SWAN LAKE–THE ZONE
With Victor Solovyov, Liudmyla Yefymenko, Maya Bulhakova, Pylyp Illienko, and Victor Demertash.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
