This month (June, 2018) writer Martin Kessler takes over The Pink Smoke with his five part series on Russian director Aleksei German, a titan of le cinema who is surprising obscure in the West.

Join us as Kessler explores the filmmaker's career, step by step: from medieval sci-fi to Soviet noir to wartime romance - German's body of work is brilliantly wild and unpredictable.

{PART I: ANOTHER CENTURY. ANOTHER PLANET}
{PART II: ESCAPE VELOCITY}
{PART III: APOAPSIS}
{PART IV: ECLIPSE}
{PART V: EVENT HORIZON}

~ article by martin kessler ~
~ artwork by patrick horvath ~

Phew! After a fourteen year interlude in his directorial career, it feels good to get back to the films that German actually directed. Buckle up!

In the post-Soviet world, German’s style exploded, becoming far more baroque. He had the opportunity to deal with taboo subjects that he had previously only hinted at. He was free to depict Stalinism as he saw it.

That isn’t to say that Khrustalyov, My Car! is a very direct film, just that German could portray the important figures of the time, the gulags, the horror of the era without concerns of repression. Perhaps to its detriment, Khrustalyov, My Car! would develop a reputation as the very opposite of direct. In 2000, film critic Jonathan Romney wrote that Khrustalyov, My Car! “…may be Russian cinema's answer to Finnegans Wake.” That description alone gives the impression of the film being dauntingly difficult to interpret and summarize. Maybe, maybe not. I think it could be cinema’s answer to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, for being something of a rollercoaster ride through the dark absurdities of the collective Russian unconscious. Who am I to say though? Probably more than anything, it’s like Dante’s Inferno, penetrating and observing the hellish strata beneath the onion dome of Stalinism.

In reading about German’s films, I often found that they would be described by western critics as ‘inscrutable’, or even ‘nonsensical’, and I think most of that reputation comes from Khrustalyov, My Car!. However, I don’t think that’s a fair appraisal, especially when that expectation is applied retroactively to German’s previous films. Some people expect to not understand My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Twenty Days Without War, and Trial on the Road, so they overlook the stories that are right in front of their faces. Western writing about German’s films often make them sound far less accessible than I think they are. Some have even gone as far as to characterize German’s films as “non-narrative”, which is simply incorrect. There’s definitely a narrative though it’s not presented in conventional way.

I think it helps to build up to Khrustalyov, My Car!, getting a feel for how German expects viewers to read between the lines to see the story of the film. He didn’t seek to present his historical stories as the collection of figures and clearly plotted sequence of events that we typically think of when we look back from on high and with distance. He wanted to plunge us into the thick of it, and make us understand those historical stories as sensations! History as atmosphere and feeling. It’s true of all his film to some extent, but it’s particularly true of Khrustalyov, My Car!, which depicts its epoch as a whirly-twirly nightmare. Plot and exposition are present, but on the fringes of each scene. It creates a distinct air of paranoia and dread as important things are hinted at and whispered about on the peripheries of perception.

To be fair to most critics, some things are destined to go over heads or lost in translation.¹ For instance in Nancy Condee’s The Imperial Trace, I was impressed to read that while the the narrator of the film reflects on wrongly thinking that his grandmother had been a poet, misattributing a Blok poem she had recited, the film itself is visually quoting Blok’s most famous poetic line “Noch, ulitsa, fonar”, Night, street, lamppost. It’s an excellent detail, but I think for a film that functions on that level of detail it can become easy to get lost in the maze of interpreting meaning. Each scene is overflowing with visual and auditory information, which can make it difficult to draw out clear linear narrative meanings until looking back with hindsight or upon a repeat viewing. Not that the details are meaningless, but I think in part it’s a bit of a trick to keep viewers from ever feeling settled. Is that rumour true? Is that murmur important? Is that man over there in the background NKVD? I think for a film that functions in that way, it’s best to approach it in a more surface-level way and build from there. To not try squinting at it, and to instead simply watch and listen.

So let me get into the story of Khrustalyov, My Car! that I’ve promised that it actually has…

The film is set in February of 1953. The last days of Stalinism. While there are no present-day scenes, it’s similar to My Friend Ivan Lapshin in that the film is narrated by an adult who is also a child character on screen. That character is very closely modelled on German’s own childhood, though a couple years younger than German would have been at the time. German also explained that while the boy may seem like him, he’s not quite. For instance at one point the character tries to report on his father, which German says he never did. He’s a bit of a pipsqueak; picked-on, bullied at school and teased by the girl cousins he lives with.

The script is an original creation of German and Karmalita’s, not based on a novel or pre-existing screenplay. Many of the characters in the film are more or less taken directly from German’s memories of childhood as well, like for instance his parent’s housekeeper-slave Nadya. In that regard the film becomes a ‘what if?’ of German’s life, filled-in with researched material (favouring aural histories over official information), including borrowing a chapter from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Where the film begins to deviate from German’s autobiography is in the child’s father, who is the main character. He’s a brain surgeon with a Jewish background, Klensky who is a ‘General of medical service’ and oversees a grand hospital. In contrast to the character of Ivan Lapshin, there’s something distinctly resilient about Klensky.

Klensky’s no weenie, he’s a full-blown sausage of a man. He’s prone to spontaneous gymnastic feats, doesn’t take things too seriously, and seems like he may actually have a chance of surviving the situation he’ll soon be plunged into.

Aleksei German originally cast writer Sergei Dovlatov to play Klensky. Apparently Dovlatov was the “Elvis of Russian Journalism”, and had escaped to the United States in 1979.² Dovlatov was a non-actor, but I think it was a potentially brilliant casting choice (there are a few other intellectual non-actors cast in the film), however Dovlatov died in 1990 at age 48, before Khrustalyov, My Car! entered production. I suspect some of Dovlatov’s personality and physical characteristics became incorporated German’s vision for the character of Klensky as seen in the final film.

The role of General Klensky would ultimately go to Yuri Tsurilo. Tsurilo described himself as “Gypsy by blood”, and had been a blacksmith acting in provincial theatre (much like the theatre depicted in My Friend Ivan Lapshin), racking up twenty years of acting experience while remaining unknown. Tsurilo says that he was discovered by Aleksei German after giving a performance in the chamberplay Minutes of the Meeting, in which his eyes were bloodshot and his face was covered in bruises because he had gotten into a brawl with a theatre director the previous night. Tsurilo had used a wide-rim fedora to help hide his beat-up face, which all came together to fit the image of Klensky that German had in mind.

Yuri Tsurilo would have been about 45 when production began on Khrustalyov, My Car!, and was in his 50s by the time the film would be released and he’d finally find success as an actor. Since then he’s continued in theatre and specialized in acting in films with a satirical bent. The most recent film I’ve seen him in is the excellent 2014 political satire, The Fool, directed by Yuri Bykov.

Another thing that distinguishes Klensky from Lapshin is that the woman who Lapshin pined for, Klensky is married too and freely cheats on. Nina Ruslanova who had played Natasha in My Friend Ivan Lapshin, here plays Klensky’s wife, who goes by Madame Klensky.

I think it’s remarkable how even though he made so few films so many years apart, you still see some of the same actors pop up from one film to the next. Tsurilo himself would work again with German in Hard to Be a God, and here I think it’s worth saying that he’s an incredible physical performer. Very tall, but often hunched over, he gives the impression that Klensky can be both the biggest and smallest person in the room. It’s a disorienting quality that’s consistent throughout the film. German seems to have set out to disorient, and there’s some carousel-like camera work, giving the feeling that Klensky is trapped in a vortex.³

Disorientation is perhaps the key word here, and it begins with the very first shot of the film. An especially slender dog running through one of those enormous and empty Soviet streets. The dog is so skinny that every time I watch the film, for a moment think I must have my television set to the wrong aspect ratio.

There’s a sort of prologue as we observe a stoker nicknamed Condom who makes the mistake of peering into a car that appears abandoned. He’s surprised to have secret police agents pile out of it like clowns getting out of a tiny car at the circus. Condom shouts that he wasn’t looking he was only passing by, as they drag him off, and he doesn’t reappear until the very end of the film. The prologue is like having Stalin-O-Vision goggles fasted firmly to your face, where they’ll stay for the next two and a half hours.

General Klensky goes about his business, but there’s something rotten in the air. Dread builds in the way that you might expect from a good slow-burn horror film. Klensky follows the rules and supervises his hospital. Apparently German intended the scenes of Klensky scatting while leading his staff through the halls as a sort of parody of “workplace musicals”. At one point Klensky even says “unauthorized death is prohibited” to one of his patients, which echos a line from Trial on the Road. However there are confused whispers of death on people’s lips. Sentiments of anti-semitism yelled by schoolchildren, leading to schoolyard brawls. There are fleets of black cars that hurry in the same direction, moving in formation like a school of sharks. There are rumours of Stalin in poor health, with the potential for a bloodbath when he dies. There are also rumours of a secret in Klensky’s own hospital.

The real inciting incident of the film is when Klensky discovers a room in his hospital mysteriously closed off. He axes his way into it, leading his staff. Inside is his doppelgänger, who has been hidden away. It adds to the film’s uncanniness. It’s generally assumed this aspect of the film was inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella The Double, but apparently in this was taken from fact. At that time in the Soviet Union, lookalikes would occasionally be used to appear on trial and to give a proper confession while the real person was already half way to a Gulag.

It’s funny that Klensky’s double is played by Ivan Matskevich, who was a character actor that had been appearing steadily in films since the 1970s, and would have been more familiar to audiences than the new-to-film Yuri Tsurilo. Matskevich would continue in character actor roles until his death in winter 2017.

There’s a great bit of slapstick choreography as the doppelgänger spits at Klensky, who deftly dodges, so the wad of phlegm smacks another doctor in the face instead.

You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that something’s up. Klensky gets ready to go on the run. He hastily packs, and hides money in his fedora. The walls are closing in on Klensky. Perhaps even visually.

The cinematographer was Vladimir Ilin. It was his first time working with German, (though he had shot The Torpedo Bombers so there was already some association) and together they created something far more claustrophobic than German’s previous films. It’s full of very tight framing and visual clutter. I should mention too that Khrustalyov, My Car! is mostly shot in long takes, but I don't think anyone could get away with calling it ‘slow cinema’. There's too much to see, and too much happening, for that. While many Slow Cinema films strive to put audiences into a reflective or meditative state, German strives to keep you constantly in the moment. There’s not an ounce of ponderousness in Khrustalyov, My Car!. Still, I wonder Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky may have been inspired by the film with the increase in camera movement and more intricately choreographed shots you see in their 2000 film Werkmeister Harmonies. The opening scene, wherein the motion of planetary bodies and an eclipse are explained using drunk patrons in a sort of dance, seems like something right out of Khrustalyov, My Car!. You have the full grammar and rhythm of a scene, with close-ups, wide shots, etcetera, just without the edits. For the sake of illustration, here are a variety of images from single shots in each film (Khrustalyov, My Car! on the left, Werkmeister Harmonies on the right) shown in sequential order:

Klensky leaves his home just before a vehicle full of NKVD show up (in a truck disguised to look like a logging truck) to take him away. He goes to the home of an old girlfriend, greeting her with a display of fire-breathing, which startles her, naturally. He asks her if she’ll let him stay the night and find him some civilian clothes. After a bit of awkward flirtation, he ends up sleeping next to her on a tiny bed.

Despite his attempt to flee, Klensky is ultimately caught. His family is evicted to an overcrowded communal apartment, and he’s sent off to a gulag. He doesn’t know it yet, but what he’s been accused of is being a part of The Doctor’s Plot. It’s a real historical event, but not a real plot. It was an invention of Stalin, who said that Jewish doctors were out to kill him, which lead to hundreds of doctors being arrested. I think this is where some of the critics’ accusations of ‘inscrutability’ come from, as the film never comes right out and explains what the event is that you’re watching unfold. I’m sure it’s a deliberate choice on German’s part though. It’s easy to look it up on Wikipedia now, and learn all about it, but the film gives a sense of what it was like while it was happening. It sounds counterintuitive, but I think to directly explain what was happening would make it impossible to fully comprehend. The lack of knowledge and perspective, the uncertainty, are essential in trying to comprehend the terror of it all. History as atmosphere and feeling. I think to follow Klensky’s journey is to understand the way it’s impossible to fully process history as it’s happening.

Klensky’s in a gulag. Klensky’s in Hell. He’s cold. He’s beaten. He’s raped. His shoe is stolen. It seems he will die in this horrible place, but something miraculous happens. An official from the Ministry of Internal Affairs show up looking for a man with a “last name starting with K,” like the main characters in Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle. It’s Klensky they’re looking for, and the official (played by Aleksei Zharkov, who I guess might be regarded as a German regular by this point) asks that Klensky be cleaned up and taken away. As he leaves, Klensky steals back the shoe he thinks is his, but it turns out the shoe is much too small.

Klensky is given new clothes, but not told where he’ll be taken. Outside the gulag, Klensky crosses paths once again with his doppelgänger, who asks if he’ll swap pipes with him “…for old time’s sake?” but Klensky only glares at him. It seems the double has been brought there to take Klensky’s place in the gulag.

Klensky is driven to a checkpoint, where he’s given papers, a driver, and a new car that “smells like perfume”. It’s all very secretive.

Klensky’s rescuer waves goodbye, and Klensky holds beck tears. There’s a look of dread on the driver’s face when he reads the papers that Klensky had been handed, but doesn’t answer when Klensky asks him “what?” Klensky is chauffeured to a grand dacha.

Inside the dacha, Kelnsky bums a cigarette. It’s his first in days, but he has it immediately taken away, being told “there’s no smoking allowed now”. Everyone seems tense and nervous. Klensky is lead, limping, to a room where he see the man behind the (iron) curtain.

At the centre of the terrible vortex that Klensky has been drawn into, is Stalin on his deathbed. The brain surgeon is face to face with the source of his nation’s pathology and asked to treat him.

Klensky is being supervised by the second most dangerous man (and the most dangerous conscious man) in the nation, Lavrentiy Beria, head of the secret police. Looking at him is like seeing all the bureaucratic evil of the Soviet Union, poured into a pudgy body that leans over Klensky’s shoulder. Beria uses vodka to sanitize Klensky’s hands.

I alluded to Beria in an early chapter, but just wanted to take a moment here to mention that he was the source of immense terror and misery. He was a mass murderer, and serial rapist. He had played a key role in Stalin’s purges, and was responsible for the Katyn massacre of Polish intellectuals. Mostly he organized and oversaw, but wasn’t shy about getting his own hands bloody. In one letter to Stalin he’d say “I took care of them personally” referring to people he had ‘purged’ himself. In recent years there’s been an effort in Russia to rehabilitate Beria’s image and place in history, but I don’t know... fuck that guy.

When no one is looking, Klensky takes the opportunity to inject himself with a bit of morphine. “Save me,” Stalin says to Klensky in a voice so faint that he may have not said it at all.

There was a Czech song that was popular but sung with discretion under communism. It had the lyric; no gods left today, only old farts with goatees.

Looking at that image of Stalin, I’m reminded of Alexander Sokurov’s trilogy of films: Moloch, Taurus, and The Sun (I know Faust is now crammed in there too, making it a tetralogy, but it’s definitely the odd one out). Films that like the planets in our solar system are named after gods no longer worshipped. They’re films about Hitler and Lenin and Hirohito. They’re artfully made (and German would work with Moloch production designer Sergey Kokovkin, and The Sun production designer Elena Zhukova), but I find something misguided in their approach.

In a 1999 interview about Moloch, Sokurov said, “There are no leaders. In those situations when it is hard for people, from their point of view, a leader is thought up. A psychological feeling that is transferred from people to a concrete and utterly mortal person.” Sukorov sought to deconstruct those gods who were also flesh and blood men, but I think a byproduct of his approach to humanize them, is that it also absolves them. He sees them as men merely bestowed power through a collective transference. They’re all depicted as living in bubbles detached from from the awfulness that surrounds them, and mostly unaware of the horrors their names would become synonymous with. Even setting aside historical inaccuracy, Sokurov’s approach to their humanization is to take the individual out of the equation of history, making those leaders into merely empty figureheads of ‘bad things that just happened’. I’m not convinced. They seek to humanize, but at their core these are not humanist films, they’re sociological films.

It may seem like I’m coming down hard on Sokurov, but I do think he is a remarkable filmmaker. I just want to make the distinction to show why at the end of the day I much prefer German’s approach to the subject of dark times under dictators. German would say in an interview, “I like Sokurov. Though sometimes he seems to me wrong. For example, the film, The Sun. In fact, the Japanese emperor was different, and the Americans wanted to hang him. He knew about all the horrors that were going on, and was not only engaged in breeding fish. But I really like other pictures of Sokurov, like The Lonely Voice of Man. Sokurov is a living person, and he lives with art. It’s is part of his soul. Take film away and he will die. I do not know more of these people.” Aside from that being a reassuringly respectful bit of disagreement, I think German understands that behind any of these grand horrible things, you’ll find failure on an individual level. He gives us something that a hypothetical Sokurov film about Stalin doddering around in privacy in his final days never could.

Stalin will never appear more human or more horrible on film than when you see his bloated corpse take its last breath in Khrustalyov, My Car!. Watching the film, I think it’s possible to understand that in spite of his isolated location, he wasn’t isolated from the paranoia and terror. It stemmed directly from him. The imaginary Doctors’ Plot didn't come out of thin air, it came a paranoid, terrible mind. German immerses us into the horrible world that was an extension of that Georgian man who named himself Stalin.

Stalin goes out with a whimper, or rather a gurgle and a fart.

Stalin’s staff are heartbroken. Some cry, but Klensky just seems dazed. Beria gives Klensky a kiss and yells out the title of the film, “Khrustalyov, my car!” The meaning of course being that he’s to hurry off to Moscow where he’ll make his bid for power with the weight of the NKVD behind him. Beria would ultimately loose that bid, and end up with his own secret trial and shot, like he had done to so many.⁴

One of Stalin's staff says to Klensky, “It doesn't get any worse, does it?” The narrator chimes in to say “Nothing would change. Nobody knew. Funny.”

The bottom on Klensky’s new shoe falls off, and he tosses it away. From High to Low to High to Low.

Klensky leaves while he still can. He returns to his family. It’s not a warm welcome, and it won’t last long. The narrator tries to report on his father, but Klensky stops his son.

While one of the young cousins sings a Jewish-Russian folk song, Klensky slips away without saying a word. Soon after, the narrator explains that he would never see his father again... That it wouldn't be officially announced that Stalin's was ill and then later dead until the day after... That his father's name wouldn't appear among those who were arrested or killed.

Thinking of everything Klensky’s been through and survived and left behind, I’m reminded of the mythic figure of the eternal Wandering Jew. Supposedly, a man who was cursed by Jesus to walk the Earth until the end of time. I’m not sure how well-known the Wandering Jew is in in the west, but they’re a figure who has inspired artwork and literature for centuries. In some cases the Wandering Jew becomes a symbolic target for anti-semitic vitriol (as in Fritz Hippler’s Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew), in others their significance is inspiring or more nuanced. For instance Mel Brooks said that he saw the essence of the Wandering Jew in The Elephant Man (even though the main character is explicitly Christian), which he produced.

I’ve always thought of the Wandering Jew as a poetic shorthand for someone who was present and subject to the indignities and cruelties of history... the inquisitions, the pogroms, the holocaust, the doctor’s plot... and to live through them as well, while even the perpetrators themselves may not. Someone burdened to forever be a survivor and a witness, with no home to go back to. That’s how I see Klensky by the end of the film.

'The Wandering Jew,' painted by Samuel Hirszenberg in 1899:

The film returns to the gulag for its epilogue. Condom the stoker from the beginning of the film is there. It turns out he’s been given a sentence of ten years. He jokes about liberty and is threatened with ten more years by a guard. Klensky is there too, with a little grey in his moustache. The film ends with an incredible balancing act; Klensky keeping a filled glass steady on top of his head, standing on a moving train.

Klensky asks for his makhorka cigarette, and for his nose to be scratched. I haven’t been able to figure out if there’s some movie magic at work in that shot or if it is exactly what it looks like. Knowing how German worked, it doesn’t seem out of the question.

I think life itself during that epoch was a balancing act.

So there it is, the story of a brain surgeon swallowed up by the madness of the last days of Stalin and then spat out, a little chewed on, but still alive. Not as incoherent as it first appeared, right?

Still, it’s difficult to find films to compare it to. Maybe Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall, which created a microcosm of Nazi society during its implosion? Downfall’s very tied to cinematic conventionality though, and I don’t think achieves the experiential quality of Khrustalyov, My Car!. Downfall also doesn’t have German’s sense of humour.

I know the gulags and the purges were something that weighed heavily on German. The impression I have is that he felt obligated as an artist to grapple with these subjects. German described a recollection of his father’s, an NKVD officer telling Yuri German in detail about the about the mass murders he had participated in. When Yuri German asked why the officer was telling him, the answer the officer supposedly gave was that “You’re a writer, you should know.” Later the same night the officer went to a sauna and killed himself. Soon after, secret police came to Yuri German asking why the officer had spoken to him right before committing suicide, and they wanted to know what had he said. Apparently Yuri shrugged it off to the police saying that the officer was just drunk. Aleksei German said that that incident had greatly haunted his father. I think for Aleksei German, a writer or filmmaker is someone who has a responsibility to know.

It’s worth keeping in mind that even in post-Soviet Russia, while filmmakers were ostensibly free to address the gulags and the purges in their work, few filmmakers did (an exception would be Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar winner, Burnt By The Sun).

Supposedly Khrustalyov, My Car! was nearly an American co-production with a Hollywood studio being involved (I have no idea which one), however German hesitated when faced with some of the compromises he would have had to have made. One would have been the casting of American actors. I’d be curious to know what that potential casting may have been like, because I’m sure it could have been jarring to see recognizable Hollywood actors in the world of the film.⁵ Another condition would have been that Khrustalyov, My Car! be in English. I wonder if that may have been a reason why German initially cast Dovlatov as Klensky, as Dovlatov had been living in the States for over a decade already. While those compromises may have opened the film up to a wider audience, again I wonder if the the film’s potent sense of authenticity would have been diluted or lost entirely.

Early makeup tests for the actors playing Stalin and Beria:

German ultimately choose to keep it all Russian, and the film went into production in 1991. Initially it had enough financial backing to be completed, but rapid inflation made those finances inadequate. That contributed to the film’s often interrupted shooting and post-production, as German raised additional funding throughout. Much of the funding came from France (with a chunk from Canal+ in particular), where German had developed an appreciable following. Production and post-production spanned the next seven years. Some things take a long time. I wanted to finish this article in time for the 65th anniversary of Stalin’s death, but that deadline zipped right past me.

German on the set of Khrustalyov, My Car!:

Admittedly the most famous production delay was caused by German himself. He halted shooting for several months until he could obtain and restore the exact model of cars you see driven by the communist elite during the film. Apparently there were only less than a handful ever produced, so chances are that the people depicted in the film were once in those very same cars.

The film’s seemingly endless shoot became a joke at Lenfilm studios, but German was allowed to continue because he knew how to work inexpensively. Despite his famously prolonged shoots, supposedly German never had a film go over budget. Khrustalyov, My Car! would end up costing only about one twentieth of what Nikita Mikhalkov’s costume drama The Barber of Siberia had cost, which would be released the same year. It’s astonishing that such a vivid depiction of the time period could be achieved, with a budget equivalent to less than two million dollars.

German on location during the filming of Khrustalyov, My Car!:

I think part of that came from German being selective with his collaborators, particularly when it came to production design. There weren’t a lot of people involved, but they were all very skilled, and fit in well with German blend of historical authenticity with an extreme style. Many of the production details are evocative of or allude to the Stalinist world outside of German’s intimate frame, giving the impression that the scale of the film is greater than it actually is. One production designer was Georgiy Kropachyov, who had co-directed the 1967 horror film Viy, which has a proto-Evil Dead II style. It’s a wonder to me how it doesn’t have a cult following comparable to a film like Hausu. There was a recent remake which Yuri Tsurilo and Nina Ruslanova would both act in. Kropachyov would work again with German on Hard to Be a God (and later with Aleksei German Jr).

Another production designer who worked on the film was Vladimir Svetozarov, whose father was Iosif Kheifits, who German had worked for on his very first production assistant job. Vladimir Svetozarov insists that his father was a real bastard, but he got along very well German. Here’re drawings Svetozarov did of German and Karmalita during the production of Khrustalyov, My Car!:

It’s incredible what those production designers did in collaboration with German and Karmalita. On one hand it feels like someone just took a camera back in time when you see the film, but there’s a timeless quality to it too.

Of course other filmmakers have taken that intent to depict an era as presenttense real, and gone off the deep end with it. I’m reminded of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s mega-film production Dau. It’s ostensibly about Soviet scientist Lev Landau, but no one really knows how the film might turn out, maybe not even Khrzhanovsky himself. Khrzhanovsky had a functioning Stalinist era city constructed, and then populated it with a cast who would dress and live as if they were in the era, twenty-four hours a day for seven days a week. Dau’s production makes me think of the Potemkin villages, erected for show. Can I coin a term and call it a Battleship Potemkin village, if it’s for the purpose of filmmaking?

Khrzhanovsky’s filmed hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage over several years, which I think is ludicrous... unless the film turns out great, in which case it’s brilliant. I suspect Khrzhanovsky is to some degree inspired by German’s sense of reality (and he would even finance Aleksei German Jr.’s film Paper Soldiers), but in contrast to German whose lengthy productions came out of necessity, it seems Khrzhanovsky has a sort of fetishization of the production process itself. Apparently Dau has finally moved into editing, but still I think you know something’s up when people argue whether a film’s a film or really a cult.

Khrustalyov, My Car! premiered at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. I think it’s a resounding tour de force film in every regard, but it failed to register with critics. “It was booed, though not nearly as badly as Von Trier’s film,” German would say, referring to The Idiots. I’ve suspected that Von Trier’s change in style - particularly having the fourth wall broken by characters glancing into camera in Breaking the Waves - was taken from German’s style. I haven’t seen Von Trier mention German though, and the only comment I could find of Aleksei German on Breaking the Waves was that he didn’t like it and called it “a pretty, but tasteless thing.”

One thing I found surprising is how straight up wrong many critics were about details in the film. One prominent critic kept referring to the main character as ‘Khrustalyov’ rather than ‘Klensky’. It wasn’t just western critics either. I though it was funny to find one prominent Russian film critic ridicule the appearance of Beria in the film as inaccurate, for having “...a fat man play Beria!” I’d guess they had only seen photos of Beria when he was younger, because towards the end of his cruel life, Beria was without a doubt fat.

In 1998, Sight & Sound magazine more or less declared Alexander Sokurov “the new Tarkovsky” with the release of Mother & Son. I’m reminded too that The Thin Red Line was also released in 1998, and while Terrence Malick’s lengthy career hiatus built anticipation for his comeback, it seems that for the critics familiar with German, he had become passé or forgotten in the fourteen quiet years since the release of My Friend Ivan Lapshin.

Khrustalyov, My Car! wouldn't find much of an audience outside of Russia. German said that even though he didn’t like Antonioni’s films (in one interview he said of Antonioni’s filmmaking that, “he's playing tennis with a non-existent ball, and it seems to me in bad taste”), he was grateful for Antonioni’s endorsement of the film after a screening in Sicily. Privately, Antonioni told German after that the film made him sick, but he admired the vision of it.

I’m sure it didn’t help that the film’s wide release was severely bungled too. The rights were held by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, a company that had successfully distributed a number international films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. If they had released Khrustalyov, My Car!, I think it’s safe to assume the film would have at least had a chance at connecting with a larger audience, and raised the general awareness of Aleksei German in audiences outside of Russia. Unfortunately PolyGram Filmed Entertainment went defunct in 1999 before the film could be released. German himself had to pay out of pocket for a handful of prints to be struck.

I think professor Ian Christie probably best summed up the place Khrustalyov, My Car! would find itself in afterwords,“After its poorly received Cannes debut, the film acquired a reputation of impenetrability; and despite its kaleidoscopically brilliant recreation of every level of Stalinist society, from the high society in which the surgeon initially moves, to the sinister world of black limousines, and the brutality of the hellish labour camps that he enters and survives, it has never enjoyed the same admiration as Lapshin.”

Still, amongst Russian audiences it was a hit, making a respectable profit. The people who did connect with it, did so very strongly, especially people old enough to remember life under Stalin. After seeing the film, Russian-American journalist Pyotr Vail wrote, “It was a rare encounter with something that exceeds the scale of your understanding, not even of cinema, but of the possibilities of all art in general.”

For many Russians it would come to be regarded as the final cinematic word on Stalinism.

German said in an interview, “I still think it will be appreciated, probably five years after I die”. I translate that sentence now, five years since German’s death.

~ CONCLUDED IN PART 5 ~