcing Lee and his audience into fertile new areas, some of which may even lie beyond the conscious wishes of both. And Lee has been gaining enough mastery in other areas — above all, in directing actors and writing or generating dialogue — to be able to shoot off in several directions at once without losing any of his control or momentum. With a running time of well over two hours, Jungle Fever moves so feverishly from first shot to last that one never has a chance to be even momentarily bored or distracted; despite all the leapfrogging between themes, characters, and neighborhoods, it looked even better and seemed even shorter the second time I saw it.

Yet at times the experience is a little bit like being caught in a flood. To compound the general sense of surfeit and confusion, Lee has overloaded his sound track with more music than ever before, much of it vocal. It’s a relief to see him finally working with a composer other than his father Bill Lee, whose scoring skills have always struck me as questionable; the original music here was written by Stevie Wonder and Terence Blanchard, and it’s the best score for a Spike Lee film to date. But given how strong the film is without the music, Lee’s insistence on using it in practically every scene — featuring a 71-piece orchestra and the 49 voices of the Boys Choir of Harlem, and 23 new and old songs, including 3 by Frank Sinatra, 3 by Mahalia Jackson, and 13 by Wonder — is sometimes a bewildering belt-and-suspenders procedure. It’s as if he didn’t trust his material enough to allow it to speak for itself, but had to constantly juice it up to symphonic proportions.

Occasionally the music is used for ironic undercutting; when Angie is being beaten by her father for sleeping with Flipper, Wonder is singing, “This was the last time I heard her saying, ‘Mother, Father, I love you . . . ‘” Sometimes it’s used for ethnic underlining: all the Sinatra is heard in the Bensonhurst candy store operated by Paulie, and all the Mahalia Jackson is played by Flipper and Gator’s father in his Harlem apartment. But sometimes it’s just unnecessary noise: Flipper’s wife Drew is throwing all his papers out the window and into the street, causing a noisy crowd to gather around Flipper, and he and Drew are screaming at one another — but Lee evidently figured this wasn’t enough to listen to, so he added a rap number with a backup chorus. Perhaps significantly, my two favorite scenes in the picture — a “war council” consisting of Drew bitching with several of her black friends, and a violent confrontation between Paulie and some Italian regulars in his candy store — are just about the only ones that do without music entirely.

One key to what’s going on in this maelstrom is the multiplicity of voices. Critic Bill Krohn has provocatively described Do the Right Thing as a conflict of discourses, linking it to the debates between French Maoists and French communist party members in Godard’s La chinoise (1967). In a variety of ways, Jungle Fever goes even further in suggesting an American mainstream equivalent to Godard’s work in the mid-60s — less intellectual, but equally attuned to a newspaperlike currency and immediacy. Significantly, both directors have drawn much of their material from news stories. Jungle Fever opens with a dedication “in memory of Yusef K. Hawkins, August 23, 1989,” and Lee has reported that one of the film’s incidents was inspired by Marvin Gaye Sr. shooting Marvin Gaye Jr. There are also, among many other news references, allusions to New York’s last mayoral election and its ethnic ramifications and to the rap song created by one of the black rapists of the Central Park jogger.

Both filmmakers splinter their narratives into disassociated parts, some more “finished” and fully articulated than others. Both switch stylistic gears at periodic intervals, specialize in intertextual references (the same white cops who killed Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing turn up here to terrorize Flipper and Angie), and typically stage their dramas in terms of political and cultural confrontations.

Even more to the point, both Godard and Lee create all sorts of occasions and excuses for multiplying their uses of on-screen and offscreen verbiage, usually in unorthodox and innovative ways. Godard often has characters reading aloud or quoting from texts, and Lee seems equally compulsive about playing song lyrics over or under dialogue. Both seek out diverse ways of presenting words visually. (A few examples in Jungle Fever: jokey and thematically relevant street signs in the opening credits and printed song lyrics in the closing credits, both of which slide across the screen at oblique angles; inserted shots of maps with place-names to identify Harlem and Bensonhurst; a real New York Post headline, “Doin’ the Right Thing,” inserted as another intertextual reference in a scene in the candy store.)

In striking contrast to Lee’s profile as an angry media spokesman, projecting attitude at almost every turn, this movie speaks with lots of tongues, many of them divergent and contradictory. Some of these voices bear a strong resemblance to that of Lee’s public persona, but the other voices challenge or qualify what he says in interviews, placing them in a different social and political context. If these voices can be said to converge momentarily — emotionally rather than conceptually — this occurs only in the final scene, when Flipper screams in pain, “No!” It calls to mind the tribute paid to Herman Melville by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.” Otherwise, what Lee is saying and what his movie is saying remain distinctly separate. (Significantly, his character in this movie is once again — as in Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues — someone who plays the role of dramatic catalyst rather than spokesman for the film’s positions.)

Much of the same disparity between Lee’s utterances and his film’s could be felt when Do the Right Thing came out. Lee — understandably recoiling from the paranoid charges of certain critics that his movie was irresponsible because it would foster race riots — started to give increasing prominence to Malcolm X’s statements about violence over Martin Luther King’s in his interviews about the movie. But the movie’s statement was considerably more nuanced and multifaceted — and more evenly balanced between King’s and Malcolm’s positions. And while some of Lee’s recent statements about Jungle Fever suggest a separatist bias regarding interracial romance — a bias stated by most of the Harlem and Bensonhurst characters in the film — the movie itself is a good deal more open and ambiguous.

Even Lee has acknowledged that the second interracial couple posited toward the end of the film, Paulie and Orin, have a much better chance of succeeding than the first because their relationship is predicated on more than just racial myths and curiosity. (The fact that Paulie and Orin both live in Bensonhurst is also clearly a contributing factor; a regionalist to the core, Lee thinks so much in terms of New York neighborhoods that one wonders how he’ll deal with the geographical spread of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in his next picture.)

More specifically, some of Lee’s recent interviews strongly suggest that he’s been listening with profit to his actors. There was some commentary in the press about his conceptual differences with Danny Aiello regarding Sal’s character in Do the Right Thing – differences that to all appearances wound up broadening the picture’s viewpoint. Recently we’ve heard about conceptual differences with Annabella Sciorra on Jungle Fever that seem to have had a comparably beneficial effect. (Sciorra didn’t want her character’s involvement with Flipper to be motivated exclusively by sexual curiosity, and Angie’s character is sufficiently ambiguous on this score to throw some doubt on Lee’s original hypothesis. Both Sciorra and Snipes insisted on charting the mutual attraction of their characters over several take-out meals, while Lee originally wanted them to dive into sex at the first opportunity.) Still another example — and an especially telling one — is the wonderful “war council” scene, which was partially improvised by the actresses and clearly gains from their creative input. Indeed, if this movie shows a clear advance on Lee’s part in dealing with female characters, this is very much a matter of “listening to voices.”

So far I’ve said very little about the film’s content — mainly because it seems impossible to do so without first acknowledging the forms — and the forms of addressing the spectator — that this content takes. On the subject of race, Jungle Fever might be said to synthesize some of the concerns of School Daze (divisions within the black community on the basis of skin color and class) and some of the concerns of Do the Right Thing (divisions within a multiracial community on the basis of skin color and class). Thus Drew’s light skin and mixed parentage (we learn in one scene that she has a white father) and dark-skinned Italians play roles in the constellation of identities and attitudes that are established.

Lee’s position within this constellation seems closely allied to Flipper’s — that is, the position of someone who identifies himself as black and agitates for black rights, but who finds himself working professionally in and (to some extent) for a world that is perceived mainly as white. It’s a position rife with built-in contradictions, and it might be argued that the tendency of Jungle Fever to speak in many voices, creating a cacophony of discourses, grows directly out of these contradictions, which stem more from American society than from the efforts of an ambitious black man to make his way in such a world. In any case, Flipper’s racial position and that of the film are far from identical; it is even possible to conclude that Angie is less of a racist than Flipper is, if only because she appears to be much less concerned with questions of race.

The logistics of their separate positions in relation to society at large aren’t ignored, however. Angie may be more physically vulnerable to racist attitudes in Bensonhurst than Flipper is in Harlem, but when it comes to neutral territory, she has a distinct advantage. The location of Flipper and Angie’s loft isn’t specified, but we’re led to assume that it’s somewhere in Manhattan other than Harlem. When Flipper is threatened at gunpoint by two white cops outside this loft — an incident provoked by the couple playfully sparring on the street — it is Angie, not Flipper, who explains that they’re lovers and who angrily showers abuse on the cops. Flipper is so terrified that he immediately concocts a cover story: “I was just making sure she was getting home safe.” And after the cops leave, he berates her for her candor: “What are you doing telling ‘em we’re lovers? You wanta get me killed?” It appears to be this incident more than anything else that provokes him into ending their affair.

On the subject of crack addiction, Jungle Fever offers no debate or analysis, merely an anguished look at what it is doing to people, culminating in a large-scale and deliberately exaggerated (Lee describes it as “surrealist”) scene set in a fictional Harlem crack house called the Taj Mahal. Lee has argued that he excluded drugs from Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues because they didn’t belong there, and given the more concentrated agendas of those films, it is easy to see what he means. Certainly Samuel J. Jackson’s extraordinary performance as Gator, which won a well-deserved special prize at Cannes, is more than enough justification for broaching the subject here, though its thematic connection with the rest of the movie is restricted mainly to the matter of becoming alienated from one’s family.

The theme of Flipper starting his own business is clearly a carryover of a theme that played an important role in Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues — the problem of working for the Man and what this means in terms of black self-determination. If Jungle Fever doesn’t get around to resolving this issue, it may be because Lee himself understandably hasn’t found a way of fully resolving it in his own career.

If there’s a limitation to Lee’s use of multiple voices in his filmmaking, it may be his schematic insistence on defining and juxtaposing characters almost exclusively according to castes, classes, and neighborhoods. (In the college world of School Daze fraternities and sororities took the place of neighborhoods.) The overall pessimism of Jungle Fever has a lot to do with the incapacity of most of its characters — Angie, Paulie, and Orin may be partial exceptions — to stray too far from their own turfs, either physically or mentally. (The name “Flipper” suggests a desire to pass from one world to another, but significantly this is perceived in either/or terms rather than as a desire to go anywhere at all.) It could be argued that this localized vision has a lot to do with the experience of native New Yorkers, and however much this vision may serve to give form to the conflicts of Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, it also implies a certain incapacity to think beyond them that may affect Lee along with most of his characters.

One of the most striking innovations in the movie, employed twice, is a stylized, frontal low-angle shot of two characters apparently walking down a sidewalk; although we faintly hear the sound of offscreen footsteps, the characters actually appear to be carried along on a sort of conveyor belt without walking at all, the tops of trees drifting past them in a dreamlike flux. The first time this happens, it’s with Angie and Paulie in Bensonhurst; the second time, it’s with Flipper and Cyrus in Harlem. In both cases this conveys the comfort of moving with a compatriot through a cozy world where identity and familiar surroundings are firmly in place — a sort of womblike oasis within a larger jungle that is raging with fever and pestilence.

Assuming that Lee can — or should — position himself outside this oasis and continue to function, there’s no telling what he might accomplish. Do the Right Thing was full of promise, but Jungle Fever is something more — a movie by a master director with a voice of his own who is still interested in discovering what he has to say, and who is brave enough to let others help him find it. As long as Lee keeps listening to the right voices, we have a lot to look forward to.

An Angel at My Table

Jane Campion’s stirring follow-up to Sweetie adapts the autobiographical trilogy of New Zealand writer Janet Frame into a 163-minute feature, originally made for New Zealand TV–clearly a labor of love by a masterful talent responding to a soulmate. The poetic empathy, the beautiful, offbeat framing and unexpected transitions, and the magnificent handling of actors are all pure Campion. (Her work is especially impressive with the three who play Frame at different ages–Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and Kerry Fox–whose suggestions of fragility, painful shyness, and passionate inner life effortlessly dovetail into one another.) On the other hand, the form–a miniseries about the formation of a writer–is a lot more conventional and straightforward than that of Sweetie, as are the script (by High Tide’s Laura Jones) and cinematography (by Stuart Dryburgh). Basically composed of short, elliptical scenes, this work’s three parts were intended to be seen separately, which a theatrical presentation regrettably makes impractical. (In a better world, PBS would have snapped this up, but perhaps it would have been too glaring a contrast to the pallidness of its other dramatic offerings.) Charting Frame’s life through the hell of being different (misdiagnosed as schizophrenic during her teens, she was forced to submit to hundreds of shock treatments) toward some adult fulfillment, Campion makes this a genuinely inspirational story without a breath of sentimentality. No less remarkably, she has managed to convey a writer’s sensibility by getting us to share in a life lived in and through words–no mean feat for such an intensely visual director (1990). (Fine Arts)

Poetry in Motion [THELMA & LOUISE]

From the June 7, 1991 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

THELMA & LOUISE

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Callie Khouri

With Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brad Pitt, Timothy Carhart, and Lucinda Jenny.

I’m not quite sure precisely when Thelma & Louise kicks into high gear. Does it happen when Thelma (Geena Davis) holds up a convenience store, or much earlier, when Louise (Susan Sarandon) shoots a rapist (Timothy Carhart)? Does it happen when Thelma’s tyrannical husband (Christopher McDonald) steps on a pizza, or when Louise divests herself of her watch and jewelry in exchange for an old coot’s sun hat?

Whenever it happens, something starts to click, and the movie becomes mythical — mutates into a sort of classic before one’s eyes. This isn’t to say that it can thenceforth do no wrong; the flashback shots that punctuate the final credits are lamentable, a cheap attempt to add uplift to an ending that doesn’t need it. But the movie does take on a certain charmed existence, persuading one to forgive such lapses. After a rather slow beginning, this prosy film turns poetic; and when that happens, we’re no longer passive bystanders but active participants, along for the ride morally as well as physically.

It’s questionable how much of the credit for this belongs to director Ridley Scott, whose production company made this movie. So far Scott has turned out one eye-popping cult movie, Blade Runner, which was substantially altered from his own cut, and several more or less forgettable features: two respectable genre exercises (Alien and Someone to Watch Over Me), a so-so literary adaptation (The Duellists), a fluffy department-store Christmas window display (Legend), and an offensive anti-Japanese thriller (Black Rain). He’s not exactly an auteur — this former director of commercials brings a stylish sense of lighting, framing, and monumentality to a variety of visual subjects, but he needs a good script as badly as a musician needs an instrument. He seems to have lucked out this time. Callie Khouri’s screenplay (her feature debut) and the performances of Davis and Sarandon provide him with both an engine and a body; he provides the snazzy paint job. In other words, without the stellar work of these three women, he’d be lost.

Here’s the little I know about Khouri: she hails from San Antonio, grew up in a log cabin in rural Kentucky, studied drama and acting at Purdue, and worked as a waitress while acting in stage productions in Nashville. Then she moved to Los Angeles, where she studied acting some more and worked her way up from receptionist at a commercial and music-video production house to a producer of music videos for Alice Cooper, Robert Cray, and Winger.

What this suggests to me is that Khouri knows something about the backgrounds of her heroines, who decide to take off on a two-day holiday in Louise’s T-bird convertible but before long wind up as fugitives from justice. Khouri knows how to write something juicy without too much showing off. The few fancy lines — “You could park a car in the shadow of his ass,” for example, or “I’ve always believed that if done properly, robbery doesn’t have to be an unpleasant experience” — are fully justified by the context. Equally important, she has an acute and very funny sense of the habits and attitudes of rustic males — car dealers, cops, truckers, musicians, and everyday sexist philanderers.

Of the lead performers, Davis is the revelation — not because she hasn’t been good before, but because her opportunities in Fletch, The Fly, The Accidental Tourist, Beetlejuice, Earth Girls Are Easy, and Quick Change haven’t allowed her to dig as deeply into a character. (Sarandon, by contrast, has already shown how she can stretch, in Atlantic City and Bull Durham as well as the recent White Palace, where she plays a waitress rather like Louise.) Davis’s Thelma, a sequestered Arkansas housewife just beginning to figure out what she’s been denied, is a full-bodied creation, thought through and dreamed up from the inside out. In contrast to Demi Moore and Glenne Headly’s able impersonations of New Jersey hairdressers in Mortal Thoughts, Davis offers not a clever sketch but a fully articulated painting — perhaps because the script she’s working with is packed with canny clues and surprises. (One of the ripest clues is Thelma’s purchase on the road of a carton full of miniature bottles of Wild Turkey — she’s someone accustomed to cutting loose only in small doses, so naturally this is how she sets about tasting her freedom.) Seeing her sidle up to a state trooper’s window with a smile and a gun, in that order, one witnesses one of those rare performances that convert doing into being.

Louise is considerably more world-weary — and somewhat less spelled out as a character. The script indicates that something traumatic happened to her in Texas, but she’s never willing to talk about it. We suspect that she was raped, but Khouri’s pointed refusal to settle the question is one of this screenwriter’s smartest moves. For one thing, Sarandon has an agreeable way of suggesting a whole character without laboring over specifics. And one way Khouri persuades us to feel committed to these characters is by not taking the lazy, conventional, and reductive route of “explaining” what makes them tick — she leaves us with some life-size blanks to fill in.

“Crime as self-realization” and “crime as freedom” are central American myths, and road movies often hark back to both of them. It’s clear that works as disparate as Huckleberry Finn, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and Housekeeping (the novel and the film) have certain things in common, and that Thelma and Louise taps into some of the same sources of energy. In all these stories the interdependence of the partners in crime is a fundamental part of their appeal; Huck learns as much from Jim as Clyde learns from Bonnie and as Ruth learns from Sylvie. The mutual education that goes on between Thelma and Louise is equally important.

Part of the way this movie accumulates momentum is by gradually revealing that even before its two heroines leave home, they’re already criminals of a sort — their best instincts are often categorized as common-law criminal impulses by their male-dominated world. (Thelma’s even given a hard time by her husband for raising her voice.) Becoming criminals before the law is therefore a process of self-definition and self-realization made possible by their adventures and their influence on each other.

Once the film firmly establishes this process, it can gain some of its best poetic effects by suspending the plot without retarding the action — an effect also achieved by all the “road” works cited above. By this time, character has become action. Thelma & Louise can allow itself several short, magical, but apparently pointless detours that don’t slow down the pace or dissipate our involvement: a camera movement traverses the T-bird in motion, Scott taking full advantage of both the ‘Scope framing and his own capacity to fill it handsomely and dynamically; in a hilarious shot, Thelma’s husband Darryl and several policemen watch a Cary Grant movie on TV; one lovely sequence is devoted to a quiet rest stop in a prairie at night.

By the time Thelma and Louise and a hoard of police cars converge at the edge of an enormous canyon, both the heroines and the world they’re fleeing have been so fully defined that Scott can depict this showdown on the same monumental scale he brought to the opening of Blade Runner without seeming unduly hyperbolic. (At this point, for all the thematic differences between the two films, their visual parallels border on the uncanny.) But the achievement of this outsize finale would have been unthinkable without the careful and sensitive groundwork laid by Khouri, Sarandon, and Davis — including their recognition that Thelma and Louise, empowered by one another, become existential outlaws in the fullest sense simply by deciding to accept and embrace who they already are.

Symbol Life [SWAN LAKE — THE ZONE]

From the Chicago Reader (June 14, 1991). — J.R.

SWAN LAKE — THE ZONE

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Yuri Illienko

Written by Sergei Paradjanov and Illienko

With Victor Solovyov, Liudmyla Yefymenko, Maya Bulhakova, Pylyp Illienko, and Victor Demertash.

One of the most fascinating things about Russian cinema is that we still know next to nothing about it. There are the socialist realist holdovers (Little Vera, for example, and Freeze — Die — Come to Life) and wannabe American releases (Taxi Blues), but the rest of the recent Soviet pictures that have made it to Chicago are interesting mostly because of what remains obscure and intractable about them — their refreshingly and, at times, bewilderingly different views of life and art.

The films that constitute the most obvious reference points in Soviet film history — a few key classics by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Kuleshov, Vertov, and closer to the present, the films of Paradjanov and Tarkovsky — have practically nothing to do with what ordinary Soviet moviegoers see most of the time. Even worse, we can’t take it for granted that these avant-garde works necessarily represent the best that innovative Soviet cinema has to offer, or that what we see of the Soviet mainstream is necessarily the best either.

If I hadn’t lived in Europe for several years, I would never have seen about a third of the best Soviet films I know: the first sound films of Kuleshov (The Great Consoler, about the life and stories of O. Henry), Pudovkin (Deserter), and Dovzhenko (Ivan) and Julia Solntseva’s rather insane 70-millimeter Stalinist spectaculars, especially The Enchanted Desna. None of them has ever been subtitled in English, and few are currently very well known in the Soviet Union either. [2011 postscript: today, at least the first two of these films are commercially available on DVD with English subtitles.]

The continued unavailability of these films and many others guarantees a skewed view of Soviet cinema. What I regard as the best post-Tarkovsky Russian film, Kira Muratova’s The Aesthenic Syndrome – probably the most thoroughgoing and shocking indictment of the contemporary world in movies, leagues ahead of any American movie in rage as well as stylistic range — as far as I know has yet to have a U.S. screening, much less a U.S. distributor. Maybe by the time we’re ready for it, we’ll be ready for Kuleshov’s 1933 masterpiece about O. Henry as well.

Early last month I attended two lectures at the University of Chicago by Yuri Tsivian, a Soviet film historian from Latvia, about prerevolutionary Russian cinema — one about censorship codes in that period, illustrated by several video clips, and a more general lecture followed by three films made in 1913 and 1914. (A touring show devoted to Russian cinema before the revolution is in the works and will eventually play at the Film Center.) What’s most amazing about these movies — dismissed by many modern Soviet filmmakers as bourgeois, decadent, and even “necrophiliac” — is their radical differences from such contemporaneous American movies as The Birth of a Nation: above all, their pronounced feminism and their visual sophistication, especially the varied camera angles, deep focus, and camera movements.

The most fascinating film I saw, Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter (1913), belonged to a genre that, as far as I know, existed only in prerevolutionary Russia. “Blackmail films” were docudramas based on contemporary scandals involving wealthy merchant families, who were expected to pay off the filmmakers. But once that happened, the films were usually shown anyway, under new titles and with different names for the characters.

The value of these early films — including Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter and the 1914 The Woman of Tomorrow, about a woman gynecologist at a time when there were already hundreds of them in Russia — is how much they have to tell us about an unfamiliar world and culture. The masterpieces cited above (from the 30s, 50s, 60s, and in the case of Muratova’s film, 1989) tell us things not only about history but about the present, and not only about Soviets but about ourselves.

Especially exciting in the post-50s work is a combination of realistic and nonrealistic modes, which might be called allegorical realism. This form of cinema seems to take place inside the mind rather than in the world, yet it’s full of realistic details in the settings as well as in its tactile sensations. Paradoxically, these conceptually abstract films are unusually concrete, immediate and richly textured physically, handling such elements as moving water with a sensuality missing from American and European movies.

Yuri Illienko’s Swan Lake — The Zone is no masterpiece, but it’s a lot more interesting than most American or European movies I’ve seen this year, and it has an enormous amount to teach us. Historically, it qualifies as the first truly independent Ukrainian feature: it was financed as an international coproduction with Sweden and Canada and coproduced by Illienko and Las Vegas symphony conductor (and fellow Ukrainian) Virko Baley. Its source is a series of stories composed (not written) by the great Armenian/Georgian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov during his many years in prison. As Illienko explained to me at the Vancouver film festival last fall (mainly through a Ukrainian interpreter), Paradjanov was often denied writing materials in prison, so he learned to memorize the stories he made up. Illienko got him to recite them into a tape recorder, and wrote the script based on those recordings. Paradjanov was dying of cancer while the film was being made, but Illienko was able to show him the finished work before he died; the director even included one detail — a French magazine with a photo of Paradjanov and the caption “Maestro” — mainly for the pleasure he knew it would give Paradjanov.

What emerges from this unusual collaboration is not an “homage” to Paradjanov, at least not in the usual sense of that word. The visual and aural styles of the film have no apparent relationship to Paradjanov’s filmmaking, and the content is equally remote from Paradjanov films (at least those known in the West, all of which are set before the 20th century).

Illienko was the inspired cinematographer on Paradjanov’s Ukrainian Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), and considering all the striking stylistic differences between this lyrical feature and Paradjanov’s subsequent work, there is good reason to suspect that Illienko effectively codirected the film as well. (Among Illienko’s previous films as a director are the long-banned A Spring for the Thirsty and The Eve of Ivan Kupalo, both made in the 60s.) Illienko later testified on Paradjanov’s behalf when he was arrested on multiple and mainly trumped-up charges, including “homosexual coercion,” in 1973 (after serving a long prison term, Paradjanov was arrested again in 1982). But it cannot be said that Illienko’s relations with Paradjanov were always friendly; back in the 60s, Illienko told me, Paradjanov even challenged him to a duel. Because Paradjanov was so obstreperous and antiinstitutional by nature, it was only a matter of time before the authorities caught up with him; he clearly needed friends wherever he could find them. Illienko remained an ally to the end.

What has all of this to do with Swan Lake — The Zone? For one thing, the prison where the film was shot is the same prison in which Paradjanov was incarcerated; most of the prisoners we see are real-life prisoners there today, so the film offers a horrifyingly lucid portrait of what Paradjanov’s life there must have been like, and what it continues to be like for more recent arrivals. (The very fact that this can be done in a contemporary Soviet film is noteworthy in itself; it’s difficult to imagine many — or any — American films about prison life adopting the same degree of candor.)

In most other respects, Swan Lake is a far cry from a documentary. Working almost completely without dialogue (so that subtitles are sparse) and with nameless characters, the film is usually easy enough to follow, though curiously some of the details mentioned in the press synopsis are not evident on-screen. To clarify this difference, I’ve included some of the information from the “official” synopsis in brackets.

At the beginning, the hero (Victor Solovyov) breaks out of the prison [three days before his sentence is over] and hides out in a huge, metallic hammer-and-sickle monument that stands at the prison gates. (Illienko told me that prison monuments of just this type are quite common in Russia, so the allegorical implications stem directly from social reality. Given all the symbolic and tactile ramifications of this claustrophobic location in the film, it functions not as a dry or pretentious symbol but as a “lived-in” allegory as well as a lived-in site.) On sorties from his hiding place, the man steals clothes from the trunk of a car and later tries to hitch a ride, only to be beaten by a carload of thugs; in his hideaway, drinking from bottles of champagne, he gets drenched in a rainstorm.

A woman (Liudmyla Yefymenko, Illienko’s wife) who lives nearby discovers his hideout, nurses him back to health, and becomes his lover. We also see her purchasing a train ticket, perhaps with the idea of escaping with him. Her son (Pylyp Illienko, the director’s son), who generally uses the monument as his own hideaway (where he leafs through the aforementioned French film magazine), expresses his disapproval of the couple by firing rocks against the monument with a slingshot when they’re inside [and by reporting the man’s whereabouts to the authorities].

Back in prison, the man attempts suicide and is pronounced dead and carried off to a morgue in a horse-drawn carriage. When he’s found to be still alive, the driver revives him by giving him blood for a transfusion, administered by an old woman. The man returns to the prison voluntarily, but is treated roughly by both the authorities and the other prisoners, who tell him he must spit in the face of the guard who saved him and then abide by the punishment for this action: another five years in prison. He slits his wrists, and the next morning his dead body is stared at by the other prisoners and ignored — or not noticed — by the guards.

The film’s title refers to the swans in the wasteland surrounding the prison. In an early sequence they’re briefly and improbably glimpsed inside the prison, when we see the clamoring prisoners getting hosed down by the guards. There’s also a very strange animated sequence, which may be taking place inside the hero’s head when he’s hiding inside the monument, that shows blue swans against a blue background flapping their wings.

I suppose these swans are allegorical to the same degree the monument is — or the map of the world on which the hero is laid in the morgue, the map covering a board placed over a bathtub containing another corpse. But the poetic meanings of the swans, as of the other details, are clearly meant to be experienced rather than rationally decoded. The worst, most demeaning approach to a movie like Swan Lake — The Zone would be to reduce it to a “purely” political allegory. True, Soviet directors tend to be more directly political than their American and European counterparts — Illienko expressed only contempt for Julia Solntseva’s films because of their Stalinist underpinnings, and Paradjanov, despite his own martyrdom, criticized Tarkovsky after glasnost for making his last films abroad. It’s also true that Soviet directors don’t usually display our bad habit of considering their ideology and their aesthetics as separate and unconnected entities. More holistic about the spiritual breath of reality, these filmmakers bring a vitality to allegory by treating it as an adjunct to lived experience rather than as an alternative to it.

An important part of the “realism” that plays against the “abstraction” of Swan Lake — The Zone is the film’s highly inventive sound track. This kind of realism, however, usually gives a particular inflection to the images rather than reproducing or reinforcing them in the conventional manner. When the film opens with the hero fleeing in long shot through a wasteland, what we hear is the sound of his labored breathing. Similar aural close-ups are later accorded to the clinking of bottles inside the monument, the tinkle of the woman’s hammer-and-sickle earrings, and many other small, odd sounds. The effect is always to intensify the physicality of the object that is aurally highlighted. (Tarkovsky and other Soviet contemporaries have used sound similarly, but the only American or European parallel that comes immediately to mind is Jacques Tati, who also avoids expository dialogue. Is it only coincidence that Tati’s family background was Russian, his original name Tatischeff?)

Conventional verisimilitude is not to be expected in a film of this kind. The hero’s proximity (and later the heroine’s) while inside the monument to prison guards and activities, which the sound track emphasizes, makes it implausible that he could remain undiscovered. It’s almost equally implausible that at the end the guards, playing what looks like dominoes, would fail to notice his “crucified” body a few yards away. Both cases recall Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” where the centrality of the hidden object is an essential part of its invisibility; it’s worth stressing that throughout most of the film the hero exists as an object rather than a character.

It could be argued that allegory and symbolism in contemporary Soviet films are legacies of the repressive past, when meanings often had to be cloaked in ambiguity in order to get by the censors. If there’s any truth to that hypothesis, I don’t think it means Soviet cinema today is any less “free” than our own; if anything, it may suggest the contrary because of the expressive registers developed as a consequence of repression.

Much as the elaborate constraints of Hollywood under the studio system gave a stylistic coherence to many movies that’s hard to find today, comparable constraints may have provided the impetus for the “allegorical realism” of contemporary Soviet cinema. We’re often quick to condemn the former restrictions of Soviet cinema and exalt the former constraints of Hollywood, but the fact remains that Orson Welles had as hard a time as Sergei Eisenstein did. And now that a good many Soviet filmmakers seem to be freer than most of their American and European counterparts, it’s about time the rest of world cinema heeded the many formal, stylistic, and expressive alternatives they have to offer.

Strand: Under the Dark Cloth

A fascinating and intelligent Canadian documentary by John Walker about the life and career of the great American photographer Paul Strand that includes interviews with Georgia O’Keeffe, Milton Brown, Fred Zinnemann, Leo Hurwitz, and Virginia Stevens, as well as tantalizing clips from Strand’s films (including Manhatta, arguably the first American experimental film, The Wave, Heart of Spain, and Native Land). The film does a good job with both the work and the enigmatic personality of Strand, and for people like me whose acquaintance with Strand’s work is limited, this makes an ideal introduction (1989). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Tuesday, June 18, 6:00, 443-3737)