Reel Life: War and Cinema

As reel and real merged over the last week, I was reminded of my recent exposure to contemporary Ukrainian and anti-Putin cinema

Reel Life: War and Cinema
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Namrata Joshi

If there’s a war, can cinema be far behind? Ever since the news of the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke and started dominating the front pages and prime time, there have also been articles linking it to filmmaking, playing on, in the side-lines. Like reports of actor Sean Penn, filming a Vice Studio documentary in Ukraine on the Russian invasion calling President Vladimir Putin’s move a “brutal mistake” while hailing Ukrainians and their leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy as heroic.

A group of Ukrainian filmmakers urged the world to wake up to the threat to democracy posed by the act of Putin. They wrote about how, having portrayed “the war in Eastern Ukraine” in their films for eight years, they are now finding the reality spreading through entire Ukraine and could well engulf Europe and the world at large.

The letter had been signed by prominent names like Valentyn Vasyanovych (Reflection and Atlantis); Maryna Er Gorbach (Klondike) and Natalia Vorozhbyt whose Bad Roads was Ukraine’s official entry to the Oscars this year. They urged for economic sanctions against Russia and to fight the concurrent information war.

Vorozhbyt gave it a personal touch by vividly describing what her own family had been up to: “I washed my head and mother made patties. We took chairs, candles and water to the basement. I allowed my daughter to swear because she was scared. My ex-husband enlisted in the army. We live in the centre of Europe, in the 21st century, in Ukraine. Our closest neighbours are Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Baltics, Romania. Near Germany, France, Italy, etc we [can] go there by car. This is not just our war. It will affect every European. It can destroy our world. Your participation, support and help are very much needed now. As well as your speeches, protests, money, weapons, sanctions. I call on the world to unite against Putin’s Russia and win together.”

Later, members of the Russian filmmaking community—filmmakers Vitaly Mansky, Vladimir Mirzoev and Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and actresses Chulpan Khamatova and Ksenija Rappoport—joined them in support and issued a call to end the war.

As reel and real merged over the last week, I was reminded of my recent exposure to contemporary Ukrainian and anti-Putin cinema. Cannes Film Festival has proven to be a happy hunting ground for that.

Two films—a Russian and a Ukrainian— stood out in the Palme D’Or competition section at the 2017 edition. Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Nelyubov (Loveless), a Russia-France-Germany-Belgium co-production, which won the jury prize and a FranceUkraine-Germany-Latvia-LithuniaNetherlands-Russia co-production, Sergei Loznitsa’s Krotkaya (A Gentle Creature).

Reel Life: War and Cinema

Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark exploration of a marriage on the verge of collapse seen through the eyes of a 12-yearold child. While his parents have moved on, it’s for him to contend with the reality of having been left in a lurch by them. Feelings of abandonment, betrayal, loneliness and the immense pain and sorrow get reflected in both the landscape and the weather—bleak, cold, wintry, depressing.

The filmmaker’s 2014 film Leviathan is regarded a more direct and trenchant critique of the corrupt contemporary Russian polity. Loveless does dwell a bit on the inefficiency of the cops but prefers to be oblique and intimate in its focus on the marital discord.

The relationship war is foregrounded in the context of Putin and the on-going Russian-Ukrainian crisis, the news of which you keep hearing on the radio all through the film. Personal battles are framed in the backdrop of territorial skirmishes and the degradation in relationships becomes a pointer to the larger degeneration and rot.

Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature is more in-your-face in taking on the bureaucracy, governance and politics in Russia. It is about a woman who travels to a Russian prison town when her parcel to her husband, serving a sentence, is returned undelivered. The search for reasons and answers turns out to be a nightmare. It’s a dystopic world where people disappear into thin air, are made to serve sentence for a crime they’d have never committed. Far from rule of law and justice, it’s a free for all. A metaphorical slice of the heart of darkness of Putin’s Russia.

The following year its filmmaker, the prolific Loznitsa, regarded as being at the “forefront of filmmakers fighting Putin’s brutal, reductive idea of Russianness”, returned to Cannes with an even more violent, seemingly bizarre and gloom-filled Donbass. It won him the best director award in the Un Certain Regard section in 2018.

Set in Donbass in East Ukraine in 2014- 2015, it focuses satirically on the war between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government. The complex, layered film is made up of several fragmented stories and conversations, making the over-arching narrative feel incomprehensible and obscure at times. The coherence lies in the neverending, everyday cycle of violence that ties up the beginning with gut-wrenching climax. Sock-in-the-jaw cinema.

A scientist turned filmmaker, Loznitsa is one of the most critically acclaimed and political filmmakers in contemporary Ukraine. He has been a diligent recorder of the recent turbulent times of the region and contextualising that in the past, seeing it as an inheritance of history.

According to a recent Financial Times report, Loznitsa is currently in Vilnius in Lithuania working on his documentary The Natural History of Destruction. He told FT that he was not surprised by the invasion: “I’ve been expecting such a development, predicting such a scenario, for months now. The thing that surprised me most was the blindness of people around me — of politicians who preferred to carry on as if nothing was happening.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter Loznitsa quit the European Film Academy in protest against its shameful response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an open letter first published in Screen he writes: “For four days in a row now, the Russian army has been devastating Ukrainian cities and villages, killing Ukrainian citizens. Is it really possible that you — humanists, human rights and dignity advocates, champions of freedom and democracy — are afraid to call a war a war, to condemn barbarity and voice your protest?”

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday.)

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