The Asthenic Syndrome (Muratova, 1989): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
This is the latest screenings from those wonderful 'The Machine That Kills Bad People' people. Their manifesto states: The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.
Programme:
Ritual
in Transfigured Time, dir. Maya Deren, USA 1945-46, 16mm, 14
min., silent
The Asthenic Syndrome, dir. Kira Muratova,
USSR (Ukraine) 1989, DCP, 153 min, Russian, Ukrainian, English and
Romany spoken with English subtitles
ICA introduction:
This
double-bill brings together works by two Ukrainian-born filmmakers
with a keen interest in dreams and temporality. Written
in 1989 just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The
Asthenic Syndrome is
Kira Muratova’s most celebrated film and won the Silver Bear when
it premiered at the 1990 Berlinale. Often referred to as a portrait
of an era, the film is made up of two stylistically and thematically
distinct parts that tell the story of two archetypal Soviet
intellectuals: Nikolai, the teacher who falls asleep in inappropriate
places at the most inappropriate times, and Natalia, a doctor and
distraught widow who has just buried her husband. “Muratova created
vivid images of desperate characters determined to endure, capturing
and divining the state of the USSR on the eve of its collapse. A
searing portrait of individual malaise and collective apathy, with
polyphonic elements and absurdist tableaus, the film stuns the viewer
with shock therapy, destroying every illusion.” (Elena
Gorfinkel)
Made
two years after her pathbreaking work Meshes
of the Afternoon (1943),
Maya Deren’s Ritual
in Transfigured Time (1945–46)
brings together the interests in psychodrama, dream logic, and dance
for which the filmmaker is renowned. Deren wrote, “I believe that
Ritual contains everything that Meshes had, but has more, and, of
course, differently,” and deemed it to be more representative of
her practice than her most famous film.
Chicago Reader review:
A
great movie (1989), but not a pleasant or an easy one. Directed by the
transgressive Kira Muratova in her mid-50s, it has been rightly called
the only “masterpiece of glasnost,” though it was banned by the Russian
government for obscenity. Beginning as a powerful black-and-white
narrative about a middle-aged woman doctor in an exploding, aggressive
rage over the death of her husband (who resembles Stalin), the film
eventually turns into an even more unorthodox tale in color about a
schoolteacher (cowriter Sergei Popov) who periodically falls asleep
regardless of what’s happening around him. (The title alludes to a form
of disability that encompasses both the doctor’s aggressiveness and the
schoolteacher’s passivity.) Though this tragicomic epic has plenty to
say about postcommunist Russia, it also deals more generally with the
demons loose in today’s world. It may drive you nuts–as it was
undoubtedly meant to–but you certainly won’t forget it.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is an extract.
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