WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Karlovy Vary

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast July 28, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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Years ago, as an artificial construct of the friendship between the Soviet Union and then-Czechoslovakia, the film festivals in Moscow and Karlovy Vary were held in alternate years. Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival was re-constituted as a solo event, and quickly established itself on the world stage as one of the key and critical film festivals in the world.

The Moscow Film Festival also now became an annual event, and then, to compete with Karlovy Vary, moved the festival dates earlier into June. This year, the Moscow Film Festival went through a crisis. Michael Haneke, the Austrian director of Cache accepted the presidency of the Moscow Film Festival jury and helped the festival handpick the other jury members. Then, shortly before the Festival began, he said he was not coming. This led to a public outcry by the festival management. When the festival got underway, Russian filmmakers complained that there were almost no Russian films being shown. One of the long-awaited Russian films, Transit by Aleksandr Rogozhkin, went to compete at the festival in Karlovy Vary.

Rogozkin’s most recent success before Transit was the wonderful story of a lonely widow in the far north who takes in two soldiers during World War II, Cuckoo. Like Cuckoo, Transit is set in the far North, this time on an island off the Siberian coast. Most of the pilots training for combat here are rookies—young men without much flying experience. Some of their supplies and planes are coming over the Bering straight, flown in by the American air force, with mostly American women pilots. Love overcomes the boundaries of language between the hormonal Soviet pilots and the dashing American women in uniform. The structure of Transit is novelistic, with lots of intertwining plots. The camp commandant is a wounded war hero given to rages of temper. One of the Kamchatkan “natives” is a girl who works in the kitchen, and she is three months pregnant by the commandant. The commandant’s wife, in the meantime, is an English-Russian interpreter, who is having an affair with the air force captain. The camp’s inventive new cook, a chef, is a former airplane designer recently released from prison. Transit’s meandering storyline comes to a climax when the commandant is suddenly found dead, shot with a small caliber rifle.

An investigator arrives and almost everyone who had any contact with the commandant is under suspicion—they all had a motive. Transit is a film set against an interesting background, with a Tolstoyan cast of characters.

A more radical Russian film in Karlovy Vary was the one-hour documentary Blockade. The film is made up of footage shot by Soviet cameramen inside Leningrad during the siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, during World War II. This footage has, until now, been totally suppressed. Rather than concentrate on the heroic defense of Leningrad against the Nazi invaders, this footage focuses on the lives of ordinary Russians under siege. The film is without any dialogue. The original footage was shot silent, and the filmmakers added sound effects.

The combined effect of Blockade is nothing short of astonishing. A huge downtown building—a library—on the Nevsky Prospect is hit with mortar fire and burns to the ground as firemen vainly battle the fire. Bodies are found frozen on the sidewalk as the citizens of Leningrad trudge through the snow and ice. The dead are wrapped in burlap and dragged through the streets over ice to be buried in common pits. In a huge public assembly, a half dozen accused traitors stand on the back of trucks, nooses strung around their necks. As the trucks pull away, they hang in the public square.

The footage was suppressed because its portrait of the daily life is decidedly unheroic and counter to the propagandistic view of Russian history. The film Blockade transgresses being a powerful portrait of Leningrad under siege; it becomes a moving portrait of how civilians suffer and die in all wars.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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