Before The Revolution 1 – Khrustalyov, My Car 0
This is my favorite Bertolucci and my least favorite German so far. The character in Before The Revolution represents the tendency of some who want radical political change to be very particular in the form of that change. It’s not enough for him to overthrow the government: Everybody must agree with him on everything because to disagree with him is a moral failure, and every small action in all of life has moral implications. I also feel Betolucci’s style works better for this premise than with The Conformist or Spider’s Strategem.
Khrustalyov, My Car seems like a cross between My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Amarcord. My issue with it is that it’s a little too eager to rub the viewer’s face in shit. It may be intentional that the plot is hard to get a handle on, but if it is, although the cinematography is amazing, there just isn’t enough of interest to make that work.
Another pretty spectacular match-up. German’s film is sort of a Kafkaesque version of Fellini (or maybe a Felliniesque version of Kafka). The Bertolucci is a little clunky compared with his later films, but powerful nonetheless.
some plot details, background and comments on khrustalyov, taken from here: New Left Review, Tony Wood – Time Unfrozen The Films of Aleksei German
Shooting started on German’s latest film Khrustalev, mashinu! (Khrustalev, my car!, 1998) in 1992, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a new series of problems to confront: US backers pulled out when the director refused to concede to their demand that Stalin be played by an American. The film is set in early 1953, at the time of the so-called Doctors’ Plot. On January 13, as Stalin lay dying, the state news agency announced that many of the country’s leading medical authorities had been arrested as spies responsible for the deaths of prominent Soviet politicians and generals: in the pay of ‘Joint’, a CIA-funded Zionist organization, or else of MI6, they had conspired to undermine the health of the nation’s leadership. That Beria may have speeded Stalin’s death has been widely conjectured. Whether through Beria’s machinations, Stalin’s paranoia or, more likely, Beria’s manipulation of the latter, key members of Stalin’s close entourage were sacked in the months just prior to his death. Poskrebyshev, his personal secretary of twenty years, was fired in November 1952; the chief of Stalin’s bodyguards General Vlasik—also in his post for twenty years—was replaced in December 1952 by one of Beria’s men, Vasilii Khrustalev. It is from this peripheral player in the drama of history that German’s film takes its title. We see Beria at Stalin’s bedside, shouting at a nurse for not changing the Generalissimo’s sheets, urging the doctors to make Stalin break wind, and briskly closing the old man’s eyes when he has rattled out his last breath. After the sobs and murmured laments of the housekeeper, we hear Beria’s voice as he opens the door, shouting—with, according to Stalin’s daughter, ‘the ring of triumph unconcealed’ —‘Khrustalev! My car!’
Strategies of disorientation
Again, the plot is elusive—events are hinted at rather than laid before us. Klenskii, a leading surgeon, goes to the hospital where he works and in one room discovers a double of himself. He realizes that his own arrest must be a part of some as yet unknown murky dealings, and he flees to the countryside. Klenskii is caught but—after undergoing horrific treatment by his captors—is then suddenly spirited back to Moscow to Stalin’s deathbed, where the leader lies prone after a cerebral haemorrhage. He is dying an ignominious death, in soiled bed linen and with next to no medical attention. Beria’s summoning of Klenskii is clearly a token gesture, since it is already too late. German’s film has none of Beria’s reported ring of triumph; it is not a celebration of the death of Stalin, but rather a brutal, farcical exploration of the lives of a series of characters at a particular point in time. There is Klenskii, his wife and mistress, his family, their neighbours, his wife’s Jewish relatives who have to be hidden; there is a worker at a fur-coat shop who, at the beginning of the film, happens to stroll past as the NKVD are lying in wait for an unknown suspect, and is carted off to Siberia. And there is Klenskii’s son, a young boy whose grown-up voice (as in Ivan Lapshin) we hear at irregular intervals in the film. But again, the boy is not witness to everything that happens, and the film is not told exclusively from his point of view; although several scenes are shot with hand-held cameras below eye-level, suggestive perhaps of a child’s perspective, these also have the effect of denying the camera any authority over proceedings, any sense of control.
This strategy—developed in the earlier films—is carried to an extreme in Khrustalev, mashinu!: throughout the opening sequences, the viewer is left with a growing sense of unease at not knowing what is happening, whose perspective it is being viewed from, what relevance these scenes will have later in the film. This unease builds into a form of narrative panic, as the camera stumbles into dimly lit interiors without explanations or establishing shots, as we meet more and more characters whose importance is unclear, as our hopes that a plot will establish itself are continually disappointed. The film unfolds as a series of farcical situations, full of comical snippets of dialogue and grotesquerie, but the comedy is often lost under the weight of the viewer’s need for sense, and under the increasing atmosphere of threat, of the possibility of a descent into untrammelled brutality. The senselessness and the shadow of violence mark a daring but brilliant attempt to depict the paranoias of late Stalinism. Indeed, the film’s logic is that of a hallucinatory, delusional condition, bordering on hysteria. Plot, events, the chain of causes and consequences are all secondary to the evocation of a frenzied imaginative state.
As if in echo of this dislocated imaginary, German shifts between a variety of registers. There are moments of crude realism—the harrowing scene where Klenskii is sodomized by his captors in the back of a van—which seem to belong to the Russian genre of chernukha, literally ‘black stuff’: a realism mired in the grime, sludge, sweat and swearing of daily life. Film such as Vasilii Pichul’s Malenkaia Vera (Little Vera, 1988) and Vitalii Kanevskii’s Zamri, umri, voskresni (Freeze, Die, Be Reborn, 1990) are prime exponents of chernukha, and are clearly influenced by German. Kanevskii was, in fact, German’s protégé in the late 1980s; his aesthetic of brak—amateurish or clumsy workmanship—makes an appearance at the beginning of Ivan Lapshin, as we hear the narrator cough and the sounds of equipment being set up. Both here and in his earlier films, too, German owes a debt to Italian neo-realism, and to Russian responses to the neo-realists such as Andrei Konchalovskii’s Istoriia Asi Kliachinoi (Asya’s Happiness, 1966). The dialogue is full of contemporary slang and snatches of popular tunes, with a rough, improvised quality accentuated by the frequent overlappings and the intrusion of extraneous noise and voices. German has also made extensive use of non-professional actors, another neo-realist practice.
There are, however, moments of absurdity and burlesque in Khrustalev, mashinu! that seem to appeal to a different cinematic tradition. In this connexion, it is perhaps interesting to note that German considers Fellini ‘cinema’s only realist’. This last remark was made with reference to Roma (1952), a city which provides a coincidental link to Gogol’, whose deranged, dislocated Russia clearly influenced German’s latest film. (Indeed, its working title was Rus’-troika, a nod to the last lines of Dead Souls.) There are also moments which hint at allegory—Klenskii is attacked by a band of children who beat him with sticks, a brutalized and brutalizing new generation, Stalin’s progeny. But frequently, German’s shots have an otherworldly beauty, a composed lucidity which challenges any intricate symbolic reading. Near the beginning of Khrustalev, mashinu!, a stray dog lopes silently down a snow-covered street; a bleak, bleached white expanse stretches before Lapshin as he promises to clean up the earth and plant his garden. This is the lingering camera of a director taking pleasure in the shot as an aesthetic object in itself—shades of Tarkovsky, perhaps.
Thanks for that plot description Tren, it helped me understand a little more what the hell was going on.
no problem, i wasn’t exactly up to speed with the doctors’ plot myself ;)
Khrustalyov, My Car! (0) – Before the Revolution (1)
Probably the best Bertolucci I’ve seen.
Khrustalyov, My Car! (German) – 0 // Before the Revolution (Bertolucci) – 1
Two very ambitious films, but it’s interesting to me that the former was German’s last and one into which he poured many years of careful work while the latter was Bertolucci’s first and feels almost slapped together, fueled entirely by the passion and industry of youth. They’re both quite challenging but I found Bertolucci’s more rewarding. Then again, it’s not German’s goal to make a rewarding film… the tone Khrustalyov, My Car! builds up is downright hellish. And it’s a cold hell. Well, I have to choose one or the other, and I prefer hot climates myself.
" It may be intentional that the plot is hard to get a handle on"
Yes, it is very much intentional. German has referred to his work as “a cinema of background,” by which he means (in terms of this particular film) that you have the camera sort of staggering forward through the murk while you get a lot of intrusions from the periphery of the frame and of the story, so you have a lot of figurative and narrative interpolation seemingly near-constantly going on in the film.
Sorry I missed the start of this match. Personal crises abound.
Thanks to Riss for picking up the ball.
Khrustalyov My Car – 1 vs. Before the Revolution – 0
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) – 0 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) – 1
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) – 0 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) – 1
I liked both very much and I guess my only gripe is with the German film and how the plot is often difficult to follow, at least for me anyway. I admire Bertolucci’s film the most because of the power and the strength behid it and knowing how old he was at the time is even more impressive. Watching films now by people who are in their early twenties are rarely as rewarding as a film by someone like a young Bertolucci.
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) 1 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) 0
Khrustalyov, My Car! is just such a magnificent culmination of the versatility of cinema. Obfuscation is certainly purposeful, but not something to be tossed aside as incomprehensible, or alien to cinematic practice but, includes that lovely element of filmic self-awareness, alongside the purposes of recreating the atmosphere of a period. The wavering shifts of style mentioned in the article above can serve these parallel purposes, representing the ‘paranoias of late Stalinism’ as well as the dreamlike, whimsical frustration of cinematic creation: the convergence of several ideas, feelings, images, which can often originate in dreams of memory, that are pieced together amidst the natural haze of detail innate in the passage of time from inception to filmmaking. The recurrence from Ivan Lapshin of the child narrator, who is far from a reliable spectator, and whose presence is scattered, defying the creation of a reliable overarching structure, acts as the earliest indicator of these tactics. Wood, when mentioning this child narration, in the same breath refers to the play of the camera at low eye level, as if the child’s perspective, and the ‘effect of denying the camera any authority over proceedings, any sense of control.’ This play with POV and camera’s presence is equally utilized with Klensky. In several of the extended tracking shots of interior hallways, the camera at first seems to be the perspective of the General, people in the side of the frame looking towards the camera with the same reactions as if looking at the man, only for us to then see him walk in front of the camera. This multiplicity and duality of the self’s image, and the mind’s function, is reasserted within the plot line in the scene of the General’s double found in the hospital. The absurd elements similarly bear these two functions, both to mirror a chaos of the era and the irrational acceptance of a leader’s illogical whim based on fear of punishment and eventual force of habit (i.e. the continued reference to Klensky’s cognac as tea); alongside the mirroring of a chaos in the film production process (like the presence of the sounds of setting up equipment at the opening of Ivan Lapshin, quite akin to the cacophony of animal noises, shrieks, spitting, etc. present here). Other scenes act even more outside of contribution to a narrative or plot, acting more as creations of an atmosphere or images with reverberate with a public memory (both tactics seem present in the repeated shots of streams of black cars riding down the snowy lanes, a contribution to creating a period, and a possible audience connection made with Stalin’s car). So, despite what may seem as a film acting to distance the audience from the director or his intentions in these confusions, German seems to far more be aligning the audience with the director’s gaze into the lense. Into the practice of director, and the function of a camera, to capture of period of time, be it an era or 24 frames.
Before the Revolution was still fantastic as well, and bears a similar parallel in the struggle with the passage of time and the loss of the momentary, only able to see the future and the past so, in essence, living before the revolution, but my vote just had to go to German.
Thanks for the write-up on Khrustalyov, Max. It’s certainly a film which leaves its spectator with a sense of confusion, so reading reviews like this and the one posted by Tren above are a welcome addition.
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!): 1 —vs— Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution): 0
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) – 1 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) – 0
Khrustalyov, My Car! is one of my personal favourites; it explores such interesting avenues within the inherent potentials of the cinematic language – as outlined above by Tren and Max – in its somewhat claustrophobic, frustrating and downright bizarre depiction of the Soviet Doctors’ Plot. Possibly above all, I admire its stylistically disorienting lengthy tracking shots which capture – in gorgeous, almost archaic black-and-white cinematography – the simultaneous movements and random chatter of various characters walking in-and-out of the frame, simply trying to go about their business in a time and place of intense fear, confusion and horror; it seems to me like a natural and creative progression in German’s style from his previous film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin. I’ve never taken part in the Director’s Cup before, but Before the Revolution sounds interesting so I’ll try and watch it soon.
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) 0 Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) 1
Not big fan of Bertolucci but the operatic ending is great and yes, “non si può vivere senza Rossellini!”
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) 1 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) 0
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) 1 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) 0
Khrustalyov My Car 1 – Before the Revolution 0
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) 1 – Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution)
So I’ve been watching a LOT of movies the past several days to get ahead before a long vacation I will be taking next week. And by a LOT I mean a lot more than usual even, which is already a lot. So it’s easy for them to kind of start running into each other in my memory, but Before the Revolution was the least memorable of all them, literally. I can’t remember what it was about at all right now. I just remember not thinking too highly of it. I’ll have to browse through it again to remember why and come back to give a better comment, but the fact that I can’t recollect anything about it at all except some guy dying in a pond doesn’t say much good about it.
Khrustalyov, My Car! is wonderfully mad. I’m glad for Sally’s post explaining more of the real narrative behind it, but I was acutally rather content not understanding that much. I’m curious why no one else is mentioning the huge spitting motif though? Characters are spitting in different ways in almost every scene. Is this supposed to be some kind of metaphor of people trying to expel some element of themselves? Is there some kind of metaphorical bad taste in their mouth or poison they’ve been fed?
@Risselada
Interesting observation; now that I think on it, I do remember a lot of spitting going on in the film, though I previously hadn’t the insight to think of it as a potential motif… I’ll keep that in mind next time I watch it. Cheers.
As I remember one of the first images with the title is a child spitting on a mirror on the image of himself. The very last audible sound before the credits is a man spitting. Just watch and people spit in almost every scene. Some people just make spitting notices as emoting during talking. And of course there is the moment when they are trying to make Stalin’s corpse fart but he ends up spitting up a bunch of acid. Those are just some highlights.
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) 0 vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution) 1
I think I could vote for Before the Revolution only for that scene at the opera, but the fact is that I love everything about that film.
The characters and their interactions, the music, the story… everything is perfect.
It is definitely my favorite Bertolucci.
I’m getting 7-9 German
Looks like
Khrustalyov, My Car! – 9
Before the Revolution – 6
I count
9 German
7 Bertolucci
Risselada
Since I’m not sure where House is and it seems like this match should have been posted already, I’m taking it upon myself to do so. I hope this doesn’t cause confusion.
The extended voting period for this match lasts until 9:00 pm BST (8:00 pm GMT) on Wednesday, August 3, which means that users will have over 48 hours in order to publish their votes. The world map which lists all current time zones can be found on www.worldtimezone.com, so that everyone can be up to date about how much time is left.
After the voting period is over the votes will be counted and the results published. The next match should begin before 7pm BST (6pm GMT) on Wednesday, August 3.
Each user can vote on any match as long as he/she has watched both films that are lined-up against each other. An explanation for the preference in each case would be greatly appreciated. Managers are not allowed to vote on matches that their director participates in. The voting should be handled like this:
Film A 1 (or 0) – Film B 0 (or 1)
Please mark the winning film/score in large or heavy print.
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT NAME BOTH FILMS IN YOUR POST YOUR VOTE WILL NOT BE COUNTED
The match you´re going to vote for on this thread is:
Aleksei German (Khrustalyov, My Car!) vs. Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution)
If you have not seen these films and are not able to access them on your own then pm me and I may be able to give you access to the streaming links.