Siberíada

Inexplicably this is compared to "Doctor Zhivago," I suppose because there are Russian revolutionaries. Egad. The films couldn't be more different.

This is inspired by "2001." Equally inexplicably, "Solaris" is called the Russian 2001 because. Heck, because it has space hardware. Jees.

The structure of "2001" is its reason to be, a fight among three narrative perspectives. We never know who wins: the human, machine or divine. Each is presented in a way that could be interpreted to subsume the others, and we are never grounded. Its sublime, each level above the other in a sort of Escher narrative.

This is the same, very deliberately so. We have the same three: we have the human story of sex, love community and how that embraces everything, Miss Marplewise. We have the "machine" or the revolution and its apparatus, some figurative and some literal. And we have the mystical energy and laws of nature, which are deliberate, clear, pervasive here.

(If there is something particularly skillful in this project cinematically, it is how this mystical mist pervades.)

Its not at all as deft in the balance as Kubric's masterpiece. But you can see the three climbing over each other, and the standoff presented at the end.

Its a long slog, and you'll have to wade through overly optimistic celebrations of revolutionary purpose. But its rewarding in a sort of Polish (meaning dreamy) way.

On a second viewing, I have to remark on how the fundamental nature of this is different from most else that I watch.

I'm particularly sensitive to the fact that most every element that I see in every film project is a matter of market forces. An artist can modulate within that pull, but never really escape the sender-receiver dynamic. This film differs in the way that some monumental architecture does from what surrounds it.

In the soviet system, you pay your dues and prove that you are a worthy artist. That means of course that you have to satisfy the artistic bureaucracy, the nature of which one can only imagine. But once you achieve some level of power, you become a dilettante, with amazing reach. Everything we see here is because it was envisioned to be so, quite apart from what we normally have to deal with in the "free" world.

Its the inversion that is striking. This film really is perfect in many ways. You can see that every frame and nuance is the way the filmmaker wants it regardless of whether he thinks people care. I didn't care much, because the thing is as soulless as most other Soviet art. But its very clean, and big and sentimental.

And its different, and that's a welcome shower.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Konchalovsky's towering poem to Siberia doesn't steamroll ahead, though it's 4,5 hours long. It holds back for space, takes time in roundabout exploration of childhood memories in a turn-of-the-century backwoods village, yet it picks up steam doing this, builds in emotional resonance as though even the sounds and images which compose it become imbued by sheer association with their subject matter with that quality of fierce tireless quiet dignity that characterizes the Soviet working spirit. Konchalovsky celebrates Soviet collectivity but in an almost revisionist way to paeans like Soy Cuba and Invincible the mood turns somber and reflective.

So eventually the Revolution, the one thought to matter. News of it reach the secluded Siberian village only through the grapevine. Worse with the fruits of its labor, these reach the village only when a world war calls for the young men to enlist.

But although the scope appears huge and daunting, Konchalovksy zeroes in on the individual, the face behind the history; with care and affection to examine the bitter longing and regret of the woman who waited 6 years after the war for a fiancé who never came back, waited long enough to go out and become a barmaid in a ship with velvet couches and which she quit years later to come back to her village to care for an aging uncle who killed the fiancé's father with an axe, the irreverent folly of the fiancé who came back from the war a hero 20 years too late, came back not for the sake of the girl he left behind but to drill oil for the motherland, the despair and resignation of the middle-aged Regional Party Leader who comes back to his small Siberian village with the sole purpose of blotting it out of the map to build a power plant.

The movie segues from decade to decade from the 10's to the 80's with amazing newsreel footage trailing Soviet history from the revolution to war famine and the titanic technological achievements of an empire (terrific visuals here! pure futurism of kinetic violence and skewed angles and flickering cramped shots of crowds and faces) but the actual movie focuses on the individual, on triumphs and follies small and big. By the second half a sense of bittersweet fatalism creeps in; of broken lives that never reached fulfillment choking with regret and yearning. "It can't matter", seems like the world is saying, to which Konchalovksy answers "it must matter" because the protagonists keep on trying for redemption.

Yet behind this saga of 'man against landscape' something seems to hover, shadowy, almost substanceless, like the Eternal Old Man hermit who appears in every segment to guide or repudiate the protagonists, sometimes a mere spectactor, sometimes the enigmatic sage; a little behind and above all the other straightforward and logical incomprehensible ultimatums challenges and affirmations of the human characters, something invisible seems to lurk. Ghosts of the fathers appearing in sepia dreams, repeated shots of a star gleaming in the nightsky, a curious bear, indeed the Eternal Old Man himself; Konchalovksy calls for awe and reverence before a mystical land of some other order.

In its treatment of a small backwoods community struggling against nature progress and time and in the ways it learns to deal with them, often funny bizarre and tragic at the same time, and in how the director never allows cynicism to override his humanism, it reminds me of Shohei Imamura's The Profound Desires of the Gods. When, in a dream scene, Alexei tears through the planks of a door on which is plastered a propaganda poster of Stalin to reach out at his (dead) father as he vanishes in the fog, the movie hints at the betrayal of the Soviet Dream, or better yet, at all the things lost in the revolution, this betrayal made more explicit in the film's fiery denouement.

The amazing visuals, elegiac and somber with a raw naturalist edge, help seal the deal. By the end of it, an oil derric erupts in flames and the movie erupts in a wild explosion of pure cinema.

I was young film student in 1979 when the Union of the Soviet Filmmakers came to Sofia Bulgaria and premiered Konchalovsky's "Siberiade"; Tarkosvky's "Stalker" and Danelia'a "Autumn marathon". I was stunned by the cosmopolitan dimension of the art form. Then and only then, I saw "Siberiade" 4 and 1/2 hours epic and was speechless. Way better then Bertolucci's "1900". By far!

Hope Andron will somehow get to the negative and make "director's restored version full lenght " someday! On DVD of course! Also I fiercely fought in defense of this Cinema against most of my colleagues who were equating Soviet film with bad taste! Time is on my side.

I have seen the film a few days back on a video tape and even though it was hard to swallow it at one take (because of its length and story), I liked it very much. I was impressed first, by the script and then, by the realization of this script. The film takes you on a ride, but that is not an easy, joyful ride; it goes through time and different political regimes and shows the influence of them to ordinary people's lives. What I loved was the inner logic the film followed; logic, which just like logic in life, was rather illogical and confusing at times but in the end, when I thought about it, all the events and twists made sense. It makes no sense though to try to re-tell the story as it spreads in more than 50 years of time. I also liked very much Nikita Mikhalkov's character Aleksei and the way he played it, as some critics would saw, with restless abandon. What I didn't like about it, was that I think he later played characters that remind me of Aleksei in films like "Cruel Romance" (Zhestokij romans, which I actually love) and to some extent in "The Insulted and the Injured" ("Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye"). "Sibiriada" shows, I think, what a great film-maker Andrei Konchalovski was before he went to Hollywood and made forgettable films like "Tango and Cash" and less forgettable like "Runaway train". I would prefer "Kurochka Ryaba" to them...

The story about a very small god-forgotten village in Siberia reflects the history of Russia from the beginning of the century till early 80s. Three generations try to find the land of happiness and to give it to the people. One builds the road through taiga to the star over horizon, the second 'build communism' and the third searches for oil.

There are many great epics out there. For Americans, many might say "Gone With the Wind" is the definitive epic. I have never cared for it personally, but I understand the appeal. This film may be the best epic to come out of Russia, as it covers so much time and really gets to the heart of humanity.

The film is not only strong as a whole, but in its sections. Even if it were treated as vignettes or short films, there are plenty of powerful images. Early on, viewers will be struck by the boy fighting with a dog for his pants. We might be horrified by this, but what is it saying?