Dreaming of a Kingdom not of this World

Film dissent in the USSR and the Soviet Bloc.

One of the most exciting phenomena in the cinema of the late seventies and early eighties was the emergence of richly varied opposition filmmakers in the Soviet bloc, particularly in Poland and Hungary. Wajda's Man of Marble, Zanussi's Camouflage, Pal Gabor's Angi Vera, and Karoly Makk's Another Way spearheaded a movement that radically revised state sponsored pieties concerning the postwar history of Eastern Europe, and--in Poland, at least--bridged that gulf between art cinema and the commercial industry, the intelligentsia and the mass audience, often encountered in Western cinema.

One may wonder about the state of these movements now that glasnost is being so acclaimed in the USSR. How has it affected the Polish and Hungarian cinemas, given the relative autonomy Eastern bloc countries enjoy in the choice of methods for enforcing orthodoxy? And exactly how critical is a film like the USSR's much-lauded Repentance of official versions of recent history compared, say, to Poland's Man of Marble?

Signs of Cracks

A viewing of the Polish and Hungarian films screened at the 1987 Montreal Film Festival confirms one's impression that the Polish and Hungarian movements have passed their heyday. Martial law dispersed the opposition Polish directors. Agnieszka Holland and Bugajski left Poland, and only the most established directors (such as Wajda and Zanussi) were able to retain sufficient independence to work abroad to make it worth their while staying. Yet even they had to settle for a depoliticization of their work, there is no international film market for local Polish problems. Polish authorities are hardly likely to fund probes into the psychopathology of their own everyday life. If there are recent signs of cracks in the ice--Feliks Falk's 1986 Hero of the Year, and the belated release of Kieslowski's masterpiece No End (of which more later)--they do not seem to presage any larger thaw. Soviet response to the proclamation of glasnost has resulted in the release of works of a freshness commensurate with the length and intensity of earlier oppression, but the Polish reaction seems almost dispirited.

Thus Flak's Hero of the Year--which won prizes at the Moscow Film Festival--is clearly soured by the knowledge that criticism no longer can change anything in Poland, as once it helped to do in the late seventies. In the film Jerzy Stuhr plays a charismatic MC traveling round the country with a man chosen to be "hero of the year" because he had alerted people to an impending gas explosion. The road show is selling civic responsibility as part of Jaruzelski's token dialogue with the people. The film's attitude toward the media man--the careerist star of Falk's own 1978 Top Dog, whose fate after martial law is chronicled here--is one of impotent Schadensfreude. The audience is meant to relish the careerist's discomfiture, but his lowly status in the hierarchy leads to a somewhat distasteful kicking of a top dog who has been downed. Falk could never have presented a prominent Party official in the same humiliating light; and so the real top dogs go untouched.

More typical of recent Polish cinema, however, was the official entry at the Montreal festival, A Train to Hollywood. Its, appallingly cute, buck-toothed heroine dreams of becoming a new Monroe. The director clearly shares her wish to break into the dollar market. And here his priorities are Jaruzelski's: What is needed is not criticism, but hard currency. One understands why the best Polish directors are dispirited. To grant them too free a rein would seem like playing with fire to Party officials, who still sweat at night remembering Solidarity. Ironically, then, glasnost is likely to presage more freedom of expression in the USSR than in the traditionally more liberal Poland.

Hungarian cinema, meanwhile, has succumbed to a sort of incestuousness. The careful limiting to the abuses of the fifties, sidestepping those of the present, and the leisureliness with which it repents, carry an air of conformism that hangs over most recent Hungarian films. If Marta Meszaros' Diary for My Loves escapes to a certain extent the academicism that has reduced the anti-Stalinist film to the status of a genre--rendering it almost as remote from personal experience as the Western is from the lives of modern Americans--it is because of its being so firmly rooted in autobiography. It is in fact the second installment in the director's filmic autobiography, which ends with her stranded in Moscow during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, rattling the bars of the Hungarian Embassy gate, demanding to be allowed to go home. Where other filmmakers are concerned, however, the authorities' ploy of permitting criticism while limiting it to the past has proved a canny means of diluting dissent.

Flamboyant and Operatic

If the fire of criticism, however, has been damped in Poland and has lost its sense of purpose in Hungary, it seems to have been rekindled on another edge of the Soviet empire: in Georgia, from where Tenghiz Abuladze's Repentance has recently emerged to great acclaim. (It won the Special Jury Grand Prize at Cannes.) Abuladze's film is clearly being presented abroad as part of Gorbachev's effort to convince world opinion that glasnost really means what it says. This work is very different from Polish and Hungarian films. More open aesthetically (to a Westerner, Abuladze may seem to resemble a politicized Fellini--Amarcord with two extra turns of the screw), it is flamboyant and operatic, studded with allegorical set pieces and dream sequences. Whereas the Poles and Hungarians have practiced a small-scale realism that punctures official facades by demonstrating their disparity from local truths (it was no accident that Solidarity was a network of local union branches, with little centralization), Abuladze employs a variety of magic realism. The results may be aesthetically more exciting, but it is less enlightening politically, as I try to demonstrate.

Repentance centers on the aftermath of the death of a widely respected Georgian mayor, Varlam Arivadze. Following his burial with all honors, his family is surprised to discover his dug-out, dirt-stained corpse three different times in their garden. They react somewhat theatrically. A guard is posted at the family vault. A woman is duly apprehended and hauled off to court. There she declares that she will continue to dig up Varlam until the truth about him becomes known. Varlam's hidden side comes to light in the courtroom: He supervised deportations of "enemies of the people" under Stalin. One of them was a painter named Stefan, the woman's father, whose work Varlam had deemed bourgeois and individualistic. The film's finest scene shows her and her mother wandering futilely amid piles of logs cut at a labor camp, hoping to find Stefan's name carved on the end of one of them. The courtroom revelations cause Varlam's grandson to rebel against the family's hypocrisy and finally to kill himself. Repenting too late, Varlam's son digs up his father's corpse and throws it to the crows.

The most striking aspect of Abuladze's film is its presentation of Varlam as a composite dictator: a statue of Napoleon on his desk, a Hitler moustache and a Mussolini black shirt all serve as cryptic camouflage for the implied reference to Stalin. And here one's problems with the film--excellent though it is--begin. Abuladze may intend a reference to Stalin as well as to Hitler--and may even daringly imply, in the irreverent manner of Makaveyev, that Stalin's corpse also ought to be placed ignominiously on public display--but Varlam's bullish neck, black shirt, and operatic manner are more reminiscent of Mussolini than any other dictator; he thereby unwittingly raises the specter of "redeeming qualities." Stalin's terrible deeds are somehow mitigated by association with the most florid and least effective of the thirties' great dictators. It is almost as if Abuladze is saying that Stalinism is to be paralleled with fascism rather than nazism--prompting one to think that the Soviets congenitally unable to accuse themselves without simultaneously justifying themselves by reminding other of their offenses.

Images of Hitler

The use of the images of Mussolini and Hitler is obviously justified as the camouflage that permitted the film to be made in the first place (even now, as witness Gorbachev's November 1987 speech, open denunciation of Stalin is hardly the order of the day in the USSR), but the viewer must remember to remove these trappings. It seems at moments as if Abuladze himself fails to do so, as when he says of his film that "it takes place in Georgia, but might have happened any place where laws and human souls are violated and terror, denunciations and fear become the usual state of society." Lest my objections seem perverse, it is worth nothing that regardless of Abuladze's deliberate intentions (trust the tale, not the teller, Lawrence rightly reminds us), Varlam's fairy-tale qualities give him some of the glow that surrounds the recollected figures in the Tavianis' Night of the Shooting Stars.

Varlam leaps from high windows into the night, where he lands safely on horseback, followed by his two epicene, Kafkaesque assistants. Repeatedly he breaks into song. It is as if his accuser's childhood memories of him have invested Varlam with an aura, despite everything. (This helps explain both his own preeminence and that of authoritarian leaders in general: They allow one to recover the sense of safety of childhood.) If even his accuser, Keti, views him in magical terms, how easy it must be for Varlam to bewitch those with no direct knowledge of his darker side.

The mixture of political criticism and a celebratory magical aesthetic leaves one vaguely uneasy. If the film identifies boisterous music as mendacious Abuladze, (like Adrian Leverkuhn, wants to make ironic use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: The "Ode to Joy" resounds as official assurance as Stefan hangs in irons), the identifications problematic in the context of the film's own formal ebullience. If Abuladze rejects the Polish and Hungarian plain style as a guarantee of veracity, how is he to indicate truth? The presentation of truth as a dream shows that Soviet society--or Soviet officialdom--still cannot face up to its past (though on the evidence of Repentance, it may be on the verge of waking). The East Europeans, meanwhile, have long been wide awake in the real world, as the sobriety of their style declares.

But if it is possible to discern a problem at the heart of the aesthetics of magic realism--how are the magic and the realism to gel? --Abuladze could well respond by pointing to the film's explicit identification of the dream as the revealer of false surfaces. In dreams the ambiguous appearances of reality melt away, rendering visible the deep hidden structures of power. Thus Nino, Stefan's wife, dreams of pursuit by Varlam even before Stefan has been taken into custody: In one of the modulations of the burial motif that runs through the film, she imagines that she and Stefan escape by burying themselves up to their necks in a field (the motif has all the ambiguous condensation of a dream, for their mode of escape is identical with a punishment favored by the Tartars). But Nino's dream comes too late: The arresting knights (their armored presence is one of Abuladze's least successful dream touches) arrive the moment she awakes.

Poetic of the Absurd

Abuladze might also contend that only a poetics of the absurd is adequate to the absurd arbitrariness of a reality governed by a dictator's whims. I am not sure, however, that he would argue thus, for one of the film's sequences places this argument on very shaky ground. In one scene--staged alongside a white piano and an allegorical figure of an appropriately blind justice--Stefan's older friend explains to him the rationale of confession and denunciation. Yes, I did denounce you, Stefan. Not only that; I confessed to the most outlandish charges and implicated as many people as possible. Why did I do so? So as to render the absurdity of events so patent that in the end the authorities will recognize that the accusations are unfounded. The scene may be a dream (Stefan's? Keti's? Abuladze's dreamer, like his dictator, seems to be a composite). In any case, Stefan is not convinced. When madmen rule, there is no hope of official recognition of absurdity in government policy.

The most striking feature of Repentance is the religious tenor clearly apparent in its title. It dispenses with the socialist self-criticism persisting along with dutiful academicism in the Hungarian cinema. It may be because Georgians are granted a license to criticize denied to outsiders--or because the magic realist style shows deference to authority by avoiding direct criticism. Let the ending is an astonishingly open apologia for religion. Varlam had presided initially over the decay and then the destruction by dynamite of the local church. The final scene shows Keti, who has been baking a cake, leaning out of her window to answer an old woman in the street who asks, "Does this road lead to the church?" When Keti says no, the woman walks away, muttering, "What use is a road that does not lead to the church?" Why this final turn to the other-worldly? Abuladze seems to be making an analogy between art and the church. Art and the church are, as it were, in the world but not of it; they take cognizance of the world (the realism in magic realism) but only on their own terms (the magic in magic realism). After all, the authorities can live with a kingdom that is not of this world: It will not impinge upon their jurisdiction.

No End, by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski--the most remarkable film to have emerged from the Soviet bloc during the last two years--also makes use of the supernatural but steers clear of any sectarian religious feeling. Indeed, the dignity it accords suicide has prompted the Roman Catholic Church in Poland to condemn it--even as the Party was criticizing its intransigent dissent. The film traces the way in which the ghost of an opposition lawyer guides the defense of one of his clients, a Solidarity activist, from the grave. The lawyer's ghost lingers around the outer edges of his wife's coming and goings, all the while exerting a gentle seduction upon her. At the end of the film, she gasses herself and--in a scene whose somber exaltation rivals that of the conclusion of Cocteau's Orphee--they walk out together into the night.

Mixed Origins

Kieslowski's film can be situated squarely in the tradition of Polish political supernaturalist art founded in the nineteenth century by Mickiewicz's poem "Forefathers' Eve." The film is the definitive expression of the dark night of the Polish soul following the imposition of martial law, the will to die that followed Solidarity's death. Falk's Hero of the Year, by way of contrast, exudes the self-disgust that may be experienced after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. One is mortified to find oneself not only still alive but being drawn back into a system that can humiliate one at will. At least in Poland that system is not about to change.

Taken together, Repentance and No End seem to indicate a resurfacing of the religious impulse at the friable edge of the Soviet empire. Their interest in the otherworldly is surely a corollary of terminal dissatisfaction with the order of this world. It is interesting to note that the religious idiom should be adopted in places well away from Moscow--in a major city in Georgia by Abuladze and in a minor one in Poland by Kieslowski--at a time when another religious revival (the Islamic one) is nibbling away at the Soviet underbelly. These films dream of a kingdom not of this world: a kingdom defined only by negating all claims that the world is as it should be.