Snow is falling

(not all around me, as I am indoors), but children are certainly playing and having fun. These shifts in temperature and seasons worry me, not least because it means many of our Slavic brothers will have to re-jig their calendars. As you will see in this table, whole swathes of them still rely on a natural calendar, hence why the month named after ‘harvest’ and ‘leaves falling’ varies as you move through Slavdom. And the month of blossoming may have to come forward - although why the Ukrainians bloom so early, we shall never know.

Talking loud and saying nothing

New Czechoslovakian Football Association trainers today:

Adidas and Communist kitsch in one… See you in 8 days.

9 F00-65036 ROYAL AUCLAIR 10-11-01

Joe Tizzard Paul Nicholls
Second to Hedgehunter under a big weight in 2005. Same owner as Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Kauto Star. Will relish the likely fast ground.
Rating: 7/10 Odds: 40-1

No chance of me winning the sweepstake at work this year, then. This is the first year I actually feel like having a bet on the Grand National - 4 years working at a famous bookmakers put me off gambling in general, but as Point Barrow is so clearly going to win this year’s race, and at 9/1 at present, it must be worth a punt.

The news here is full of the end of Prince William’s break-up - suicide bombers in Morocco have been relegated to second place, and the issues the anti-Putinists in both the UK and Russia are experiencing are way down the list.

And this little story filled me with an immense amount of hope and joy, especially taken alongside my current reading material.

[...]In vain the frightened Tamoszius

would attempt to speak, to plead the limitations of the flesh; in vain would the puffing and breathless ponas Jokubas insist, in vain would Teta Elzbieta implore. ‘Szalin!‘ Marija would scream. ‘Palauk! isz kelio! What are you paid for, children of hell?’ And so, in sheer terror, the orchestra would strike up again, and Marija would return to her place and take up her task.[...]

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Estrada

Away this weekend. Enjoy.

The Party and the Guests

has finally arrived from Second Run DVD - after repeated delays I finally managed to see the film banned forever by the Czechoslovak authorities in 1973. The film had been made in 1966, banned, released in 1968, and then, as I said, banned forever. Or until 1989 at the very least.

And not without reason, I might add. The film has a dark absurdism, rooted firmly in the very nature of Czechoslovak history, especially of the 1950’s and 1960’s, yet also drawing on literary works, both Czech (Kafka looms large over the film, especially the Trial and the Castle), and more international - Beckett and Ionesco would both have revelled in the situation the director dreams up for the protagonists. And yet as allegorical and playful as the film is, one cannot help but see the dark heart that beats just beneath the surface, as the various characters change their behaviour over the course of the film.

The film opens with an idyllic scene of the main characters, four men and three women, three couples and a charming single man, enjoying a picnic in forest clearing (standard Slavic romantic images of birches and meadows along with a sense of bourgeoisie calm) - they are going to a banquet/celebration/party (the word ’slavnosti’ is problematic to translate - similar to the German ‘Fest’) to be held nearby later. So, they eat, drink, and be merry.

They then dress up and head off to the party. As they walk up a path, they are accosted by a strange individual, Rudolf, who asks them numerous personal questions and refuses to leave them alone. As they try to leave him, a group of men appear from the woods and lead them off to a clearing.

The men form a perimeter, and a table and chair are set up at one end of the clearing. The seven guests stand before it, and the Rudolf sits down, holding a folder. He again questions them, and at the suggestion of the other men, they split themselves in to two groups, men and women, and stand in an area marked out as an enclosure. The single charming man engages with his interlocutor, whilst another falls silent, and a third tries to leave. He is grabbed by the thugs and beaten.

At this point, the host arrives and apologises profusely - Rudolf and the other men, it turns out are his adoptive son and other guests from the party.

At this point I need to head off to bed as I am still recovering from a cold, but more will follow tomorrow, hopefully with some images and maybe even a trailer. There is so much more to outline, before I even try to get started properly on analysing it…

Building up

very slowly to watching ‘Satantango‘ by Bela Tarr (please excuse the lack of accents in both the titles and the director’s name, but my knowledge of the Hungarian keyboard and/or the html codes for these characters is somewhat non-existent).

Almost eight hours of Tarkovskii/Antonioni- influenced Central European gloom. This is the most readily available (in the UK at least) of the 24 most important films listed in The Cinema of Central Europe. It is seemingly a film composed of very long, static shots, a film in which very little happens.

How does one cope with this? I saw the Star Wars trilogy in a single 8-hour sitting as a six-year old (with breaks between each film), but that was about the single most exciting thing to have happened in my life up to that point. Andrei Rublev was intolerable in Petrozavodsk, yet I have watched it several times since with no overwhelming urge to either kill myself or to dig my way out of the room with my bare hands.

I suppose that watching it at home frees me somewhat from the necessity to watch it all in one sitting. I can get a drink, I can go to the loo. But will this impact on my perception of the film as a whole. If one leaves a shot of a muddy road in the rain and returns some 15 minutes later to what you believe to be the same shot, will my understanding of the film be compromised? Or simply any feelings of empathy I may feel to wards the protagonists’ predicament?

In certain ways, the same question(s) are raised when watching Sokurov, especially Days of Eclipse or his documentaries about Russians living on the peripheries of the former Soviet Union - his use of filters, long static shots and so on draw one into the tedium and apparent lengthening of even the shortest periods of time that the characters experience, as well as the oppressive nature their surroundings, be it the Central Asian desert, mountains, or even the confines of a submarine.

Edward Said

wrote a very interesting book called Orientalism. I was reminded of this today as a delightfully middle class woman sought to purchase some Serbian language learning materials to converse with her (soon to be) daughter-in-law’s parents. She was to travel to Beograd and stay with them, and was concerned that they would not have a bath or shower, that the food would be terrible and that it would be cold. She also stated that she would buy them a washing machine as these kinds of goods are very hard to come by.

Now, the point of this interlude is to query if (and indeed, how), Western European (especially British) perceptions of the former Soviet Bloc have changed and continue to change following the fall of Communism and the expansion of the EU. I have posted before about the Russian middle classes that have appeared in the last 7-8 years, and I note that many of the Central European nations are now home to shopping centres on an almost American scale. Although the exterior of many building have not changed, the interiors would, I’m sure, shame many inhabitants and businesses of this fair isle. So, as I know at least some of my readers have a wealth of experience in said Mittel-Ost Europa, what do you think?

Kazan was certainly a culture shock to me some 10 years ago now, but Moscow, Piter and Petrozavodsk less so. (Although whether this was due to higher material standards, or due to lower expectations, I don’t know). Central Europe is now very much part of Europe - the languages and cultures may change, but Pizza Hut is all pervading, as are Ipods, digital cameras, nice airports, tarmacced roads, washing machines, etc. The notion of the launderette still has to take off, I believe, and takeaways are, I would imagine, lagging slightly behind, but what can you do?

The difference between false memories and true ones

is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Salvador Dali

12.08 East of Bucharest raises a great many questions about the nature of memory and the different interpretations of a single event from the varying perspectives within and without it. In this case, the flight of the Ceaucescu’s in December 1989, and the question(s) of the varying degrees of involvement of individuals in the events in a provincial Romanian town.

I found this particulary interesting, not least because (I thought) the images of the dead President and his wife are one of my clearest memories of the collapse of the Communist regimes, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The question, however, for me, at least, is how much of this I have (re)created after the event - in fact, I m no longer even sure that the footage of the two dead bodies actually appeared on British TV, and I can’t find a copy on YouTube or anywhere else to check, and even if I did, I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t simply fulfilling the expectations I have having read about the footage in a number of other sources.

This period, or rather the UK media’s coverage of it, was one of the major influences that has fired (and, of course continues to fire) my passion for all parts of the former Soviet Bloc. So, dear readers, can any of you confirm, either way, whether or not the footage appeared on the Beeb?

Four good things today

1. Starting work on the two Russian translations I have at 8.30 this morning.
2. Wong Kei for dinner.
3. 12.08 East of Bucharest.
4. Mike Leigh in the next urinal at the cinema.