Briefe eines toten Mannes

One needs to be in a resilient mood to watch Lopushansky's films, particularly this one. It surely is one of the gloomiest, saddest films out there, bare, raw and hyperealistic. It could not be otherwise, since its purpose is to show the aftermath of a massive nuclear attack on a large city somewhere, without heroes, without Hollywoodian last-minute miracles and hopes. The end of civilisation, the end of humankind.

The nuclear catastrophe, we are told, happened by accident. Most of the few remaining survivors are physically or mentally sick, going about zombie-like, and slowly dying off in a few dimly lit underground shelters. The situation above ground is even worse, with high-radiation, wreckage, rubble, strong winds and little light (some kind of "nuclear winter"), rotting corpses everywhere.

The main character is an old scientist who tries to preserve some sense of purpose, inter alia by continuing his work and by writing letters to his missing and most likely dead son, letters that are not sent because there is no address to send them to. The acting by R. Bykov who plays the scientist, is impeccable, and the same goes for the rest of the cast, although it seems out of place to think and comment on these matters in a film dominated by sheer horror.

The limited colour gamma used (mostly dirty ochres, greys and blacks) effectively reinforce the feeling of oppression and hopelessness this film so effectively conveys from beginning to end.

Very hard and painful to watch, but perhaps necessary to get an idea of what our world could look like, were we to use the horrific weapons we have created. Did in fact look like, for some, when these weapons were used at the end of WWII.

The world after a nuclear disaster. A world taken from the pages of Revelation. Dim light illuminates a scene of utter destruction. Survivors are sheltered in damp underground shelters while a nuclear winter screams over their heads. In the absolute turmoil the thirst for survival and the world human soul seeks the hope to continue ...

Letter from a Dead Man, established amidst the panic of a nuclear holocaust, the result of the irrational arms escalation with which the United States and the Soviet Union were putting pressure on each other and which threatened to transform life on our planet into something impracticable. However, the accident at the Chernobyl plant, which occurred five months before the premiere of this film, determines its most obvious message.

The panic to lose everything is definitely achieved, to reset the historical evolution of one single action, to forget the identity of species and break the commonly admitted social contract was identical in capitalism and socialism, especially because it was the common sense of the ordinary citizen who was demonstrating in pursuit of a understanding. What was the point of mutual annihilation, if no one would emerge victorious from the final battle? What is the goal of total domination, if there is nothing left to dominate? What is the meaning of the will to try to impose your own model, if the future is nothing more than a barren terrain lined with rubble?

But despite the uncompromising staging of the film, Konstantin Lopuschanski retains, maybe naturally, a humanistic core. Aside from the anti-nuclear aspect, "Letter From a Dead Man" is a haunting reminder for reason, in the resolute emphasis on human humanity, which ultimately represents a final anchor of hope. Therefore, the film closes with a quote from the infamous 1955 "Russel Einstein Manifesto" against nuclear war: "There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? "

The protagonist and his fellow sufferers are constantly preoccupied with questions about humanity, about the conditions of the human race and the absurdity of war. A resident of the museum bunker, for example, dictates a pathetic pamphlet to his secretary about the fatality of the civilization process in the machine, marked by deep disgust for progress and the awareness of the ultimate end of humanity - as a testament for subsequent civilizations. "Mankind was a tragic species, doomed perhaps from the very beginning." One of the roommates expresses his deep love for humanity in a farewell prayer shortly before his suicide; "Love created art, an art which reflects our unbearable yearning for perfection, our immense despair, our endless cry of terror..."

there is a also a great thought-provoking scene where the professor (the protagonist) remembers his childhood nightmare; when he was frightened by a big locomotive; and now it seems to him that it was he - with his inventions - who created the giant locomotive that overran humanity: and his most terrible dream is the one in which he sees his son on the rails...

Finally the professor tells his prodigal son the story of his fears, dreams and research, all of which together expresses one thing: his ambivalence between hope and self-abandonment, which characterize his whole situation and the essence of the movie. The movie also gives more suggestion to an existentialist and humanistic side that states that the face of death is not scary anymore given that everything has perished. And that hope can still be found in youth as the only remaining symbol of innocence, and that it is impossible to imagine that humanity will be wiped out permanently from the face of the earth.

Lopushansky assisted Tarkovsky during the production of Stalker - and that influence is clearly visible in every shot. that is its: sepia tones, long, static shots or slow driving on the landscape, melancholy intonation of caring questioning about where modern man is heading imbued with religious faith, etc. Visually, almost the entire film is coloured of sepia, brown-black, a ugly, grainy, 'dirty' sepia. it's not that high-contrast, sharp and somehow 'beautiful' sepia of STALKER. This is a film about a world that has driven itself to the grave, with a slow, elegiac, torturous atmosphere, it shows the last twitches of a man's futile attemps to save humanity.

But given all these great quotes etc, the movie's plot, in the beggining, is hard to grasp and many big factors in the film is not understandable at first. Thus it have a relatively poor structure and narrative.

The story takes place in an eastern European country(no reference is made to what country) after a nuclear war. A military regime has been imposed, there is no reference weather this is a local regime or an occupation. The soldiers tend to carry western weapons like AR pattern rifles and HK G3. The main character lives with coworkers under the university buildings where they once worked , all characters have a type of confession to tell relating to the catastrophe. Decay is everywhere but there is also irony in the decay and destruction, such as the scene in the library that is half covered in water with pages upon pages floating on this evil soup of corpses and texts that the main character ,as a true scholar, goes to a semi submerged desk to study a book. Just like "Threads" this is the only other movie that truly shows how final a nuclear apocalypse would be.

This is a post-apocalyptic movie where a group of Russian intellectuals, living in the airtight vaults of a museum, cling on in the twilight, going slowly mad according to their own pompous wonts.

The movie is unremitting in its depressing depiction of a dead world. I was stuck between turning it off because it was almost sacrilegiously depressing, and remaining because of the sheer cataclysmic beauty. The images are mostly tinted yellow, although some shots are in tints of blue. There is no way this experience is going to allow you the respite of polychromatic images.

There is a body of work that deals with the end of humankind in cinema, but any example I can think of seems completely notional in conception, this one actually felt like a recording of the end of days, as unflinchingly profane as a documentary of viaticums.

I think it's also a tombstone for communism in Russia, suggested as a blind alley, and advocates a return to pre-revolutionary values regarding family and religion. But only in an intensely personal way, as if recounting the death of a close family member. It is more than a warning against nuclear war. In its parodying of ridiculous, pontificating, and obstructive authority, it's an emesis of authoritarian communism, a whole-hearted, wholesale rejection.

As an endnote, there's a dolly-out in the first few minutes of the film that left my jaw on the floor, practically the best shot I've ever seen in cinema, my congratulations to Konstantin Lopushansky and his team.

To fully understand this movie you should understand the mindset and milieu of the Eastern Bloc - preferably the Soviet Union - of the 1980s, in the height of the Cold War. This movie is radically different from Western post-apocalyptic movies like 'The Day After' or 'Threads' which deal with the very materialistic side of a nuclear holocaust, like the effects of bombs and life after the war. This Soviet movie is not a spectacle and its aim is far from simply entertaining or scaring. It ponders on the philosophic and moral side of a nuclear war, a suicide of mankind and whether it's inevitable or not.

There is barely any storyline. The main character is an unnamed scientist who lives in a makeshift shelter under a museum, among saved relics from all eras of history and some of his surviving colleagues. Being all scientists they are trying to grapple the whole point of what happened. There are no names, except for the wife and son of this scientist: Anna and Eric. Eric is presumably dead as he was outside when the bombs exploded. Nevertheless the scientist keeps writing letters to him, in a form of a diary, which is more to save his last thoughts of the world than actually meant to be delivered someday.

The pace of this film is just as slow and time would be in such a situation. Soviet art movies were not bound by economic constraints so it did not matter to their makers whether the tickets will sell well or not. Modern moviegoers would find the entire thing profoundly boring, and even the most dedicated movie hipster would look at the clock time to time. Being this slow is part of the image the movie builds. Just like the characters, the viewer is also immersed in an endless waiting, never to know whether something is going to change or happen. You actually have to watch it to the very end to see. Don't expect rich experiences. In such a dull and dead world it's a rare gift to see anything happen.

Interestingly, the makers took great care to emphasize that this is not happening in the Soviet Union. Or more exactly, it could happen, but this particular place is not a Soviet city. There is not a single object in the background with Cyrillic letters on it, but there are a lot of things with English labels, some are even consumer goods rare behind the Iron Curtain at that time. German beer cans float in the water - canned beer was a curiosity that time - and a bottle of Jagermeister is seen on a desk. Canned foods are also foreign, with English labels. Even the soldiers carry weapons that look like a crossbreed of American M-16 and M-1 rifles. It's a small detail, but back then every able-bodied Soviet men were familiar with Soviet military equipment, having spent years as a conscript, and this clue is giving away that the scene takes place in a foreign country. Even the military vehicles were selected to keep this illusion. The helicopter is a Ka-26 which was never used by the military (in the Soviet Union at least), the large truck is a MAZ missile trailer, but there was also a civilian version of it. The then- futuristic hovercraft that appears for no apparent reason was an experimental vehicle at the time, but such vehicles were already operating as ferries on the English Channel, and were praised as a great technical advancement of the time.

I'd generally recommend this movie for those who are desperate enough to take a plunge into a strange, lost civilization's vision of the violent end of the world. Not a date movie, except if your date is a hardcore movie culture fanatic or grew up in the Soviet Union.